An online encyclopedia that grows through the contributions of literally anyone, it seemed doomed to irrelevance when I first started reading about it six years ago.

Without editors, quality was bound to be a casualty, while the potential for pursuing personal agendas meant that anyone with a grudge could create entries or deface existing ones. No, I assured myself, this is an idea that will founder on its own contradictions.

Clearly, I was wrong.

Wikipedia is more robust than ever, and continues to broaden our model of information retrieval. Problems of quality and digital vandalism remain, but they're under better control than one might expect, with blatant errors often corrected swiftly by a battery of contributors the site claims to total 75,000.

With 10 million articles in more than 250 languages now available, Wikipedia has become a useful adjunct to traditional encyclopedias, a kind of parallel track for research.

Used with caution, this burgeoning base of knowledge can often prove invaluable.

The cautionary note seems obvious: Anyone can make edits to existing Wikipedia entries, so at any particular moment you may be looking at an error that has yet to be corrected. The problem is exacerbated the less visible the subject, for fewer readers on a given topic translate into fewer eyes to make necessary corrections. So the way to use this resource is in conjunction with established references.

Cross-checking should include sites or books that use established experts in their fields, for Wikipedia's democratic notion of editing can leave you in the hands of amateurs.

This is precisely the point Andrew Keen makes about the Wikipedia in his book, "The Cult of the Amateur" (Doubleday, 2007), which points to the value of experts as gatekeepers of knowledge, an idea now under full assault in some quarters. I agree with Keen that the notion that there is no such thing as authority is a dagger to the heart of scholarship. But I also see unexpected value in what the Wikipedia is assembling, especially when it relates to more esoteric subjects.

For it's surprising how often current work -- particularly in technology and the sciences -- is well described and annotated.

Many of us who write weblogs on technical subjects (I write often about the search for planets around other stars) link to background information to explain concepts to readers.

I would like to do this with the Encyclopedia Britannica, but the Britannica does not contain the most current work on my topic. An even bigger problem has been that I could not link to it because a link would take my reader to a login page asking for a password. The Wikipedia became a reference by default, and when I checked the quality of the entry in question, I found myself using it about 80 percent of the time.

It's interesting how Britannica is responding to problems like these. Recently it offered free access to its subscription service to bloggers -- an acknowledgment of its problem: For every view of a page on the Britannica, 184 pages of the Wikipedia are accessed.

Britannica's new Webshare program attempts to build readership by allowing bloggers to bring Britannica content into their sites, with links that work even when the readers are not already subscribers. This is a smart move that gets Britannica back into the game with a recognition of just how much traffic is generated by such references.

I've long revered Britannica and wish it well in adapting to the new marketplace. And yes, I would obviously prefer to link to an article that had been vetted by experts than one that had not. But the Wikipedia is so much faster than other sites in keeping up with new developments that science watchers like me can't be without it.

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