Wikipedia has grown to be one of the most used source of information on the web. It has credible information and hey its free! Some professors are hesitant in letting us students use this as a source in academia, but nowadays Wikipedia is the way to go. I know you can go in and edit anything you want and add your own little blurb about any given topic. So I gave it a try and was sorely mistaken by the removal of my one line of text within hours of posting it. I guess there are some editors who revise this content regularly and remove unnecessary information.
One example of a vandalism gone badly and taken a little serious is the Wikipedia biography controversy where an elderly man by the name John_Seigenthaler was hoaxed on by someone editing his page and saying that he was part of the assassination plots of multiple people when in reality he was their friend. This brewed a lot of controversy and helped with the security situation that Wikipedia faces.
Although the goal is to let anyone edit articles, controversial pages are subject to various levels of protection that restrict editing to confirmed users. Pages are often protected temporarily to thwart vandalism and so-called "edit wars." This article showed me that measures are taken to avoid misleading information. I always wondered why people were allowed to edit stuff when they themselves aren't credible enough to edit the site. apparently you can become an edit member of Wikipedia and have access to fully edit articles. I still think that the information is somewhat skewed, but "though scholarly work suggests that vandalism is generally short-lived" which eases my mind on using this site for papers and research in school.
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