How much do you trust the content of wikipedia?

Too much.

I trust it enough for a reference here, it’s far more trustworthy than some things people reference. There are some very dedicated people who get updated when one of their pages is edited, and they swoop in and fix things fast. I think it’s a fantastic starting point for any form of research, it links so much and in so simple a way it’s hard not to learn something.

All in all I trust it as much as some of my professors when they try to remember something for a minute, then give me an anecdote. It’s nice info, but I’m sure some of it got muddled in the process.

its peer edited, its probably more truthful than if the government wrote it.

Depends on what subject material imho.

Lurve @A_Beaverhausen and added to my Fluther!

:D

I’ve used Wikipedia on more occasions that I can remember for reference and just for my own intellectual stimulation. I think that there is a large amount of factual information on the site but there is also reason to be cautious about some of the provided content. There are several pages that list notes for ‘citations needed’ and other things to verify unconfirmed information.

For the most part, I like Wikipedia very much and I’m glad that I can utilize it on a daily basis as part of my Internet experience.

i trust wikipedia just as much as i trust google. and i use them both constantly! i have found that most of it is copy/pasted from encyclopedia britannica, so unless i am writing an academic paper it is off to wiki and google when i have a question about anything! sheesh, gotta love the internet!

My trust in wikipedia is unwavering. I learned everything I know about cell biology from wikipedia—seriously. When I was studying it in college, I couldn’t afford the textbook and when I couldn’t be bothered to head over to the library, I leaned heavily on wikipedia. (I got an A.)

Even now, I often use wikipedia as a first line of defense when I’m tackling a new research problem—even if the article is too simplistic, it usually has fantastic sources to turn to for the rest of the story. (I found a paper by one of my professors cited just today!)

anyone ever accidentally spend hours on wikipedia just because you keep clicking the links to a related article!? i’m guilty!

@alive: At my last job all I did was read wikipedia all day.

If I don’t think something is accurate, I google and see if I can find more information. But, I have never really had anything that popped out at me as incorrect.

@alive—Wikisurfing! It’s one of my hobbies!

I mostly use wikipedia as a source of entertainment. I just pick up general information that doesn’t really need to be accurate—if someone corrects me somewhere down the line, that’s cool. If I really need to know something for sure, I’ll start with wikipedia and follow links to more reputable sites. It’s a good jumping-off point for “real” research but not something I’d cite in a paper or anything like that.

I know I shouldn’t, but I do.

agree to asmonet (first reply).

I believe it’s one of the greatest ideas since internet itself.

At first I was sceptical, so I obsessed with finding something “wrong”. Amazingly, it turned out the “peer review” process seems to work exceptionally well. Fluther and Wiki have “constant” tabs on my browser.

By the way, shouldn’t someone add Fluther to wiki already?

@TaoSan
Good suggestion!

I’ve never found anything blatantly false on the site. I frequently start there for academic research (it almost always comes up first in Google on any topic anyway) and use the references on the wiki articles to quote as my own references since teachers are still afraid of the internet monsters that will corrupt their precious “peer-reviewed” sources. I find it funny that they won’t accept wikipedia as a reference but they’ll accept any other random web site I find on a given topic. It could be full of false info written by someone trying to spread false info, but they’ll generally accept it as long as it isn’t wikipedia.

Wikipedia is just fine. I remember getting annoyed on like 6 different levels by a previous occurrence on Fluther.

I had referenced the Drake Equation in an answer. Someone PMed me and asked me what it was. I answered and included an excerpt from the Wikipedia article. He then wrote back saying, “Ooooh, okay, thanks, but, just to let you know, anybody can edit Wikipedia, so this might not be accurate.”

…....?

1. As if I, a graduate student (which was indicated in the PM), would not know that anyone can edit Wikipedia.
2. As if I, a non-astronomer, would have a better, instantaneous, self-written explanation of the Drake Equation than is available on Wikipedia.

Ugh, these ridiculous concepts just piss me off. Wikipedia is a fantastic tool. I probably read more than 30 Wikipedia articles per day. Whenever I hear of a new geographical location, I enjoy looking at its demographic characteristics and history. Whenever I come across a new term in a research article, I find Wikipedia very useful for looking this up.

I know you mentioned that this wasn’t supposed to be a debate about whether Wikipedia should be used for research papers, but honestly, I think that’s where all this skepticism came from. Sadly, some ‘tards gotta be told that you’re not supposed to use non-primary sources when writing a research paper. Teachers explain this by saying, “Anyone can edit it,” which implies that the information is not reliable. The problem with “anyone can edit it” is not that the information is not reliable, but that it is not a primary source, and the point of writing a research paper is to read primary sources, not encyclopedias. Unfortunately, the idiots that had to be told not to use Wikipedia to write research papers grew up to think that the reason they weren’t supposed to do this was that the information was not accurate. Sad. You’re not supposed to use any encyclopedia in a research article…

Wikipedia is a really helpful tool that should not be dismissed for everything, just because it’s not a primary source to be used in research papers.

Wikipedia is a great resource. Even if small details are wrong, it’s enough to get the bigger picture, and the references lead to actual credible sources if one takes the time to verify this. I am sad when people ask questions where the answer could be found by reading Wikipedia.

I also use it a lot for TV reference, as its episode listings are most always spot on.

