Is Wikipedia Ever Wrong?

[2012 Wont Happen]

Wikipedia has as high an accuracy rate as Encyclopedia Britannica (somewhere in the mid 90s percentage range). Nothing is always right, but its about as accurate as you can get.

That has been my experience as well. I've actually found more errors in my college textbooks than in wikipedia entries dealing with science.
On the other hand, I've found this on the prohibition article a while back:
"Prussia completely bans the production, importation or consumption of babies and imposes strict penalties on those violating the ham, including weeks to months of tickleing, and possible lashes"

Wikipedia is fine for research on subjects, and higher level scientific fields, because nobody bothers to change those except for the people who know their stuff in the first place. Political figures, and anything popular/controversial is a bit of risk though. The best idea is to use Wiki to get a basic idea or to look up a term, but to use "real" databases (note: you can forget about the ones you learn about in school, those are awful and absolutely useless) for the subsequent report.

Even controversial figures are fairly accurate.

For example, to test their editors, I one time went on Glenn Beck's page, and linked his book's title to a different book instead of his own. I marked it as a minor edit, and said that I had fixed a minor grammatical error. Within about a minute, I had a warning message from a mod, and the info had been changed back.

Wikipedia is quite reliable.

 

[Kwaren]

I looked up Napoleon Bonaparte on there once. It told me he was a giant half turtle half poodle that lives in a London subway.

 

[razer17]

I saw an article on Mice that said they were secretly planning to take over the world.

But they are! Have you never seen Pinky and the Brain? IT's a documentary, you know.

Yeah, there is the odd mistake on Wikpedia, but they do have mods to make sure people don't screw around on it. I use it a lot, but I will never reference it. I also steal the references it uses.

 

[thenoblitt]

its right most of the time, there are some biased opinions occasionaly but whenever they get a blatantly false accusation they change it and send a warning to whoever edited it