I used to teach fourth-year undergraduates in the fine art of conducting research into the ins and outs of the Middle East and the ins and outs of then writing a thesis based on that research. I had 60 minutes a week (maybe 90 if I was feeling cruel) for all of a single quarter in which to cover these fairly expansive topics, and so it always kind of bugged me that we had to spend precious time on things that I would think should be obvious to somebody who’s starting their fourth year in college. Having to tell the students that they shouldn’t plagiarize felt insulting, and then spending time going over what plagiarism is and why we have to cite our sources felt both insulting and like time that could be better spent on other stuff. Of course, when our brightest intellectual stars (plus Rand Paul; I KID) can’t be bothered to grasp these things, I guess it’s not all that insulting or frivolous to spend time explaining them to a bunch of 21 and 22 year old undergrads, but it seemed that way at the time.
Another thing that sounded fiercely insulting every time it came out of my mouth was the sentence “Wikipedia is not a source!” The students would always laugh at that one, and then I would too, because of course Wikipedia is not a freaking source (in an academic context, at least), are you kidding me? And yet, how can you expect undergrads to instinctively know that Wikipedia is not a source when tenured university faculty are out there treating it like one?
In Chapter 10 of his 2012 book Atheism and the Case Against Christ, Matthew S. McCormick provides a list of “gods and religions in history that have fallen out of favor.” Between the Chinese deities Jade Emperor and Ji Gong on this list sits Jar’Edo Wens, an exotic-looking nonsense phrase some Australian guy added to Wikipedia seven years prior.
The blog Wikipediocracy recounts the genesis of a wholly fictional Aboriginal deity, created by an anonymous Australian prankster—presumably named Jared Owens, get it?—who published a Wikipedia article for Jar’Edo Wens and added an entry about the god to the site’s page on Australian Aboriginal mythology in 2005. Thanks to Wikipedia’s immense and often indiscriminate ability to disseminate facts and factoids alike, Jar’Edo has spread its gospel of humility and learning to the furthest reaches of the internet in the years since then.
McCormick offered Gawker this statement in his own defense:
Well, my point in using that list of gods is that they are all fictional creations, in one way or another, so this doesn’t create a problem for my book really. Religions, and other sources disseminate false information, I argued, and the ideas take a life of their own in history. Wikipedia obviously has its limitations too. Thanks.
Yes, all fictional, great. Except that the list is called “500 Dead Gods and the Problem of Other Religions,” and McCormick does intend it to show “the preponderance of gods and religions in history that have fallen out of favor.” You can’t get catfished by Wikipedia into including in that list something that was a. never a “god” (you need to have had at least one real worshiper at some point to qualify, sorry) and b. couldn’t have “fallen out of favor” since it was never in favor in the first place, and then claim that this is all central to your point.
I think Wikipedia is actually a great thing; it delivers an impressive breadth and depth of information that is open to anybody who can get online to view it, and despite all the jokes that people make about it, for the most part it’s in the ballpark in terms of reliability, at least when it comes to topics that aren’t socially or politically hot at the moment. I read Wikipedia a frankly ridiculous amount and refer to it sometimes when I’m writing, but hardly ever without following the citations through to the original source (I’ll link to Wikipedia on obscure historical stuff when I know it’s accurate or when linking to it instead of to an article helps me make a snarky point, but I always approach it with the idea that it’s a resource, not a source). It obviously does have its limitations, but it’s the limitations on people’s ability to properly research a topic that are the real problem.
The Foreign Exchanges Companion 
Excellent work! It’s always fun to see some pompous wanker deflated when his sophomoric bungling gets deflated. There is not so much trouble with wikipedia in my field, chemistry/physics/biology, but sister the art historian has to pull teeth to get her students to understand what is and is not a proper academic source.
The real problem, I believe, is that some people actually care about proper sourcing – as a safeguard against the propagation of nonsense – but most people don’t: and this is why we can’t have nice things. One of my little hobbies is browsing the news aggregator sites and following the evidence trails back to the original scholarly articles. I have the advantage here over your typical ink stained wretch, being educated in reading a scholarly article and having access to a decent library, but time and time and time again I have to come back to the comment section and report that the entire article is nonsense. People generally ignore the rebuttals in favor of the sensational stories that they want to believe, that they want be true, and sometimes I get the vicious attack – but it’s all worthwhile for the occasional grudging respect: “that’s pretty convincing, and I hate you :^>”