Wikipedia

[mkjuk]

Who exactly writes the enties and why?

[snook]

Anyone can, including you. See the main page here for details.

[boobesque]

the reason why is for the greater good of humanity. its all very good hacking websites and ripping off starving children but a bit of benevolence now and then ensures good karma all round

[whqttt]

A lot of people like to talk about their pet subjects (I had a minor hand in the Lewis Carol page, for example) - so wiki can be a very useful source of information. Other people have other motives.

However because it is open to all, there is no guarantee that the information on any given page is accurate (as you can't verify who actually wrote it, and pages can be modified out of whatever motivates people to vandalise things. (A radio 1 dj did this recently on pages about his colleagues "for a laugh").

You might learn interesting things on wiki (I have my homepage set to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Randompage which means I get a random entry every time I fire up a web browser), but I really wouldn't depend on info there without verification elsewhere.