Ed Eulenberg said, "If your mother says she loves you, check it out." Or did he?
Get it right. It's so easy to get it wrong. And if Wikipedia or the New York Times or a professor or textbook is your only source, you're getting it wrong. Some call it skepticism, others call it fact checking.
No reporter should rely exclusively on one source of information, whether it's Wikipedia or the Encycopedia Brittannica. If you're a solid reporter who cites varied and numerous sources and the facts are right, then who cares if Wikipedia is one of those sources?
Reporters are responsible for having correct information. Sure, reporters make mistakes. No one is infallible. There's never going to be a newspaper without a "Corrections" section. That's okay.
Reporters still need to verify and check their facts and look for things that just don't add up. Copy editors are there to help ensure that the finished product is as error-free as possible. If Wikipedia is part of the verification process, that's okay. It just can't be the only part.
The idea of including art with a post is to do what media professionals always have done: Provide some visual supplement to the content that adds values. I think we have exhausted the use of personal portraits in your blog entries with this picture of you screaming at the reader. Let's try something that shows a bit more thought. And your cutlines still don't work right.
I absolutely agree that one should use Wikipedia in conjunction with other sources.
To bolster your argument, I would argue that most newspaper or television reports are somewhat valid only on the day they are printed. They are ephemeral.
Wikipedia articles, however, exist as long as they are continuosly updated.
More and more, newspapers such as the New York Times are charging for archival access. Once a reader decides to fork over the exorbitant fees, the information is poorly packaged. If we want to find out about dredging on the Hudson River (who would, except me?) we are confronted with several articles and the corrections may or may not be appended.
Wikipedia skims off the fat, like journalists are supposed to do. Ideally, the articles are updated and we would find one article on Hudson River dredging, instead of having to pore through several.
Isn't the job of a journalist to boil down the issue to a concise, uncomplicated explanation? Newspaper archives would indicate otherwise.