In a very interesting post on Techdirt, Michael Masnick attacks the oft-(ab)used “Brain Surgery” argument used by Wikipedia-haters.

It goes something like this: “If you needed brain surgery, would you trust someone who was trained as a brain surgeon, or someone who learned brain surgery from Wikipedia?” An alternative version of the question is “would you allow a ‘crowd’ of people to perform brain surgery on you.”

Masnick takes this (in my view very short-sighted) argument apart piece by piece (and does that very well), but is also open an honest about Wikipedia’s role as the source for information:

This isn’t to say that Wikipedia is perfect. It’s not. It’s got plenty of problems. But the lesson that this professor should be teaching is that you can’t trust any source by itself, and you should double-check and confirm any information you find, whether it’s from Wikipedia, a supposed “professor” or anyone else. It’s not brain surgery to understand such a lesson.

Read the full article here.