16th May 2010, 9:17 PM
EdenMaster Wrote:Let me stop you right there.
Popular opinion would have you believe as such, but Wikipedia is actually quite accurate, more so than any dusty encyclopedia you could find on a library shelf (and certainly more up-to-date). The whole theory that since everyone can edit it, that means the jackasses can too. Yes, they can. And they can spend an hour editing an entire article and laughing about it, but I guarantee it'll be noticed and fixed within minutes, if not seconds. Not only does WP have tons of staff and volunteers monitoring the pages, they have bots looking for edits and reverting them automatically if they're too drastic. For every vandal who's out to ruin the website, unsuccessfully, there are also experts and truly knowledgeably people with data and facts that they can source to better expand the mass of information that is constantly evolving and free. I know I'm guilty several times a week of thinking of or hearing about something obscure, and i can instantly log on to Wikipedia and learn anything I could want to know about it (in case your curious, todays was Lake Agassiz)
Wikipedia is far, far more accurate than most people give it credit for, and it bugs me when people say it's unreliable.
I'm not talking about vandals, I'm talking about things that are there but are wrong. And such things are there, and not just a few.
I said that based on the many times I've seen errors myself on the site... don't believe their older videogame release dates for instance! And that's just one example. Sorry, the site has many errors.
I mean, sure, other things aren't entirely reliable either (for older videogame release dates in the US or Europe, there really are no truly reliable sources a lot of the time), but that doesn't mean that Wikipedia should be let off the hook just because other encyclopedias may also have as many errors...