QUOTE
"The NY Times reports that researchers at Cornell studying the news cycle by looking for repeated phrases and tracking some 90 million articles and blog posts which appeared from August through October 2008 on 1.6 million mainstream media sites and blogs. have discovered that for the most part, traditional news outlets lead and the blogs follow, typically by 2.5 hours. The researchers studied frequently repeated short phrases, the equivalent of 'genetic signatures' for ideas. The biggest text-snippet surge found in the study — 'lipstick on a pig' originated in Barack Obama's colorful put-down of the claim by Senator John McCain and Gov. Sarah Palin that they were the genuine voices for change in the campaign. The researchers' paper, 'Meme-tracking and the Dynamics of the News Cycle,' (PDF) shows that although most news flowed from the traditional media to the blogs, 3.5 percent of story lines originated in the blogs and later made their way to traditional media."
Now that's interesting because blogs are not exactly a perfect mirror for what actually happens in the world. Rather they are like a carnival hall of mirrors or a hellish echochamber which filters, distorts and then redistributes the result to yet more blogs, twitter feeds, facebook commentaries.
And that's where most of Wikipedia's facts come from. If the MSM is filtered or distorted (and I would argue that it largely is) then the No Original Research criterion means that what ends up on Wikipedia after going through the blogosphere echochamber is rarely accurate, complete or sourced correctly.
Yes, its hyperlinked to the gills. No, its not authoritative and therefore to be treated with maximum skepticism.
There has got to be a better way to disseminate information that allows people to go right back to the source and ask questions than Wikipedia's The Proud, The Many, The Clueless.