What is Wikipedia now?

I was searching for information on a current event for class discussion: the Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings. Before, I was assigning a reading to another class: the wikipedia entry on Bandura's Bobo Doll study (I didn't feel as though students were ready to read an academic article from the early 60's, and I thought that the wikipedia article did a good job of distilling the essence of the article and doing so in a manner that most undergrads could understand and remember it). I felt a bit guilty about using Wikipedia in these ways. I wasn't holding up Wikipedia as an object of study (how is it created? Who creates it? How trustworthy is it relative to other sources?), but instead using it as if it were a legitimate source of information.

Upon reflecting on these feelings of guilt, I thought about how Wikipedia has probably changed over the past few years, since gaining prominence. Initially, the question was "is Wikipedia as reliable as published sources?" The assumption was that, because it is open to be edited by anyone, it could never be as reliable as published, vetted sources. As far as I know, it is still as open to change as it was back then (though perhaps the structure of correcting errors and detecting bias has been improved), but I think its wrong to assume that openness determines the extent to which any document is trustworthy. The factor that people should be paying attention to is motivation to introduce bias.

Think about other sources of information on the web. Is there some motivation to introduce bias to the information? In most case, there is some motivation. Maybe it is to please corporate shareholders, or to retain a certain audience so that they can get more views within that niche and generate profit that keeps them afloat. With Wikipedia, there are some particular topics that are edited frequently by interested parties, but as I understand it, the system has a way of detecting those and flagging those. But for my purposes, for using it in class as a way of getting the facts straight about Sandy Hook, or learning about Social Learning Theory, doesn't it present a much more even-handed, complete summation of these entities than any other available source on current events?

Maybe it wasn't always this way. There might have been a contingent of people adamant on shaping public perception of some event or entity that systematically altered the Wikipedia entries on those things. That was when there was some public conversation about the trustworthiness of Wikipedia entries. But now that that conversation has dropped out of the news cycle, out of the public consciousness, are those interested parties still as numerous, and as interested? These things have implications for the true trustworthiness of the content on Wikipedia. I am skeptical that people intent on fooling people retained their passion for altering Wikipedia entries, or, in that passion, eclipsed the Herculian efforts of volunteers working for Wikipedia to keep it free of disinformation and bias. But who knows?