Wikipedia flux.

Thank goodness for Wikipedia! After reading this article, and remembering dimly that lead was a fairly harmful substance, we decided to check the facts. The Wikipedia article confirmed the memory, and also, to our joy, provided us with this useful information:

"Pete wentz and ryan ross are hott and they dont asociate with lead. lead is a monster! lead will take your babies!! DONT EAT IT OR ANUL RASHING WILL OCCUR" [sic, all of it]

While we feel reasonably sure that the above passage was not added by a lobbyist for the lead industry, it does point out the basic problem with Wikipedia. We will not link to the article, because by the time you click on such a link the offending sentences may be gone -- and replaced, perhaps, with a few sentences stating that "the effects of lead on human health, long exaggerated, are now thought to be minimal" -- that last unsourced, of course.

For of course that's the problem. Since every piece of information on the site is subject to the curious whims of the last "editor," tomorrow lead may well be the cure for cancer, at least on Wikipedia. So why on earth should we be upset about lead? It's not that we don't trust the EPA to know differently -- it's the public that we worry about, the ones who might conceivably be upset about "potent neurotoxins" hanging around and getting in the way, if they bothered to look it up....

And we'll be damned: during the writing of this brief post, that passage about "ANUL RASHING" has indeed disappeared, like smoke. It has become an unfact.