The Times has yet another article about Wikipedia, and how you need to be careful about trusting it - it's not a bad article, although the title - "Snared in the Web of Wikipedia" - certainly tells me something about the way the Times sees things. To wit - they have fact checkers, and those web folks don't. They bring up a good example of what can go wrong, with a guy who's name was smeared in a bio piece on the site.

However, it's not as if the Times' hands are clean of this sort of thing. Steven Hatfill comes to mind - the man who was publicly trashed as a "person of interest" in the Anthrax investigations from 2001. There were lots of breathless articles about him in the Times (and other media outlets) - and the damage done to Mr. Hatfill by the Times is far more extensive than anything Wikipedia has done.

In fact, the Times is now the subject of a suit brought by Hatfill. In the Wikipedia case, whoever put the bogus information on the page is unknown - but that's not true of the thing with the NYT. So before they get all high and mighty about the unreliability of Wikipedia, I have a simple question for them: why does Kristof still have a job after he went on a mission to destroy Hatfill's reputation?