Wikipedia and the Meaning of Truth

With little notice from the outside world, the community-written encyclopedia Wikipedia has redefined the commonly accepted use of the word “truth.”

Why should we care? Because ­Wikipedia’s articles are the first- or second-ranked results for most Internet searches. Type “iron” into Google (GOOG), and Wikipedia’s article on the element is the top-ranked result; likewise, its article on the Iron Cross is first when the search words are “iron cross.” Google’s search algorithms rank a story in part by how many times it has been linked to; people are linking to Wikipedia articles a lot.

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