Battle ! OPEN SOURCE vs PROPRIETARY !

A: Hey! have you ever heard about ______ ?
B: Oh, is it the latest thing? Let me search in Wikipeadia first....

A: Hey! What is _____? I don't have any ideas about this project!
B: Find information on Wikipeadia and you can have an idea of it.

Are these case similar to you? Those happened to me quite often. I used to search Wikipeadia ( Wiki) when I don't have any ideas on a topic, a word, or just a thing.

Wiki is an open source  for marjorities to search information they need while also open to public to edit anything inside this website. So, that mean information are up-to-date and could be changed in a second if you are going to edit any orginal article there. However the information Wiki provided may not be so accurate as "Wikipedia in fact had a third more inaccuracies than Britannica."  (from http://corporate.britannica.com/britannica_nature_response.pdf).

Therefore, it is better to KNOW the basic concept from Wiki rather than to UNDERSTAND from there.

Wiki sounds convenienct and user friendly. I agree on it too. It is a popular resource on the internet nowsaday. How about the proprietary source, like Encyclopeadia? These sources need to be paid so that we can gain the information inside. Those articles, are edited by professionals and have to be proof-read for serval times before publishing. The resources are more respresentable and accurate.

Which do I prefer to use? Both. It is because I can search anything easiler and up-to-date on Wiki, to gain my first hand information. Then to have a further study on the thing I can go for Encyclopeadia to understand deeply.

If there are both pros and cons here, why can't we combine them to make things going better?