Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia anyone can edit. It contains more than 4m entries, and you could add another one right now. Last week, speaking at a conference in Pennsylvania, the site’s co-founder, Jimmy Wales, said he receives 10 e-mails a week from college students complaining: “Please help me. I got an F on my paper because I cited Wikipedia.” His disarming response was: “For God’s sake, don’t cite the encyclopedia.”

This is the latest in a slew of stories about the website’s reliability, with fans and detractors baying at each other. Why can’t people get a grip?

I want to have no sympathy for these students, because anyone quoting a website written by the public has no place in further education, but some blame lies with Wales. The site’s lofty guidelines for contributors talk about neutrality and fact-checking. Wikipedia has been puffed by respected journals such as Nature, which, late in 2005, ran an irresponsible feature implying that Wikipedia was nearly as reliable on scientific matters as Encyclopaedia Britannica. Journalists leapt on this because it was a great story.

Britannica’s extensive rebuttal skewered the “careless” way Nature had assembled its evidence — sending out partial entries, claiming differences of opinion were errors, quoting from Britannica publications other than the full encyclopedia — yet the rebuttal prompted nowhere near the coverage of the original claim.

The Nature article came at a good time for Wikipedia, which was under siege over a libellous fake biography that sat on the site for four months last year before being discovered. John Seigenthaler was Robert Kennedy’s administrative assistant in the early 1960s; the biography falsely claimed that he was thought to be involved in both Kennedy assassinations. The libel, posted as a prank, was not verified by the site’s editors.

It is obvious that anyone can post anonymous defamation on the web. Wikipedia gives them a forum within which they might be believed. John Seigenthaler’s case created a storm because Wikipedia calls itself an encyclopedia, and ranks high in Google searches. This gives it, says Daniel Brandt, a long-time critic who runs www.wikipedia-watch.org, “a massive, unearned influence on what passes for reliable information”.

Seigenthaler said that “while Wikipedia may provide a great deal of factual information, it also is a flawed and irresponsible research tool”. He also quoted a high-school teacher who told him: “Wikipedia is intellectual democracy. My students love it. They can contribute articles and it can give them quick facts.”

As well as all the mistakes and pranks and frequent vandalism, there have been well-publicised cases of politicians editing and bowdlerising their entries. Well, durrr! Of course they do. I don’t want to vote for a politician too dim to be able to maintain a flattering biography. Screaming about these “abuses” of Wikipedia generates headlines, but it’s shooting a whale in a barrel.

Wikipedia is a generally accurate first port of call for information. It’s especially good on tech subjects and pop culture, and it’s decent on most other topics. We’d be mad to trust it as a definitive resource, but its unreliability is the price it pays for grand ideals, which bring the benefit of a range and immediacy no other enyclopedia can match.

The world is full of people who uncritically believe what they read. I recently sat next to someone in a cinema who claimed that The Da Vinci Code movie received bad reviews because “the Catholic church controls the media”. Online, fact and fiction look the same, especially on a site such as Wikipedia, which has become an Aunt Sally in the debate over dumbing down. This problem lies not with Wikipedia, but our society’s criminal lack of media literacy. We are failing our children if they are so ignorant that they take Wikipedia on trust.

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