As a total aside, I find it interesting that Wikipedia, which 5 years ago would never be considered a reliable source for a developing event such as this, is now (rightly) considered a good place to go to for up to the hour information.

I'd suggest caution in using WP for this. WP tends to get a lot of activity on current events (I usually don't bother editing them for that reason), this one is less likely to draw on the usual contentious/opinion driven contingent, but it is always a risk.

Quite a lot of "current event" incidents are badly covered on WP until some time after the fact.

Facts and figures could well be very wrong; with lengthy discussion on the talk page ironing it out. There is also a strong western bias in the writing/sources, especially (as it happens) with regards to Japan. Finally; people will tend to write their own interpretations and comment on such events; some of which hangs around longer than it should.

Use with care :)

I've found wikipedia to be an excellent source of news on current events.

One of the problems with most "regular" news reporting is that it's very context sensitive. It's a tiny diff of info that assumes that you have already applied all of the previous diffs. If you want to understand a situation well this process can be infuriating. Wikipedia however actually distills down all the info into a complete and coherent whole making it a far more useful overall source of information.

However, there are some caveats. Wikipedia isn't well optimized for breaking news, so the hiccups in the process can cause more problems there than for other articles. Case in point, the wiki article for the Sendai quake/tsunami had very early on listed the number of casualties at an astonishing 6 million.

As a followup: At some point while I was trying to keep my annoyance in check at being forced to listen to CNN in the airport terminal during a layover on my trip back from PAX East in Boston I had a realization about traditional media. It's essentially just a giant example of the broken telephone game. The information from the people who actually know and understand what's going on is transferred in relay-like fashion through spokespeople, to reporters, to copy writers, to editors, to anchors. Sadly most of the people involved in this chain do not have any expertise in the subjects at hand and do not have robust mechanisms for ensuring the accuracy or utility of their reporting.

In the end you get the classic "purple monkey dishwasher" problem of too many questionably reliable nodes on an information route, and then amplified by the prejudices and predilections of everyone involved plus the needs of the news organization to drive traffic in order to maximize revenue.

"Case in point, the wiki article for the Sendai quake/tsunami had very early on listed the number of casualties at an astonishing 6 million."

I imagine that was fixed pretty quickly. Things like that tend not to last very long.

It was only that way for a few hours, but the magnitude of the inaccuracy is important to keep in mind. No matter how good wikipedia gets it's always important to use critical reasoning to make sure what you're reading is actually reliable information.

Actually, the 50 evacuating was based on a mistranslation. They're still there.

11:36 The remaining 50 workers located in the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant have evacuated after radiation levels there have surged. They were allowed back in less than an hour later.