I think Wikipedia is great. I generally trust the content for day-to-day use. If I were writing a paper, I’d look deeper and use the resources the article in questions leans on more than the article itself. But for daily use, I don’t even bother to do that. I just read and accept. It helps that I’ve seen someone put in something wrong and how fast it got fixed. About five seconds later.

I love to spend an hour or two just following links from page to page reading whatever comes up and I really think that I am able to do that is just amazing. That’s really using the Internet properly.

I am bracing myself to be slammed for what clearly will be an unpopular answer.

I find this whole thread incredibly scary. I have seen the content vary widely in quality from article to article.

I use wikipedia, but only as a jumping off place or a quick synopsis if it is a curiosity question. If it is for something important, I usually don’t start there.

I would never use wikipedia as a primary source. High-quality, expert primary sources are available for almost everything.

@A_Beaverhausen “its peer edited, its probably more truthful than if the government wrote it.”

Huh? Why the trust in peer editing? People have their own agendas to promote. They can also be dishonest and ignorant. The government does not write encyclopedias. What it should be compared against is encyclopedias compiled from expert sources.

@Marina: I really got that the majority of the thread agreed with you. Certainly I do—if it’s important, I use Wikipedia as a starting point, but use the articles it refers to more than it for the actual source. I think it’s not a primary source, it’s, like, a pre-primary source. It gives and overview and a direction for where to start looking.

@EmpressPixie Yes, I did get that from your post. I also see the appeal of wandering around in an encyclopedia, which is not easy to do in print media.

Nothing should ever be accepted as 100% truth. There is always some motivation in communicating. No matter where the info comes from, whether it’s a random book, my friend, the government, CNN, a true thinker will keep looking for an actual accredited source of the information to make a logical decision, and if this cannot be found, the information should be taken with an extremely large grain of salt.

@Marina I agree with you on your view of Wikipedia, I only use it to quickly learn about things..since when you google, usually the first thing is a Wikipedia article.
I’m taking an English course right now, in college, and my professor specifically states not to use Wikipedia. I figured that was because it comes from many sources, and not just one, so it’d be harder to cite. And why not just go to the source of the information. That’s what I usually do.

Well said, dynamicduo.

Wikipedia is usually a good first source go to go. If it’s information you need to rely on, you need to verify it somewhere else—but if someone’s throwing around a concept I’m not familiar with, like @girlofscience‘s example of the Drake equations, I’m likely to go to there to figure out roughly what they are.

Like @Marina, I’ve seen some low quality articles, and I’ve seen more accurate information reverted in favor of less accurate information. Most of the academics I know won’t bother editing Wikipedia articles, because they don’t have the time or the inclination to engage in the discussion thread wrangling that it takes to get an article that people disagree on into some semblance of coherence.

(I was in the hotel bar at a musicology conference, and there were three people at the table who had written the authoritative articles in their respective fields for the New Grove Dictionary. All of them had attempted to improve the appropriate articles on Wikipedia; all of them had given up, in part because the fact that they can’t cite their own work gave them a significant handicap in any discussion with a weekend guitarist who can’t remember whether the Dorian mode starts on D or E.)

@Marina well considering even I get slack for errors (even in my own opinion)on fluther, i believe there is a strong battery of people dedicated to letting other people know just how wrong they are at Wikipedia :)

I use it alot. I find it as an efficient and usually accurate site, sometimes it is lacking in completeness or thoroughness. I also like it because it isn’t inundated with adverts. Also, it depends what your intended purpose for the information.

@A_Beaverhausen

Exactly! There is a huge amount of very motivated people trolling around on wiki zealously “righting the wrong”.

Of course that means that the “QA” is provided by a large demographic “cut”.

@Marina

But therein lies the strength of wiki’s QA quality. By the time everybody is satisfied and an article doesn’t undergo a lot of edits anymore, you can pretty much assume that the facts are straight.

Of course you can’t just scan over an article, and then assume it is right. You need to look at the article as a whole. How often has it been edited, are “flame edits” going on, what is the amount and quality of the cited sources. Pretty much the same as as with any source you turn to for information.

On the other hand, the people who run around zealously correcting the errors in Wikipedia are not always right themselves. And so when you have someone who is actually right but who has other things to accomplish during his day, and someone who is wrong but thinks he is right, and has nothing else to do but argue in Wikipedia comment threads, the wrong information wins.

The thing is, as long as you realize that Wikipedia has these patterns of behavior, you can read the articles critically and compensate for them. This means it’s useful despite these flaws.

it depends on the situation.
if it’s for a serious school assignment, i’ll go on wikipedia for basic information, but check a lot of more reliable places for sure, because i don’t want to chance my grade on wikipedia.
for general information that i’m just curious about, i’ll go on wikipedia, and if it doesn’t seem like fabricated information, i’ll trust it until told otherwise by someone more reliable.
if it’s for a school assignment that isn’t being graded roughly, i am 100% okay with taking whatever wikipedia gives me, because my homework that is being graded more harshly is more important to me than something i’m basically going to get a completion grade for.

it is not wise to question the source of all information

I trust wikipedia for most types of information. When it is a serious query, needing hard documentation (evidence), I check other sources. My experience has been not to put too much weight on uncorroborated data, especially if the source is unfamiliar or unreliable – which is to say, pretty much the whole Internet.

Its a reliable source if your just looking something up. But if your doing a important thing such as a research paper i wouldn’t even think about going there.