reading Wikipedia

The picture: some colleague used an unknown word during a discussion. Everybody seemed to agree, so you just noted it on your moleskin, nodded vigorously, and moved on.

So here you are, ten minutes later, on a random Wikipedia page, which apparently answers your questions about this weird acronym. You took what the encyclopedia gave you. On the way, you may have noted a header mentioning that "The neutrality of this article is disputed", or "This article needs additional citations for verification". But you simply did not care. "Meh".

You really should.

We all access to multiple information mediums: web, tv, magazines, newspapers, people. But the medium is not my point here; my point is about nuancing each instance of a medium.

• The Clint Eastwood in Gran Torino is not the Clint Eastwood speaking during an interview, who is not the Clint Eastwood thanking the jury for an Oscar
  
• Dramatic revelations in the Times have a different meaning to you than dramatic revelations in FHM

Back to Wikipedia. Several facts can easily mislead the occasional web wanderer:

• The occasional web wanderer looks for info on Google, and Google promotes Wikipedia pages way more than a standard PageRank weighting would normally do (which promotes pages that lots of people refer to). If a Wikipedia page of what you're looking for does exist, be sure it's in the first three results.
• Wikipedia is so huge that you can basically ask him anything (did I say "him"? Aaargh; they got me). An information hypermarket making you forget specialized information resellers.
  
• Wikipedia ends with "pedia" (uh).

To sum up, Wikipedia is so ubiquitous, massive, and authoritative that you forget to remember it's not an Oracle. Just a clever database edited by 9,613,340 people like you and me as of today (--including-- me, and now you're scared).

But unlike Clint, who fortunately has no built-in disambiguation feature, all Wikipedia objects (articles, but also editors) have "Discussion" and "History" pages (see the tabs at the top of each page: Article... Discussion... Edit... History).

And that's how you read Wikipedia: you not only look at the picture, you clickety-click between these tabs and understand how the photo was taken. Who chose the framing, the exposure, how the focus was made, under which weather conditions, etc.

 "Reading" sole Wikipedia articles is like pretending knowing all about a meeting by reading the written minutes of the meeting. No matter how brilliant the minutes are, they will always be a dumbed-down version of the epic fights that occured in the conference room.