How trustworthy is Wikipedia?

[noname223]

Do you think this forum should get a wikipedia article?

In school the teachers told us don't use wikipedia as a source. But in general I think it is a good place to start your research.
I think WIkipedia has probably a lot of biases. I think most people who write articles are male and quite young. I once watched a TV show about wikipedia. Some politicians write their own articles and engage PR companies to enhance their articles.
There are also fake news on wikipedia. But I think they have some good measures to enhance the quality. But as always be careful of misinformation. I have heard there are edit wars on articles. Especially when they are controversial. I would feel like my time was wasted for something like that. But other people would claim the same concerning writting in a suicide forum.

I am thankful for wikipedia but I have never donated. Just imagine how many physical books had to be produced to capture all the information and how many trees had to be destroyed.
I use wikpedia quite often. It is the the modern version of Brockhaus. But I think it is only known here in Germany. An equivalent would be the British encyclopedia.

 

[Sakura94]

Wikipedia is a link hub not a source. It compresses multiple sources together (like a zip file) to piece together an article.
Most of the news sources which it would use are negative because journalists write them after families of people who have taken their lives reach out to them and content is produced. The wiki article would be negative.

 

[Raskolnikov's Axe]

If you want to bypass your teachers, simply use the sources on the bottom of the wikipedia page instead of wikipedia itself.

 

[DrekSS]

There are two sides of the story on wikipedia.
1.- Wikipedia is not a source that you can rely to PROVE your information or the veracity of it, because it is not first-source information. Also, there are "troll" people who like to edit the articles. One friend of mine changed the name of a famous pyramid in egipt to Jiraffe pyramid (it was in spanish), I found it funny at the time but, got me thinking on how easy it was.

2.- On the other hand, Wikipedia as @MizzShadows said, is a place where you can find a ton of original sources at the end of each article, and, I would say that over 80% of the articles are very reliable, because there are very serious people who right there.

In conclusion, you shouldn't use Wikipedia in your sources for your work, but rather, read the article (to give yourself an idea) and look at the sources of that article and some of them you could actually use in your accademic work.

 

[GreyCTB]

Wikipedia is trash. A lot of articles are biased and contain sources without proof. Also most scientific article have been changed in the last 10 years, to include jargon and make it harder for average people to understand what it is saying. Big part of wikipedia is controlled by a handful of people and they block everything that doesn't fit their worldview. Maybe it's good for certain subjects but when it comes to science, politics, etc. it's best to leave it behind

 

[Someone123]

I thinki Wikipedia is a good starting point for a lot of subjects- many articles there also reference a large number of asrticles from mainstream publications at the bottom where you can verify information. It does seem very reliable to me, though for important things you need to verify them elsewhere. I did see one Wikipedia article where the subject of the article was a person and the third or fourth line in the article said something like "This person's is a horse's ass an is a comletely lame screwuyp" or something like that- it was actually worded a lot funnier than that, not horse's ass but horse something else with swear word. Within a day this did get deleted. For short articles with just a little information it seems less reliable.

 

[waitingforrest]

It's a good site as a starting point, like a guide of sorts. It can help you find keywords to search up on a topic or citations. But like with anything, moderation is key and don't always trust anything on the internet.

---

(Off topic but the editing dramas on there are really funny for me for some reason because of the contast between how professional sounding the site is and how crazy the scandals are. The "Scots Wikipedia scandal" is a rabbithole and how open editing can be a double edged sword.)

Spoiler: Badly translated "Scots"

My sides are hurting.

 

[GrumpyFrog]

For the most part, Wikipedia is fairly trustworthy, but you've got to remember that it can be edited on the fly by the general public, so whenever it comes to things that cannot be 100% proven or disproven it is always skewed towards the most popular opinions. So making an article for this site would not be a good idea. Wikipedia prides itself on it's self-pronounced neutrality, but as someone blessed with an ability to fluently read languages of two countries in a state of an active war conflict, I can compare and contrast articles on anything having even the most remote relation to the current politics (even if those are 300 year old historical events) in the corresponding languages and attest to the fact that of course neutrality my ass, everything on Wikipedia is heavily politicized, just not in an obvious populist way. So you've got to take that into account when you're reading it - it can be perfectly reliable if you're looking for the information that doesn't evoke emotional response in people and doesn't trigger random people to relentlessly edit the page to make it represent the right opinion (tm), but for all other cases - compare, contrast and draw your own conclusions.