It’s good that you gave two separate links to look at both sides of the case. However, I really disagree with you suggesting people to look at wikipedia. Wikipedia is known to be horrifically unreliable when it comes to controversial topics. This much can easily be seen just by scrolling through the article’s “discussion” subpage, which contains a lot of ouright allegations of impartiality from various wikipedia editors. I’ve seen a few people posting their assessments based on their reading of wikipedia, and this is a big problem.
It’s good that you gave two separate links to look at both sides of the case. However, I really disagree with you suggesting people to look at wikipedia. Wikipedia is known to be horrifically unreliable when it comes to controversial topics. This much can easily be seen just by scrolling through the article’s “discussion” subpage, which contains a lot of ouright allegations of impartiality from various wikipedia editors. I’ve seen a few people posting their assessments based on their reading of wikipedia, and this is a big problem.
For further illustration of the impartiality of wikipedia in controversial topics, perhaps the best example I have seen is the article for second hand smoking, which they label as “passive smoking” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_smoking). See pertinent criticism at (http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1346195&cid=29182695). If you read the article (and the commentary subpage), it is pretty outlandish how one-sided it is.
You need to actively discourage people from looking at wikipedia for this sort of thing...