I came into this project with some knowledge of wikipedia. I frequently go to wikipedia when I have any questions or curiostities on just about any subject, and I never questioned the site and took most of the information I recieved, as fact. Through working on this project I found myself relieved that the information in my article was mostly all true. However, I will be a little more careful of accepting all information on wikipedia as fact without checking the references.
Going through this article it really brought to light the concept of social knowing. Not only can peers contribute to the site with their knowledge, but it is also peers who judge the information. The traditional authority is absent.
I mostly made the same experience. In fact, I couldn’t find a single mistake in the article, when I checked the references. Of course, that doesn’t mean that you can rely on everything you read on Wikipedia, but at least you know that most pieces of information are very likely to be true. Still, I don’t think that that’s a problem: If primary sources aren’t available, you inevitably have to trust other sources to a certain extent.