Is there a specific reason you assume the academic community is doing a good job at this? Consider the case in point. The myth the Chronicle author was refuti

Is there a specific reason you assume the academic community is doing a good job at this? Consider the case in point. The myth the Chronicle author was refuting was a political myth: that the Haymarket defendants were innocent men railroaded by a biased prosecutor who was not "credible." This myth had been repeated by generations of pro-labor historians with a big ol' axe to grind. As for the anti-labor historians? Oh wait, there aren't any anti-labor historians. At least, if by "historian" you mean "individual funded by the US Government to teach history." Thus, Wikipedia is simply recording in its pages the depressing result of a political power struggle in academia. Now that labor has become the establishment, an honest historian who is not pro or anti labor, just interested in the past, can discover from primary sources that gee whiz, the prosecution actually had a case. It's 2012 so he won't be purged for this. On the other hand, it's not clear how he's supposed to purge all his axe-grinding colleagues who continue insisting that the sky is green. Academia is just a thing called "academia." Science is just a thing called "science." The Soviet Union had both. Ours are better than the Soviet Union's, but they're still de facto government agencies. Jeebus didn't come down yesterday and make our government systematically infallible. Imagine Wikipedia in the Soviet Union. Would you want it to be a crowdsourced version of the Great Soviet Encylopedia? Or would you want it to do a little better? Wikipedia has done a great job of being a tertiary source, mostly. That doesn't mean it can't have higher ambitions for the future. When I stop being a child, I put aside childish things. It's childish to assume that "reliable sources" are reliable just because everyone says they are. Is Wikipedia all grown up now? If so, maybe it should at least think about starting to address its utterly circular definition of a reliable source. If there is no conceivable mechanism to distinguish between homeopathy and medicine, how do our existing mechanisms work? Are these mechanisms unique? Are they perfect? Can they be duplicated, improved, advanced?