Many people are using Wikipedia to learn about Ebola. This makes me happy.
There are many safeguards to prevent spurious edits to the Ebola wiki entry. Only registered editors can contribute. All edits are proposed on a separate page, and must be approved. Sources for any claims must be rigorous--newspaper articles won't do, sources must be from higher on the evidence-based pyramid.
Those are reasonable precautions that mean that Wikipedia is not really the "encyclopedia anyone can edit." With respect to health information this is a good thing.
The elephant in the room here is our misplaced faith that information from more established authorities than Wikipedia--the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), peer reviewed journal articles--are always of high caliber. Oftentimes it is , but not always. After all the CDC has acknowledged mistakes in handling the first Ebola case in Dallas. And many peer reviewed claims are eventually retracted.
This is not to bash the CDC or journal editors. Rather the point is that we should be productively skeptical of claims from all sources, from Wikipedia to Nature to the CDC. Simple heuristics--go here! don't go there!--no longer suffice, if they ever did.
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