Wikipedia’s Reliability and People who Blame the Messenger
I love Wikipedia because it’s a great place to start researching any subject, it’s heavily footnoted so you can verify its claims, it’s free, it’s easily corrected if you find an error or an omission, and studies have proven it’s more reliable than its critics will admit.
As you would expect, Wikipedia has an article on this: Reliability of Wikipedia. One of its writers has a sense of humor:
The Daily Mail — itself banned as a source on Wikipedia in 2017 because of its perceived unreliability — has publicly stated that it “banned all its journalists from using Wikipedia as a sole source in 2014 because of its unreliability”.[102]
Now, I also hate Wikipedia because people will try to correct it for ideological or insane (yes, that may be redundant) reasons. A few articles are especially unreliable because of correction wars. And yet its virtues remain. No one who can use footnotes and Google should complain when Wikipedia’s cited.
But whenever I post something from Wikipedia that a reader hates and cannot refute, they’ll go “But Wikipedia!” If they then said why Wikipedia was wrong in that case, I would be impressed, but so far, no one has impressed me. These people are engaging in an ancient rhetorical cheap trick: when you can’t refute a source, insist it has cooties.
They miss the fact that there are no perfect sources. Readers should always read critically.
I’ll continue to cite Wikipedia when it seems accurate. I check anything suspicious before I share it, but, being human, I’m sure I’ll make a mistake someday. I admit I’m pleased that so far, none of the “But Wikipedia!” people have been able to find one.
Relevant:
Wikipedia: Why is the common knowledge resource still neglected by academics?
“the number of errors it contains is on par with the professional sources even in specialized topics such as biology or medicine. Yet, the academic world is still treating it with great skepticism”
“In 2005, the peer-reviewed journal Nature asked scientists to compare Wikipedia’s scientific articles to those in Encyclopaedia Britannica — “the most scholarly of encyclopedias,” according to its own Wiki page. The comparison resulted in a tie…”
Study shows Wikipedia Accuracy is 99.5%
“They analyzed articles on drugs, drawing every piece of relevant information, as well as references, revision history and readability. Their conclusion is that the accuracy of drug information on Wikipedia was 99.7%±0.2% when compared to the textbook data.”