Matthew Sheffield (he of the now-retired RatherBiased.com) calls attention to the dustup over Keith Olbermann's entry on Wikipedia that resulted, briefly, in Robert Cox of OlbermannWatch being banned from posting to the site.
On the jump, my take. By the way, I'm a founding member of Cox's group, Media Bloggers Association, which I belatedly note by adding a link to the MBA page in my sidebar.
As it happens, Mrs. TV Barn and I were having a discussion on this topic today. Here's what we concluded: As a source of factual, day-to-day information, you can and should do better than Wikipedia. But it is a remarkably well-done source on less controversial, more arcane topics are concerned. For instance, a noted academic recently commended to my wife (a biographer) the article in Wikipedia on historiography. That's something you'd never see in a more consumery cyclopedia like Grolier's or World Book.
I think that the Googlenet will resolve this problem over time with hot topics. And ironically, I think what will happen is that Google will begin to favor people with a point of view rather than neutral-sounding sites like Wikipedia's. Yes, it's true that with millions of articles, one site can start to hog all the Google relevancy points. But it's also true that focused individual sites can score right up there with the big sites. If they care about a certain topic, they will post persistently and be linked to often. And who's more likely to care more about Keith Olbermann -- the masses who post to Wikipedia or Robert Cox?
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