Can I Trust Wikipedia?

A question as dreaded as "Who's on first?" And one that I am forced to ask as I feel lucky often. One quick and fun way to address how much you can trust a wikipedia article is by looking at what else a contributor edits. This can easily be done through the magic of the MediaWiki API and Mathematica. Here is the result, with a CNN inspired example, of Mitt Romney's wikipedia article from April 19th, 2012.

The top 20 contributors to the Mitt Romney wikipedia article are highlighted in yellow and common articles edited by these contributors are highlighted in blue.

Personally, I see red flags when contributors of the Mitt Romney article are also subject-matter experts of Katy Perry, Springfield (The Simpsons), and Savage Love. I wouldn't put too much faith in its accuracy.

A copy of the notebook can be downloaded here. To use it, simply copy the title of the wikipedia article of interest and paste it into the third line. More to come the next time I skip lunch!