Wikipedia - where truth is editable.

In 2011, when I was attending the Wikimedia conference, supporters of right-wing parties were protesting outside the venue of Mumbai University campus; and Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia was greeted with black flags. The cause of their agitation was the wrong depiction of the map of Kashmir in Wikipedia. Nothing bad happened further; the conference completed smoothly. 

Mr Wales' Mac-book, however, could not be connected to the projector during his opening speech

The protesters probably did not know the nature of Wikipedia. It wasn't as if Mr. Wales had a team of editors who were writing the articles like the Encyclopedia Britannica. The later is edited by domain experts whereas in Wikipedia - anyone can write. In other words, the truth need not be proven - it is conveniently editable. Although, there are rules to assess the credibility of an article and articles evolve much over time to a supposedly more generally accepted version of the truth. 

Recently, while reading about human evolution, when I got to the part of language development, I was interested to find how my language - Bengali had evolved. It has been proven beyond doubt that Bengali is a descendant of the Sanskrit language, which in turn had descended from the Aramaic language which in turn had come from the Semitic branch of Afro-Asiatic language. Though some scholars claim Sanskrit had evolved from inside India i.e. the Indus Valley. 

On checking the Wikipedia article on Sanskrit it said that the earliest inscriptions in Sanskrit were found in Ayodhya. This rings a bell; especially now. 

This part on Ayodhya appeared on 18 Jul 2018. Refer difference here.

It may be plausible that the earliest known Sanskrit inscription were indeed found in Ayodhya. Prof D.C Sircar, an epigraphist with Archaeological Survey of India may have unearthed and dated it. Ironically the book he edited Select Inscriptions (bearing on Indian History and Civilization) was dedicated to Dr. Shyamaprasad Mukherjee. 

However, no one from ASI edited or even locked this entry in Wikipedia, especially, at a point of time when a defining verdict was being awaited in Supreme Court. 

(as of this writing)

This edit was done by someone named Ms. Sarah Welch. She created her first page on 26-Dec-2014, and is very active since then with 15 edits per day, mostly on Hinduism and ancient Hindu literature. From the edit statistics, it seems she is an academic or researcher on these subjects. However, most of the articles she wrote on Hindu literature has lower ranking per Wikipedia assessment standards compared to the much better ranking which is on Cattle theft in India. Moreover, she has numerous edits on subjects those seem different from her main subject, for example on 2019 India General Elections, even on Article 370 of Indian Constitution, Citizenship Amendment Act Protests and Assam Accord. 

I am not sure whether Ms. Welch is helping protect the truth. Maybe Ms. Welch genuinely cares for the correct information. But it is quite amazing how there is absence of participation from official entities when gradually evidence from the digital medium is being accepted in the court of law. There were quite some instances of people held guilty for public posts. 

Such platforms, though immensely convenient should always be taken with a pinch of salt. 

References:

Sarah Welch edit statistics from here.