Being a Wikipedia Auditor

Last week a large portion of my time was dedicated to Auditing the JFK Assassination Wikipedia page.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_F._Kennedy_assassination

I thought this was a really interesting project because I spend so much time reading and using Wikipedia that it was great to finally do some research and understand where all the information is coming from.  Since Wikipedia has been popular people have said that it is not a very good scholarly source, however learning that first hand definitely affected my view of the website.  Our group decided to split the work up into five different sections.  My sections of the Article were the Intro and the Assassination.

My first step was to read the whole article so I had all of the knowledge it could provide on the subject.  Then I re-read my own sections a couple times in order to check for bad grammar, syntax, and other clues that would indicate an "amateur" without proper knowledge was writing them.  Everything seemed to be in good order so I moved onto my next step.  One by one I began going through the citations in my section, clicking on each and every link in order to verify a few things:
1. That the sources information coincided with the information on Wikipedia
2. That the sources information was from a legitimate source and credible
3. That the source was not an amateur site without citations etc.

Of all the citations in my section I only found one that I had issues with.  John McAdam's site appeared to have no citations on it and while the information on his site appeared to be good, there was nothing that I could find proving the legitimacy of John McAdam's website.  The website itself looked poorly put together as if an amateur had done it and a google search did not return any results on John McAdam's that would make me view his information as credible.  Because of those things I believed that the website cannot be trusted.  This was the only site in my section that was an unacceptable source.  Our group then rated each of our sections out of 5 and I awarded my section 4/5 stars.  While it is certainly a good place to get an overview of the events, and despite many of the good sources, it would simply be irresponsible to recommend using this article as a scholarly source if even one of the citations is bad.  For a scholarly source we want everything to be perfect essentially and this was not.

Overall I really enjoyed the process, I learned first hand that while Wikipedia is accurate, it cannot be used scholarly because one tiny portion (which may be the portion you are using in a academic paper) can be filled with wrong or potentially wrong information.  Ultimately we gave the article a 4/5... it was a great place to start research, however should not be used as a scholarly source.