I've been checking out wikipedia.com for a while now. For the most part, I find that the articles dealing with controversial political subjects are pretty well balanced. There is objectivism that you would even expect from a professional encyclopedia, but there is also, sometimes, a subjective view that makes those articles interesting to read. Some articles connect the dots or read between the lines.

It's nice when information is referenced and you can see that the last paragraph was referenced to some anonymous person's personal blog, so you can take it with a grain of salt. Or that a piece of information was referenced to a .org with a strong and questionable political agenda. But most of the time information is not cited or referenced.

Wikipedia kind of bridges the gap between the overview of an encyclopedia and getting as deep as a history textbook would, so it's more of an interesting read.

For example, the Saddam Hussein (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saddam_Hussein) article does not delve into fanaticism but keeps a pretty objective tone throughout. When it gets to 2001 and beyond though, people's blogs are referenced as sources and a lot of speculation, "if's," "could be's," "possibly's" start showing up.

I'm always wary of what I read and where it came from - what's its angle - but I'm having discrepant thoughts about wikipedia. How much should I trust it?

I know that I can't use Wiki in school because it isn't considered to be an "accurate citation". I find that the encyclopedia is fairly accurate. It is a good idea to read other sources of information in addition to Wiki just to verify the slats it sometimes has.

I wouldn't go to wikipedia for politics.
There's a big scandal over wikipedia and touchy subjects. Like the whole... whatyacallit.. Kerry's vietnam boat scandal thing. There was a whole situation about that and wikipedia someone linked to somewhere.