I might go a step further and say that it's a
license to lie. If it were a real encyclopedia, anything that was the slightest bit questionable would simply be excluded. A real encyclopedia is expected to be authoritative. What Slim and her crew want is to simply be able to slough off the blame for irresponsible crap on to some purported "source."
Allow me to put in a plug for my
blog post on this topic.