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A few 'wicked wikis' - misinformed or mischievous entries - by devious minds and the whole of the Internet community has suddenly turned on the world's most popular anything-goes repository for information. It's almost enough to persuade people to actually do some proper research when they want to find out about something important.

The number of entries causing high-profile headaches has spiralled over the past few weeks. US journalist John Seigenthaler was libelled by a claim on Wikipedia that he was linked to the assassination of JFK, Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg's entry was vandalised, and 'the podfather' Adam Curry admitted anonymously editing his own personal entry - a practice that's frowned upon - to boost his standing in history's recollection of podcasting.

The coverage these events earned in the press made more people aware of the site and of its weaknesses: suddenly, the entry for Jimmy Wales - co-founder of Wikipedia - was altered with the claim that he'd been shot by a friend of John Seigenthaler.

But even if you set aside the blatant attempts to fill some of Wikipedia's millions of entries with misinformation, there are still fundamental flaws in the system, which not only allow anyone to edit entries but encourages people to do so. One of the problems is that this gives rise to fanatics - the type of Net nuisances that have kept right-minded people away from online forums for years.

To try to illustrate this point, I decided to look at the entry for an IT term - Pentium - and click on the History tab. There are hundreds of minor changes to the details for Intel's processor line on Wikipedia, and you have to ask whether the entry is any more polished now than it was 200 revisions ago.

Of course, the Pentium is an ever-changing product line, so perhaps that's not the best example of how pointless revisions make a mockery

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of an entry: many of the later ones are legitimate updates. So I then started thinking about a technology or brand that had been inactive since the rise of Wikipedia, and I came up with 3dfx. Take a look at the history there!

Even taking into account the tensions that boil over in the graphics industry between supporters of one chip architecture and fans of another, the determination to control a Wikipedia entry on a company that hasn't been active in its own right for five years is pure lunacy.

Other entries have evolved from succinct and concise to obsessive diatribes that are too long to provide anything useful to most people. (And for those of you who regularly frequent the pages of Wikipedia, my misgivings about the website have nothing to do with the Wikipedia entry for PC Pro submitted at 16:34 on 9 June 2005, honest.)

The bad press given to Wikipedia couldn't have come at a better time for its other co-founder, Larry Sanger. He lashed out against Wikipedia's 'anti-elitism' last year after leaving the project four years ago. Now he's back with a Wikipedia competitor - Digital Universe - which welcomes public input but is backed up by 'experts' who review material that's been submitted.

So, rather than trusting anyone on the Internet, Digital Universe is building a 'global alliance of researchers, scholars and experts' to add authority. It's an attempt to build on the success of Wikipedia while capitalising on its weaknesses.

And yet, on the whole, Wikipedia is a useful resource and it has a huge head start in the minds of Net users. For every incorrect entry that escapes the community's attention, there are hundreds of others that are corrected shortly after a misinformed edit. In fact, an article published by Nature goes so far as to claim that Wikipedia submissions on certain scientific topics are as accurate as the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

We live in an era of information on demand, when the speed with which you can find something is more important to some people than the legitimacy of what you find. For anyone who wants a bite-sized reminder of the technology behind a thin-film transistor, a high-level analysis of a major historical war, or a ten-second overview of the life and times of Tom Paine (to pinch a point made by Dick Pountain last month), you could do a lot worse than look on Wikipedia. But as for the sum of all human knowledge, that sounds like something you'd be more confident in if it came at a price.