Wikipedia error?

Nevermind, I fixed it. Never done Wikipedia before...

It's interesting how unusual it is to find a question mark after the words "wikipedia error".

--Blair

wikipedia is a great tool for a casual overview of a topic or a place to begin one's research, but beyond that it gets mighty sketchy.

Not necessarily (regarding "mighty sketchy"). A study by the journal "Nature" found that, on average, Wikipedia was as reliable as the Encyclopedia Britannica. Of course, Britannica disputes the findings.

However, my experience has been that on "factual" matters, Wikipedia is pretty reliable. Items with more emotional investment, such as politics or biography of controversial people, are a little less reliable, in my opinion. However, if my kid ever tried to use Wikipedia as a primary reference for a school paper, we'd have to have words.

Actually, Google is better. You'll still get the Wikipedia hits, but you'll likely see real information in the links around it.

If you know absolutely nothing about a topic, Wikipedia will "inform" you, but you will accept its word credulously, and then be just as misinformed as it is.

--Blair

I wouldn't cite it. It's great entertainment though. I look up dozens of obscure things on Wikipedia every day just because I'm interested in them. Now, I wouldn't rely on it for something important and I certainly would hesitate to believe anything in controversial articles.

Read it like a newspaper. Look at a quality newspaper article about something you know about and you'll likely see numerous errors. Now guess how many errors you won't even notice in articles on other topics because you're not an expert. Journalists very rarely are experts on stuff they write about.

With Wikipedia there's a higher chance of an actual expert contributing IMO (ignoring vandalism and deliberate misinformation for the moment).

Stefan

Sheesh. I know the Britannica isn't so hot, but it's not THAT bad.

--scott

1. You can't ignore them.
2. The system doesn't reduce them, it encourages them. And it permanently ensconces their results, because it chases off the people who could and would fix them.

--Blair

I guess I wanted to say that that's mainly a problem with high-profile and controversial articles (IMO). And even then vandalism is easily spotted and reverted.

Yesterday I read a couple of Wikipedia articles on the history of breakfast cereals. I feel pretty safe that very few people feel strongly enough about this topic that they would inject misinformation. Or that reading something on this topic that's untrue would harm me.

Honest mistakes are another problem, but I stand by it: your newspaper isn't that accurate either. People read papers to get an overview, and that's how I personally read Wikipedia.

It's a side-effect. It's the price you have to pay for something that anyone can edit which is very, very useful for certain topics, less so for others.

Agreed. I know of a couple of errors (real errors, I could cite valid references and laws) that I tried to fix but met fierce resistance by the main authors. I don't really bother anymore. That's a real problem.

One feature of Wikipedia that I like is multiple languages. That way you can read articles on the same topic that are often written by seperate groups of people. I read Wikipedia articles in German, English, French and Japanese. Sometimes they are bad translations of each other but more often than not there's different information in each of them.

Wikipedia certainly has its uses. And its fair share of problems.

Stefan

Which is why I differentiated between "factual" and "emotional" topics. The statement that the emotional topics are "a little less reliable" was sarcastic. Unfortunately, you seem to have ignored that.

It's not new. It's the same fallacy that comes when one assumes that ANY encyclopedia is 100% accurate.

Let me be clear - I mean ignored the statement since it was deleted from the reply and not addressed in any way. I was not meaning that the sarcasm was ignored. Sarcasm is a difficult thing to convey in text.