We love to cite to the “internets.” It’s easy. It’s fast. And it saves paper. But be careful. In Crispin v. Christian Audigier, Inc., 2010 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 52832, 28-31 (C.D. Cal. May 26, 2010) the Court was not shy in expressing its disapproval:
It is unfortunate that the parties were unable to provide more authoritative evidence. One court recently noted the danger of relying on Wikipedia: “Wikipedia.com[ is] a website that allows virtually anyone to upload an article into what is essentially a free, online encyclopedia. A review of the Wikipedia website reveals a pervasive and, for our purposes, disturbing series of disclaimers, among them, that: (i) any given Wikipedia article ‘may be, at any given moment, in a bad state: for example it could be in the middle of a large edit or it could have been recently vandalized;’ (ii) Wikipedia articles are ‘also subject to remarkable oversights and omissions;’ (iii) ‘Wikipedia articles (or series of related articles) are liable to be incomplete in ways that would be less usual in a more tightly controlled reference work;’ (iv) ‘[a]nother problem with a lot of content on Wikipedia is that many contributors do not cite their sources, something that makes it hard for the reader to judge the credibility of what is written;’ and (v) ‘many articles commence their lives as partisan drafts’ and may be ‘caught up in a heavily unbalanced viewpoint.'”