It’s possible to quibble with or contest every second sentence in my encyclopedia entry, which quickly cratered my confidence in the website. But there are plenty of studies suggesting that Wikipedia is, despite its ability to be edited by anyone with excess free time and an Internet connection, about as accurate as the Encyclopedia Britannica. It also has the benefit of being up-to-the-minute: when news breaks, when a public figure dies, details are added to Wikipedia almost immediately. A fact-check of important subjects with multiple editors—Darwinism, Squeaky Fromme, the Boxer Rebellion—suggests that the website is broadly trustworthy, terrific at aggregating links, and a worthy springboard to better material.

But what of those entries covering the hopelessly insignificant, like me? I won’t bore you by cataloguing all the mistakes in my entry (I found about a dozen), but the results weren’t terribly impressive. I’m unsure how long it remained on the page, but according to Wikipedia’s edit log, my biography once claimed that I had a “vagina” and—pardon the language—“love the cock.” The only people who can refute the first point are, I hope, biased in my favor and wouldn’t be trusted by Wikipedia as “reliable sources.” The second point, also difficult to disprove, seems irrelevant to the job of polemicist…

But alas Wikipedia is often the first stop for enquiring minds and so one must vigilantly monitor one’s own entry. Just ask Taner Akçam, a Turkish historian domiciled in the United States, who in 2007 was briefly detained (PDF) by Canadian immigration officers on suspicion of being a terrorist. When he protested that he was an academic, the diligent border agents showed him a print out of his Wikipedia page, which had been defaced by his political enemies. Upon returning to the United States, Akçam was stopped by agents of the Department of Homeland Security who also enquired about his Wiki-reported terrorist connections.