Never has a single metaphor of mine created such a stir. The article by Chesney you cite is intriguing, but it concludes that 13 percent of the articles contain mistakes. The difference between the means of the articles credibility was only significant at the 10 percent level -- based on the responses of 55 people in total. I'd also point out that the article was based on the responses of graduate students -- who, as the literature seems clear on, have different interests and information seeking behaviors than undergraduates. I'd also point out that they may very well be, as Europeans, more sophisticated and better educated than the typical American undergraduate. I'm not saying they are. I'm just saying we know little or nothing, from the article, about the survey group -- their education level, academic interests, level of information literacy training -- all of which may have impacted the results. In short, I'm just not sure we can take the conclusions of this article and make an overall generalization from it. The history of Wikipedia is interesting as is the fact that people are attempting other projects similar to it but that information is irrelevant to the question of whether Wikipedia is accurate today. You're mixing apples and oranges here -- if I may be allowed another metaphor. As a professional reference librarian I still feel it would be inappropriate to recommend the use of Wikipedia to my users. For the fundamental reason that it does not, as it currently exists, in my view, meet acceptable standards for accuracy. It certainly is an interesting model of distributed data collection, but that's about as far as I could go. In particular, I think the fact checking on Wikipedia is questionable -- an issue that the article by Chesney doesn't address. In the end I guess I just wonder what I'm supposed to compare Wikipedia to if not our traditional reference sources -- printed and electronic??? Either it's as good a resource as a traditional encyclopedia or it isn't. And if it isn't don't I have a professional obligation to steer my patrons away from it towards the better source? Karl Bridges University of Vermont