What am I missing about the Wikipedia 'scandal'

If you haven't heard about it yet (and probably everyone has), a gag entry was put into Wikipedia and it caused a huge scandal.  H3ll, it even made /.  I'm not sure I really follow what the problem is.  Is it that the dude was slandered/libelled?  Or was it that a gag/prank made it's way into something as mainstream as Wikipedia ?  Or is it both?  Or is it neither?

I use Wikipedia quite a bit and like it. Most people I know use it and most of them like it.  Some however don't.  My friend and co-worker Ben have discussed it a few times and he used to be pretty anti-wiki.  His problem has been precisely the sort of thing this 'scandal' brought to lite, namely, how do you know something is true.  Ben is in charge of managing technical writing and documentation at InfoPro so he spends a good bit of time looking things up and researching things.  If I understood his criticism correctly, one of the main problems is that you can reference/cite something on wikipedia and it can easily turn out to not be true, or it can be edited away.  So if he cited something in one of our manuals, the material he cited could easily be edited away and you'd have an effective broken link.  While this is the possible with most internet based stuff, Wikipedia stuff can be changed by anyone, and is often changed dramatically on a regular basis.  Just a few weeks ago for instance, I was listening to a talk show on XM and the host was talking about Wikipedia and Anderson Cooper .  He was reading from the entry and it said something to the effect of "Anderson Cooper, gay journalist, gay advocate and son of Gloria Vanderbilt..."  ( Not to be confused with Doug "I'm a gay man and a gay journalist" Danger, ) and the host was commenting that he didn't know Cooper was gay and was suprised that the first sentence introducing him highlighted his sexuality.  Well, I looked at it the next day and the issue of his sexuality was completely different, mentioning only that he is rumored to be gay and that many gay advocacy groups want him to come 'out'.  I honestly have no idea if he is or isn't (although i'm relatively sure that Doug is although I'm not so sure that his stories about giving people the 'Gay Eye' are).  But the point is that there's obviously some danger involved if people take stuff they read on the internet, let alone on the Wikipedia at face value without fact checking it (although I'm not sure how you'd fact check the Cooper thing).

When I read Wikipedia, it's usually just for background information.  I personally take anything I read, particularly on the internet and double particularly on Wikipedia, with a grain of salt. There are a lot of people with a lot of agendas out there, and even if people were 100% honest,  people make mistakes.  But I hear the main criticism for Wikipedia from people like Ben, is that it's often taken as Gospel by many, and since anyone can edit it, there's a ton of potential for abuse.  I guess I buy that

But Why did dude have to quit his job?  More importantly, why did this become such a huge story.  I never heard of a single person involved in the story other than John F. Kennedy and if anyone seriously thinks that there's compelling and legitimate evidence out there that xxxx killed Kennedy that has somehow slipped under the radar for all these years, I have a bridge for sale.  No, I'm not saying that there's no one saying Kennedy was killed by someone other than Oswald or anything of that sort. What I'm saying is that there's no way a credible theory is out there that no one has heard of until today.  And if one came out, it would be major news, it wouldn't just slip in under the radar screen - at least  not as long as there are 24 hour news Channels.  This after all is the same media that covered the Natalee Holloway storie for like 2 months straight and made Americans (and Alabamans in particular) look like total f~~~~~~.  But I digress.

What I'm getting at is how did this manage to gather national attention?  Heck, if one of my employees did that, I certainly wouldn't expect them to quit.  It was clumsy for sure.  But unless I'm missing something, I didn't see any indication of real malace or anything other than just someone goofing around.  Even the supposed 'victim' isn't aggrieved.  It's not like he did it to Mr. Chaz I make 14k - 20k a month or something. How does this make the company look bad?  I mean, does anyone actually believe that people don't put fake stuff in Wikipedia?  Have you seen how many times the pages of political figures get edited b/c of stuff like this?  Sure, it undermines the credibility of Wikipedia , but mainly you just use it as a resource to find out general information about something, and the Nuanced stuff is always suspect.  I'm guessing I am probably missing a big part of the angle so if I am, please help me understand it.  In the meantime, Ben will have to learn about narwahl elsewhere.