Use Wikipedia - With a pinch of salt

[lowzeewee]

A false Wikipedia 'biography'

By John Seigenthaler

"John Seigenthaler Sr. was the assistant to Attorney General Robert Kennedy in the early 1960's. For a brief time, he was thought to have been directly involved in the Kennedy assassinations of both John, and his brother, Bobby. Nothing was ever proven."

[gryphon]

Winkipedia is nice, but no one is ( or in his right mind) gan'na use information pubicly available on the net without any warranty about it's source or it's credibility.

[Andrew]

It's great to find info about stuff, but to simply use it as your only reference (or as a reference) is silly.

For getting references and information, I use ABI/INFORM Global mostly.

Provides indexing and abstracting of more than 1,600 leading business and management publications, including full text for more than 840 publications.

I get to use it for free as a university student.

[Dante]

Seems to me that whoever this guy is he's taking it way too personally. And seriously.

[erjin999]

In light of this, I would like to point out (most recently in the Starport chatter topic) how many people here have been quoting Wikipedia.

I did sort of question its acceptability then, and I think it has been shown, by this story and another I read about on the bbc website, that wikipedia is fallable and people should be aware of that when quoting it.

I wonder if I could change a page to suit what I wanted to say, just before quoting it ? :P

[Acriku]

For major topics, it can be highly reliable, with the amount of oversight performed on them by dedicated users.

[Dude_Doc]

Hehe, I use Wikipedia almost everytime I need material. But of course, what can you expect? Nothing on the Internet could be 100% true - only more probably than other sites. An enclosed encyclopedia sometimes requires the person using it to pay, and not only that, the authors can manipulate what they want on their page, without using objectivity. Then, of course, those encyclopedias are often limited and don't encompass much than, say, all countries, religions, characters and some important books.

But yes, using Wikipedia just like that has, so far, proved to be quite useful to me. But if you're researching for a grand project or something, of course it should be double-checked with books and such.

[Edric O]

I am an active Wikipedian with some 1000 articles on my watchlist and who knows how many edits on my record. As such, I have a lot of experience with things like this - and I am highly critical of some aspects of Wikipedia.

Contrary to common belief, the biggest problem are not annonymous vandals, but registered users who make biased edits (and often insert just plain lies into articles) for the purpose of furthering their own views. Wikipedia has a horribly inefficient arbitration system, and almost no one is ever banned without a formal trial that can last for months. A fanatic with an agenda can do untold damage before he is stopped. I am currently involved in an arbitration case with one such fanatic and am on the brink of getting involved in a second arbitration case with another one.

Wikipedia is huge, and I can't claim I know enough about all of it, but I know my own little corner - the politics and history articles - very well. And the best advice I can give you is the following:

DO NOT EVER, EVER TRUST A WIKIPEDIA ARTICLE ON A POLITICAL ISSUE.

Some of those articles are actually neutral; the vast majority, however, are biased in one way or another and get thrown around like ping-pong balls between different editors supporting different points of view. With particularly long articles it is even possible to have different biases in different sections. Since it is often difficult to separate fact from opinion, I suggest that you don't bother, and simply treat everything you read on Wikipedia as opinion. Better safe than sorry.

To be fair, of course, it is possible that my view of Wikipedia's accuracy has been skewed by the fact that I mostly contribute to politics and history articles, which are magnets for controversy. I have heard that the quality of articles on mathematics and hard science is much higher, and that those articles are much more reliable than those on social sciences and humanities.

As a general rule, the more controversial a topic is, the more likely it is that its Wikipedia article is biased. Thus, Wikipedia tends to be a chaotic and unreliable mess when it comes to controversies, but is quite good at reporting established empirical facts.

P.S. Matthew White (the author of one of my favourite history sites) maintains an active Wikiwatch project where he reports the many errors he has found on Wikipedia's history articles. For example, the article on Genghis Khan was (and apparently still is) trying to whitewash the Khan's reputation - poor Genghis, he was so misunderstood...

[Andrew]

Well, wikipedia is essentially the same as a regular britannica (hard cover) encyclopedia. They are not primary resources. Most scholarly areas frown upon the use of encyclopedias. Since I started university, I don't think I have used an encyclopedia, having been told repeatedly that they don't want it used (sure you could use it for one thing, but the rest of your sources had to be from somewhere else).

[Egeides]

I know I once read that some professional said Britannica could get a grade of say 80% while Wiki would get 60 or 70. I don't remember the exact numbers, but it does say that any encyclopedia has its flaws, and that there is a need to consider the level of accuracy of what you're using. There's still lots to be evaluated about Wikipedia and it might take some time.

[erjin999]

Wikipedia is like a tresure trove for me. I followed Edricdudes link to the Gengis Khan page, and that was it, I got lost reading about him, the people he killed, following like after link...I like that about it though.

[Andrew]

Britannica averages 3 bugs per entry; Wikipedia averages 4

Seems wiki is not so bad after all.

Yah browsing around wiki (links in it and such) to find other topics is great. Just searching for renewable energy (wind, solar etc) showed me a lot of information.

[Edric O]

Britannica averages 3 bugs per entry; Wikipedia averages 4

Seems wiki is not so bad after all.

Notice what the title says: "Jimmy Wales' Wikipedia comes close to Britannica in terms of the accuracy of its science entries, a Nature investigation finds."

Science entries are generally good. Politics and history, on the other hand, are most often full of subjective opinion or just plain factual errors.

[Egeides]

It's getting weird and ugly... the founder of Wiki edits articles about himself to "correct it" ::)

As he himself says, such behaviour is not controlled, since it's Wiki's nature. He regrets it but thinks it's hard not to correct when you're the one having more info.

http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,69880,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_2