Poll: How accurate do you think Wikipedia really is?

[Anarchemitis]

Wikipedia a lot of the time is acurate for specific information regarding technical matters.
You can't really argue with it when you're looking up Engineering or Chemistry or other sciences. Where Wikipedia gets fuzzy is when there are camps or biases to articles with the ability to be subjective.
One can't argue if Bohrium has or hasn't 107 protons because it's fact.
One can, however, argue if Vanadium should be renamed Riomium [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanadium#History] because of who discovered it.

 

[Woodsey]

Pretty accurate.

A lot of the scientific pages and whatnot are only really edited by people who actually know what they're talking about.

Celebs often complain about it and cause distrust because someone's gotten their birthday wrong.

 

[SpartyTheOneManParty]

As long as my research paper isn't on Lady Gaga or Kanye West,
Wikipedia is as good if not better than encyclopedias since they don't have Ctrl+F.

Who's going to make stuff up about Cadmium or Archduke Franz Ferdinand?

 

[Randomologist]

Depends on the content. If it's about advanced particle physics, people don't usually bother vandalising it. If its about George Bush, I prepare for a scene straight out of 4chan.

 

[lonny2x4x5]

Looked up the Napoleon War once, Wiki said it was when the King of England, Spain, and Germany sat down and had tea together.

 

[MasterChief892039]

Wikipedia has never failed me in terms of highschool and university research. Everything I've gotten so far has been accurate.

On the rare occasion I do find an error, it's always a very obvious trolling attempt, usually on pages about pop culture figures where it doesn't really matter anyway.

 

[MikailCaboose]

It depends. On pop-culture, especially modern figures, I wouldn't trust it. However, I am aware that the science articles on Wikipedia are at times more reliable than most encyclopedias. I've just noticed a few problems (and by few I mean one or two) with some chemistry/element-related searches (Damn you Webelements and your pants-on-head retarded creator(s)!).

 

[Ickorus]

Somewhat accurate, i'd say it's best to find multiple sources than believing everything that's on there.

 

[MikailCaboose]

Who's going to make stuff up about Cadmium or Archduke Franz Ferdinand?

Make sure that you do "Ctl+F" for "Webelements" on anything with elements, because that site is absolutely horrible.

 

[CobraX]

It's gotten me through High School thus far

 

[sosolidshoe]

The idea that knowledge from a book is more valuable than knowledge gained from the internet purely because finding the information in a book takes more time is ludicrous, frankly. If your going to make a claim like that, I want to see the peer-reviewed neuroscience papers which support your claim, not some vague Luddite ramblings about "the youth today".

As for Wikipedia, I think it's a fantastic resource, and is sadly under-utilised because of the misunderstanding about it's function in academia, among students and teachers alike. Wikipedia is not a source, Wikipedia is a way to locate sources.

If I'm writing a paper and need to find information on a specific subject, I would previously have had to have spent hours in a library or bookshop, combing through catalogues and reading synopses until I found books relevant to my chosen subject. Now, I can simply read through a couple of Wikipedia articles, each of which contains what is essentially a synopsis of its sources, and I locate which sources are worth investigating further in a tenth of the time.

Reducing the time it takes to locate information does not diminish the information, it merely gives me more time to assimilate additional sources. Where before, my papers would have been informed by the handful of books I could dig up by hand, now I can use the time I saved looking for the sources reading even more sources, thus my writings are more extensive and better researched.

 

[Arkham]

I judge an article's validity on its page length to references ratio.

 

[lacktheknack]

It's more accurate now that there's a heavy moderator presence, but I'll never forget the "I liek to shit on eggs" incident.

 

[snowman6251]

I find wikipedia to be very accurate.

One time however I was doing a report on World War II and I looked up the wikipedia page of a specific battle. It read something like "General Assface sent his army of flaming penises across the Berlin Wall only to have them be stopped by Robo-Stalin of Soviet Japan. He quickly realized his fault and fell back into his mom".

So yeah I looked up a different source.

 

[Kaymish]

it is accurate enough for my purposes and errors are obvious enough like the one on the temple of dakka

 

[TheYellowCellPhone]

It's good enough for me. I give it credit, but I don't trust every article on there.