One of the continuing discussions about Wikipedia is whether it is useful as a real source of information or not (as you would expect, say, the Encyclopedia Britanica or the World Book Encyclopedia to be). Another recent piece has emerged from the blog of Keith Stattenfield that describes the back-and-forth about an entry in Wikipedia that refuses to be corrected. Heh... it was corrected finally on August 13th.

The entry for MacOS 9 the predecessor of MacOS X (for those of you who are new to the Macintosh), had (until yesterday) contained an item which claimed that MacOS 9 had at one point contained protected memory and that the feature was removed at Steve Jobs' behest.

Various revisions of this in the history page clearly show an ongoing battle between Keith and various other authors on the page who believed the following rumor (citing an article from a Macintosh rumor site) to be true, or at least worthy of mention.

Despite it's final removal, or perhaps because of it, you can draw some interesting conclusions about Wikipedia and it's editorial policy. However, given the current status, and the fact that it took two weeks to reach here, it's not entirely clear what conclusions to draw.

Can you say that "all's well that ends well", and show that eventually a real, human source with knowledge prevailed (although he had given up by that time and it was a diligent editor who restored his comments)? Or do you see the time that the incorrect information was on the site (from October 29, 2005 until August 14, 2006) as being an example of what's wrong with the 'pedia?