I find the single most valuable aspect of Wikipedia is in the way that details marginalized in the traditional sources are so readily incorporated there. This makes it more authoritative in a certain way, though the means of achieving that advantage (decentralized composition) also open it up to untoward effects. I find the example of the guy for whom the suggestion was presented that he may have had a hand in the JFK assassination as actually a very trenchant example. Maybe it's not true; the fact that he authored a letter that's in general distribution about how he was wronged by that note, is a detail that offers a circumstantial suggestion that might tilt opinion towards its falsehood. But the point is that even though without supporting citations such a comment may be of lesser or little value, nevertheless the comment actually could be included, whereas traditional sources of knowledge (particularly in the case of encyclopedias) would present an account that is not supplemented with such details, and would tend to hold to a standard of incorporating details that are consistent with the exposition of a certain perspective, rather than incorporating a greater variety of details which can affect how a subject is presented more richly. Seth Johnson -- RIAA is the RISK! Our NET is P2P! http://www.nyfairuse.org/action/ftc DRM is Theft! We are the Stakeholders! New Yorkers for Fair Use http://www.nyfairuse.org [CC] Counter-copyright: http://realmeasures.dyndns.org/cc I reserve no rights restricting copying, modification or distribution of this incidentally recorded communication. Original authorship should be attributed reasonably, but only so far as such an expectation might hold for usual practice in ordinary social discourse to which one holds no claim of exclusive rights.