Yes.

Here’s an article from Games Radar (Don’t ask. No really — don’t ask) on the skewed priorities of Wikipedia.

Wikipedia’s ethos is of course that any one can add information to it and therefore the information is accurate.

We learn for example that “Knuckles of Sonic the Hedgehog fame” (who?) has more words written about him than does God*, and that “Mario’s legacy” is worthy of 444 words while Jesus’ is worthy of a mere 418.

I’d go a bit further than the Games Radar article, which merely says that “the nerds and dorks tend to have a lot more free time - and passion - than the teachers and professors.” The nerds and dorks are bad enough, but there are also the obsessed nuts. I’ve had experience on Wikipedia with an article that is dominated by a couple of people who, I suspect, suffer from obsessions that amount to mental illnesses. Now who has more energy than a nutcase? In the end the nuts end up wearing you down with their sheer obsessiveness.

The funny thing is, that even though I know that Wikipedia’s information is completely unreliable**, I still use it for instant “fact-checking.” Sad.

* “All Wikipedia word counts were gathered during the week prior to this article’s date. Due to the encyclopedia’s open source nature, numbers are always subject to change.”

** Yeah, I know, someone compared physics articles from Wikipedia and Britannica and found slightly fewer errors in Wikipedia, but the articles you read right at this moment in Wikipedia may have been significantly different ten minutes ago, and may have have new errors introduced, while the Britannica article is the same as it was. That’s what I mean by unreliable.