Darn it Wikipedia, why did you move your search box?

[A Black Falcon]

Well, one thing would be that at least print encyclopedias have the excuse that at some point they have to say "this is done, this is what's printing now"... with a web one you don't have that excuse, it can always be improved. Also it includes huge amounts of stuff that no print encyclopedia would, so the amount of places they can make errors in is so great... I mean, all the videogame, movie, anime, etc. details Wikipedia has... no normal encyclopedia would have that stuff. They are opening themselves to errors by having it because of all the fuzzy stuff like so many older videogame release dates and such (and there are many more examples than that), but having something is more important than having nothing, obviously, so they have it. I agree it should be there, but the accuracy...

Of course, plenty of "normal" encyclopedia topics have errors or wrong information too, but as I said no encyclopedia is perfect...

And really, I didn't say that Wikipedia is a bad source. I do think it's probably slightly less credible than a print encyclopedia, currently, even if you just look at the non-popular culture elements (such as the history articles there, many of which I have read), but that is changing with time I think. Right now Wikipedia is not a widely accepted good source in academia, but I'm sure it eventually will be in some way... part of that's just that a lot of professors aren't big internet users and don't trust anything there, or don't understand it at all I think. :) But of course, part of that's also that anyone can edit it, so people think of that as being somehow less authoritative, even if that's really only partially true (sometimes it's less, sometimes it's more, I think).

Anyway, nothing will ever be perfect of course, there are so many things that we don't know for sure about and have to make educated guesses about. And they do try to sometimes cover the legitimate controversies about facts, like the different interpretations of what happened to vanished languages or peoples or things like that. You may or may not find great depth on those subjects though, because of contributor interest often the things like anime show character listings will have much more information and depth in them than many articles about things that matter a lot more... but oh well, that can't be helped really, it's an all-volunteer organization not focusing on academia as its main source of information.

I guess the question is, where are the errors and how important are they, in comparison between Wikipedia and traditional sources... I think there have been studies on this before, but don't remember them right now. I'll have to look that up.

Really, Wikipedia's a fascinating site, and a very interesting experiment that it's interesting to follow and see improve over time. I like it. I just don't trust everything I read there. But the problem I talked about in my last few posts, about the changes only sticking if certain people with the ability to remove them approve, is an issue. Sure, most of the time the stuff they remove should be gone. But, like with the Genesis numbers example, that is not always the case. If they really cared so much about accuracy you'd think that they wouldn't have ended up with the note as it is now... and I know that's not the only such example, there certainly are others. Of course someone has to make the decisions, though, so there are no easy answers here, only questions... :)