I did my first edit on Wikipedia yesterday. At first I was very skeptical about the notion of a user created information source and then I thought a bit about how much misinformation I have run across in reference books. I guess in a sense all reference books are user created.

Also, Wikipedia can be a good quick source for information,  is synoptic and has links.

in my case I was consulting the article on “Ghostwritten” the book by David Mitchell I had just read. After finishing it I wasn’t quite sure that I had picked up enough of the cross references between the ten seperate sections of this book. The article on Wikipedia highlighted these references and I realized that I at least picked up most of what the author(s) of the Wikipedia article did.

At the same time (and this is the way I read most non-fiction books anyway) I realized that all of the information was not necessarily covered in the article. I decided I might still re-read the book to deepen my understanding of it.

BTW, the edit I did was a simple mis-spelling error.