Let me restate this. Wikipedia has a complete, thorough history of all past articles, since Wikipedia's inception. What that means is that you can cite your current edition, so it can be viewed without worry of being edited. Just go to an article, click on the history tab and there it is. Every non-reverted edit ever, some going back as far as 2001.

I wont deny that wikipedia is a good place to start and get general info for your own personal info; even the teachers/professors have said this. But again this does not mean you can use wikipedia as a official primary or secondary sources for any proper research or reports (and if you don't know what i mean by those, look them up). Just because wikipedia has this ability where you can cite your sources and references doesn't mean it is automatically reliable and credible; the fact that anyone can edit the articles including the parts where people can cite sources and create references makes the sources already lose MUCH credibility; some of these citations and references might actually be broken. Sure many of the articles are properly cited and haven't been tampered with but that's not the point. The point is that these sources can be tampered with easily. Infact I can go right now and edit all these articles by adding bogus information AND cite them by referencing them to fake/dead links and put fake works cited info at the bottom. Now of course you are more than welcome to spend 5-10 minutes inspecting each and every reference, source, or citation for each article and reverting them back to the original/real ones, but if you are going to be having to do this for each and every "source" that you are being presented, what does that mean? It means that you do not fully trust this source 100% and thus people are going to have to waste precious time inspecting each and every link, citation, reference, etc on that source... Any proper or formal research has to use official sources which are reliable and not easily be tampered with.

Imagine a geotechnical engineer surveyor who conducts surveys on the earth's slope systems goes up to this company and presents his report to the company. If all of his data, such as the geotechnical coordinates of the earth's crust, the bearings longitude/latitude of an objects coordinates, the Electronically Distance Measured data, etc of his research references to Wikipedia... EVERYTHING he's found/presented will lose almost, if not, all credibility and has to be checked over and over again by other surveyors... just how long do you think this guy will keep his job?

Again wikipedia can be used for your personal knowledge; infact it can even present yourself with overwhelming knowledge about something. But again, some of it is either false, inaccurate, or misleading (even with sources too) and because that any wikipedia article risks this chance; they cannot be used as official sources for any formal or proper research. I've seen many articles which have such bogus information as well as bogus references (i actually spent some of my precious time inspecting some of these references and to my dismay many of them were broken, dead, or just flat out wrong)

Fair enough.

What wiki needs is a way to move its "correct" information (information that is verified by professionals) to an immutable destination. I'm sure there is already something like that, but if they can figure out how to wrap it into the software layer somehow (versus being completely human dependent), then that might allow citations.

I'm sure something like that exists, doesn't it?

Encyclopedia ADD ftw!

Citizendium is trying that.

Regarding Wikipedia's accuracy though, I have the most thorough biography on Leonardo da Vinci ever published. It's about 700 pages long, with 100 of sources, reading through it I learned less about him than I did from Wikipedia. While the Wiki article had some minor discrepancies, which I fixed, it generally had more information in less words. Some things that the author of my book skimmed over in his 1000s of sources a Wikipedia author picked up on and added. It's completely impossible for a book or other "reliable" source to have as much material and information as Wikipedia.

Give people power and they will corrupt it.

What exactly is wikipedia?

Is it:

A) a site which allows anyone to add information to any article?
B) a site that compiles information upon a subject as accurate and precise as possible?

Both sound like what one would think, or want to think, of wikipedia but you can't have both.

If it's A)...
then like i've said, information and sources can easily be abused, thus ruling out B).

If it's B)...
the only possible way to achieve this is if a handful of qualified, well-educated, and trained people are the ones to approve of correct, accurate, and precise information. This would destroy wikipedia's uniqueness and turn it into another generic online encyclopedia, thus ruling out A).


Apparently it seems like Wikipedia at its state right now is A), but is it better this way? Must we preserve the original intent of wikipedia's structure and feature, or should we turn wikipedia into one of those generic online encyclopedia's where only a handful of people can create, approve, or inspect all articles? If wikipedia's purpose is to just provide brief introductory information upon certain issues, then it's fine as it is as A). But if we want to make wikipedia a place where one can properly identify wikipedia as a good primary or secondary source for any formal or important research, then we must convert wikipedia to B)

Wikipedia is:

C) a site that compiles information upon a subject as accurate and precise as possible to the point where the inherent nature of allowing anyone to add information to any article would allow.

