As of now, college students says wikipedia is unreliable because anyone can write articles and the information is always changing. Wikipedia is a starting off point. The purpose of the project where public policy students put their information from research on Wikipedia and find errors in existing articles is not to make Wikipedia a sitable source. The project is about making complex information accessible to ordinary people. The effort is not expected to give the site more credability.
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Many times, I have used Wikipedia as a starting point to get a general overview of the information that I will research but I have never considered using Wikipedia as a reliable source. Wikipedia is a huge wiki. In my Web Technologies class, we used a wiki to do a collaborative project on copyright law. We could change each other's work and edit as we pleased. We had the leisure of setting up who did what. Each person did independent research as needed and our plan was executed smoothly. If we had more people let's say the world editing the Wiki, people who didn't do proper research on the topic, it would have been disasterous. Some people are wrong. Who knows why they chose to make inaccurate statements on wiki-articles, but they do. For that reason, Wikipedia is not a sitable source.
The project that students of public policy from Georgetown and eight other universities are doing is great practice for them to perfect making their research easier to interpret for the general public. From experience in Web Technologies, I know how nice it is to be able to relate what you've been studying back to everyday life. It may seem like a waste of time when internet users begin to make inaccurate edits just moments after they finish their article, but it's not. People are going to refute their findings. They have to be confident in their work and persistent in presenting their information. Personally, I would comment on the edits every now and then, but I wouldn't continuously update the article. I would probably get frustrated after a while. Wikipedia teaming up with Academia is a good deal for the students. Wikipedia doesn't get affected much by the process.
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