This incident led to policy changes on the site, specifically targeted at tightening up the verifiability of all biographical articles of living people.” and “Defences

The Wikipedia has a complex multi-layered defence against these kinds of attacks. These include users checking pages and edits, computer programs (‘bots’) that are carefully designed to try to detect them and fix them automatically (or semi-automatically), blocks on the creation of links to particular websites, blocks on edits from particular accounts, IP addresses or address ranges.

For heavily attacked pages, particular articles can be semi-protected so that only well established accounts can edit them,[61] or for particularly contentious cases, locked so that only administrators are able to make changes.[62]“

And don’t fall for the Wikipedia propaganda. When “stupid, inaccurate, or not adequately researched information” is posted in Wikipedia, most of the time it is _not_ marked or deleted, but rather remains, year after year, unnoticed. Indeed, there are a number of articles (such as the ones on “feudalism”) where accurate information is swiftly “fixed” back to inaccurate.

Remember, with very few exceptions (mainly a small number of highly controversial subjects like abortion), anyone can edit any part of any article, and the only “wikipedia mediators” involved in the vast majority of articles is that selfsame _anyone_ (in other words, the source of the unreliability in the first place).

As an unreliable source, Wikipedia can be very useful. But it simply is not, and by its nature never can be, a reliable source.

Your post didn’t add any original input; you just agreed with the person above you.

Examples of people finding Wikipedia useful as an _unreliable_ source (e.g., not believing what they find there unless and until they confirm it in reliable sources and/or people using it to try to find other, more reliable sources) don’t change this. And no matter how useful something may be as an _unreliable_ source, it is the reliable sources themselves, not the unreliable source that helped you find them, that should be cited as the source of the relevant information in any subsequent work.

And I, with a Bachelor’s in English and a Master’s in linguistics–which hasn’t made me an expert in the are, merely somewhat knowledgeable–used it to get a term, “rises,” for the accented syllables in Old English verse lines. Of course I immediately checked against other online sources until I was morally certain it was in fact established before I used it in a presentation to our Salt Lake SF convention on “Old English Verse and the Riders of Rohan.”

Approved, SKrossa?

Now, Wikipedia sometimes serves the very helpful purpose of orienting me to the subject area an unknown word or phrase applies to–in some case, when even the best dictionary couldn’t or wouldn’t.

And yes, there’s a small but adequate window in my computer room in my basement, which used to be my younger brother’s bedroom 40+ years ago.

Even so, the intrinsically unreliable nature of Wikipedia would not be a problem if it were not for the fact that the vast majority of people who use Wikipedia use it as if it were something it simply is not, that is, they use it as if it were reliable.

**Unless, of course, one is already an expert in the subject — in which case one hardly needs to use a Wikipedia article as a source.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/editorials/2005-11-29-wikipedia-edit_x.htm

lol

I pronounce this graph officially as a FAIL.

“Nameless says:
June 25, 2009 at 10:08 am

I like how people think “anyone can add anything to wikipedia”, then assume the rest of the internet is actually credible.”

That said, I’ve found Wikipedia to be a reasonable resource for most purposes; citing it as a research source is pointless, though, because any article reliable enough to be used for that purpose has comprehensive citations of its own that can be referred to.

That said, it seems that pretty much all of the sneering about Wikipedia seems to derive from an exaggerated listing of the potential weaknesses of such a project, filtered through a thick layer of “HUH HUH HUH NO 1 SPENDS ANY TIME ON DA INTERNETS EXCEPT DUMB TEENAGERS,” and coupled to the flat, unevidenced assertion that nothing whatsoever has been done to remedy or compensate for these potential issues.

(Either that or it’s just another dumb, excruciatingly unfunny, self-perpetuating “joke”-meme).