I haven't. =P

This is just like one of the arguments in the OSMap debate, with the same problem.
Can and are are different. There are those who will damage the articles, yes, but they are, so far as I can tell, the exception, not the rule. As has also been mentioned, records are kept of past articles, making vandalism easy to correct.

As for the issue of the fact that cited sources may not be accurate, that's why I check the cited sources on any information I find to be dubious. And for school reports, I use it as a link-guide - I read the article, find the sources cited for anything I find interesting, and look into those, instead of Wiki itself.

I know the difference between the two. Like i've said in my other post, because they can be tampered with, the credibility, accuracy, and precision is automatically put to question. Whether they are tampered with is not the point right now. In an ideal world where everyone behaves accordingly, one has no need to worry about this, but today one can only dream of such a place, especially if this place is the internet. We can't always keep correcting sources; that's not what the point of a source is. Sources are suppose to be documents where we obtain info from, not documents that must be inspected and revisedby its viewers. And now shifting from the theoretical realm to reality, many articles i've seen are tampered with. Many have been corrected now, but there are still plenty that either haven't been corrected yet or will be in the near future.

Yay, another smart and intellectual individual on here ^_^

MA, you're turning into a brick wall of a debater.

The point is, any random article is probably 99% accurate. If you're not sure, reload the page in 5 minutes, and any blatant problems should be fixed. This will bring you up to about 99.9% accuracy.
Factor in how much MORE information Wikipedia has than an average encyclopedia and it's an all around good choice.

If you're not sure, you should check the background via the sources it cites. This is something you need to do with any source you cite (ok, not in high school). If you believe anything you read, or anything you find on a site that looks legit, you're gonna find at least as much inaccuracy as you would on Wikipedia.

What if you use Wikipedia as a jumping point to find all the source on your info. You'd need to list it as a 100% accurate primary source.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physics

can you spot what's wrong?

You (if you're Jaydawg89) inserted the word large.

Too late, I've already submitted a research paper which uses that article as one of it's sources. I added the word "large" in the electromagnetism area of the physics, which would totally skew the meaning of what that article is saying. By now my professor would've already seen that page (and in my research paper, I've properly identified my endnotes and indicated where on that wiki article that I've used info on). And if my professor knew anything about physics, then he or she would've instantly realized that my source was inaccurate, thus ruining my paper, and would give me a zero for that paper. Oh wikipedia, why did you fail on me?! How come at that moment when I was gathering information from your article, you gave me the wrong info? I even refreshed my page twice with 5 minute intervals inbetween to see if anything would've been fixed! Why oh why did I get a zero on my paper for using such misleading info??

That's your fault, no one told you to trust Wikipedia and use it as a source. You deserve the 0.

Exactly, I did deserve that 0. Even IF my professor or some random hoebag told me that I could use wikipedia, they can't guarantee that I wouldn't still run into situations like that. Or if this information goes uncaught, I would've deceived the viewers with inaccurate information; they've become sheep to my paper! So what if I don't get in trouble (from my professor) for using a wikipedia? My information would still be wrong regardless. Unlike books, scholarly articles, or even proper university websites or encyclopedias, people can just go arbitrarly modify any given document in wikipedia at will. Sure the error will be caught and fix eventually (or hopefully), but what if it's too late? What if during that time in which the article contained misleading information it's already deceived many people? Books, articles, newspapers, and even internet encyclopedias may have some inaccuracy somewhere, but what wikipedia has that the others dont is that wikipedia can be editable at any given time (and this certain "given time" might actually be the time that counts!).

In the long run however, wikipedia can be treated like any other source, but it cannot be treated as a source in which you would use as a presentation, because there will only be a specific time in which a viewer will view its sources (and during this specific time, the article might currently be in an inaccurate state).

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Oct 24 2007, 7:19 am by MillenniumArmy.

I never said anything about correcting cited sources. I only specified checking those relevant ones and discarding the use of information which should be cited and is not or is inaccurately cited.
It makes it a poor choice of cited information, assuming you don't specify which version of an article you're citing, but the topic-post also asks about general reliability, where individual assesment can account for errors and inaccuracies.
According to frazz, all edits are documented. If he's correct, then while the current page for an article you cite may be incorrect, a logged one won't change.