and the award for most trusted reference source goes to...

NOT Wikipedia.
now who would've guessed???

According to an article in U.K.'s The Register© Wikipedia's most illustrious "professor" previously known as "Essjay" (actually twenty-four-year-old community college drop-out, Ryan Jordan, who had claimed to hold doctoral degrees in both theology and cannon law as well as being a tenured professor at a private university) as resigned his post at Wikia Inc. under the pressure of what is threatening (according the The Register© at least) to topple one of the world's favorite sources and threaten the very idea of wikis or open source web sites.

Very interesting food for thought if nothing else.

Of course, Wikipedia has had its doubters from the beginning, authority and content always are a bit suspect when just anybody can contribute. But Wikia Inc. has been working on its image problems and promoting the idea that it is reliable that quite a few have fallen prey to the idea~ease and accessablity also being at issue here. You almost have admire Jordan's cheekiness though(well, maybe):

Some Wikipedia users argued that Essjay had compounded the deception by flaunting a fictional Ph.D. and professorship to influence the editing on the site.
“People have gone through his edits and found places where he was basically cashing in on his fake credentials to bolster his arguments,” said Michael Snow, a Wikipedia administrator who is also the founder of The Wikipedia Signpost, the community newspaper for which he is covering the story. “Those will get looked at again.”
In a discussion over the editing of the article with regard to the term “imprimatur,” as used in Catholicism, Essjay defended his use of the book Catholicism for Dummies, saying, “This is a text I often require for my students, and I would hang my own Ph.D. on it’s credibility.”

~A Contributor to Wikipedia Has His Fictional Sideby Noam Cohen The New York Times, March 5, 2007

here's what i believe to be some interesting points made by The Register© article:

Does it matter?

The episode has been quite a calamity for the project: Wikipedia funders now regret their contributions, and senior Wikipedia editors regret their personal investment in the project. May we add three points that are in danger of being overlooked-
Firstly, there's the issue of "deception" and the New Yorker. Pranking the media should not be considered a crime; it's an honorable activity. Journalists are deceived on a daily basis - and should be more often, as it keeps us on our toes. When you hear journalists complaining about this onerous obligation - of sifting their sources, you know that privilege has won out over duty. Yet this is something the Pulitzer Prize winner commissioned to write the now notorious feature failed to do.
Make no mistake, Jordan's appearance in the hallowed pages of the New Yorker was not due to his 16,000 edits on Wikipedia, or his natural charisma, or photogenic charms - it was because his sales blurb claimed that he was a Professor of Theology with four degrees. Who better to fulfull Stacy Schiff's brief, to marvel at one of the Wonders of the Modern World? Schiff duly delivered what her editors required: a piece of advertising copy.
It stands as a a warning that evangelism and reporting don't really mix.
Secondly, there's the very elephant in the room that Schiff failed to mention: the cult-like aspect of Web 2.0-flavoured technology-evangelism that we see in projects like Wikipedia. What did the New Yorker miss? Only the obvious, as reader Michael Paxton pointed out via email -
"I know this will sound ridiculous," he writes, "but it is beginning to seem that Wikiology is, more and more, taking on the form of the much maligned (pseudo) religion, Scientology."
"The personality cult, the rejection of conventional truths and realities that challenge the core objectives, the once informal steering groups hardening into a shell of dogma that realises that rejection."
"Hell, the moment I read ArbComm I immediately thought of the Scientology's 'Sea Org'. Both the role as upholders of the core objectives (on behalf of the leader) and the affected air of hand chosen adjudicators of martial law seem to simply add to the rather scarey similarity."
"Please, oh please, warn us if Jimmy Wales ever starts building a navy!"
Not all idealists on the Wikipedia cause are prepared to let this go. Here's a crie de couer from an editor in despair, spotted last week: We've stopped being an encyclopedia. We've stopped using common sense. We've taken our eye of the big picture and focused on ourselves, our myopic power games, our petty process, and our internal need to keep every one in line. We count sources to determine notability - because we need objective rules. Never mind the fact it is absurd. We fight little wars with [Daniel Brandtmonsters of out own imagination]. Never mind the fact they cheapen us. We care not for the damage we do to the real world and its real people, or potential we miss, as long as we can make little rules and have little people follow them.
I'm sick of the little people and their little rules. For now, I want no part of them. I thought there were signs of hope. And I was wrong. + :If this is a direct or indirect result of [List of Internet phenomena], I feel some responsibility for the situation.
Please e-mail me. Which may be the last sound of any conscience the project had ebbing away.
Thirdly, and (almost) finally - there's the question of what Wikipedia's place in the world really is.
A few months ago at a social event, your reporter had an epiphany - but then we all need to get out more. A random stranger was expressing delight at finding "stuff" - information, factoids - on the internet, but couldn't grasp that Wikipedia wasn't owned by Google. When you type in a word, or question, doesn't "stuff" just come out of the computer?
It was hard to explain that Wikipedia was a separate entity that wasn't owned by Google, and even harder to explain - forgive me, dear readers, for I didn't have the courage to explain this - that it was actually Wikipedia that now "owned" Google.

and, from Shelley Powers at her burningbird blog

Wikipedia Walking

I've recently stopped using Wikipedia, or stopped using it as an original source. I've found two things:
First, Google's results have degraded in the last year or so. When one ignores Wikipedia in the results, on many subjects most of the results are placement by search engine optimization–typically garbage–or some form of comment or usenet group or some such that's not especially helpful. Good results are now more likely found in the second or third pages.
Second, I find that I'm having to go to more than one page to find information, but when I do, I uncover all sorts of new and interesting goodies. That's one of the most dangerous aspects of Wikipedia (aside from the whole 'truth' thing), or any single-source of information: we lose the ability to discover things on the net through sheer serendipity.
I still respect many of the authors in Wikipedia, and think it's a good source.
However, this event only strengthens my belief that Wikipedia should be pulled to the side for search engine results, like the Ask definition for words that match in Google, and people go back to searching the web by actually searching the web.

So what do you think? Do you still use Wikipedia (if you ever did)? Does this change the way you look at it and how you use the information in any way? And what do you think of Web 2.0? Or is it all just a case of "Where are we all going? And what am i doing in this handbasket???"