Introducing Wikipedia.......The new Delphic Oracle???

Well lets put it this way I do not see many people trying to scale a mountainside in Greece, slay some serpents, then ask Wikipedia what happens next. Wikipedia is much easier then that and to that extent we can attest to the fact that even though its not a prophetic oracle it does give us plenty of breaking news even before many authorities even know what is going on. This was the case as Andrew Dalby (author of The World and Wikipedia: How are we Editing Reality) states on the Chris Benoit murder suicide. That a wikipedian correlated the evidence 14 hours before the authorities did. Dalby talks about how wikipedians genuinely love creating pages or editing articles for the sake of making them better aside from the few that try to be malevolent. As stated before he even acknowledges that Wikipedia is a sort of social network for user-generators. The site has its tendencies of having political bias, staying neutral, footnotes have nowhere to hide, and the blurring of fact and fiction but it tends to be a great place for consolidated facts. But to really extend the reasoning we use Wikipedia is that it does let us access almost anything we really want to explore. If one can sift through some of the drama between wikipedians, viral marketing that some companies try an inject into the site under certain pages, or the certain people who try to plant a "leak" to see how far it spreads across the internet the site really is useful for everyone. Wikipedia has its good and its bad but in the end the site is not to blamed for being out there for free access to information, we need to blame ourselves. Dalby reiterates this when he says "Vandalism and spam are not the fault of the servers, or the site itself, or the software. They are our fault as human being. Were given access to the site, we're bored and stupid and we write childish and unpleasant things and leave a mess; were greedy and we add links that we think will bring us money." This is all very true, sure it "could" be considered an "encyclopaedia full of crap" but how many things do most people truly look up everyday just crap in and of itself. When someone sift through that crap and finds a tidbit of information that they are truly seeking to help in their cause of research that is when Wikipedia shines. It was never meant to be the end all research destination for students it was merely a place to consolidate facts and making searching for answers a bit easier.