Topic Proposal: Accuracy of Wikis Used in Research

Before interactive and online encyclopedias such as Wikipedia, research was mostly limited to physical resources.  These might have included books, magazines, and those enormous volumes of encyclopedias.  While these resources were accurate at the time of their printing, they would soon become outdated and need to be replaced.  As a solution, pages like Wikipedia allow for input from anyone to make sure the largest amount of information is collected and kept up to date.  A major problem with this is that anyone can abuse the system and post incorrect or undocumented material.  Wikipedia has started to counteract the problem by banning IP addresses of those who vandalize pages, by freezing certain high-traffic pages during critical times and by making people register so they can keep track of revisions.  Also, anything that is undocumented is marked as such and removed if a citation is not added.  While this does not completely solve the problem, it does eliminate much of the room for errors in the overall goal of having an online encyclopedia that users can freely edit.