General Discussion

For the subjects I teach (vertebrate paleontology, with an emphasis on dinosaurs in one course), there are all kinds of online resources. Some of them are reliable, but many are not. They're put together by dinosaur groupies (they're a thing) who've memorized lots of details, but don't really understand the subject well enough to understand (a) what these details really mean (beyond "would dinosaur A kill dinosaur B, even though they lived on different continents and one was extinct 50 million years before the other appeared" ) and (b) how much nuance these details require given what's actually in the professional literature.

About 10 years ago, I published a paper naming a new species of extinct crocodile. It got a little bit of media attention. I checked Wikipedia from the moment the paper was released, and someone had posted a page about the new species one hour later. I had nothing to do with it, nor did any of the coauthors - and it was full of errors.

Same thing happened earlier this year. We published a new species of fossil crocodile, and there were a few news reports about it. It took slightly longer for the Wikipedia page on this new croc to come out, but it was so full of errors and misinterpretations that I almost asked its author to just pull it down and start over. Whoever wrote it made all kinds of non-sequitur statements and clearly didn't know (a) what we'd done or (b) what we'd concluded.

The great thing about the Internet is that anyone can post things. The problem is that anyone can post things.

Upper-level undergrads and grad students can usually discern the reliable from junk, but for beginning students or non-majors, it's not so easy.