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How Much Do You Trust Wikipedia?

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Stoic Joker:
I like Bacon!

app103:
With the understanding that the quality is directly related to the sources of information and those that edit the page, my trust is on a page by page basis. I treat Wikipedia as a starting point and nothing more, a summary of the links provided in the sources. Those links and the information they contain must be examined in order to know the true story about any page on Wikipedia. To me, the value of Wikipedia is about equal to a search engine and can enhance your search for information by at least helping you to ask the right questions, find the right keywords, for the info you want.

rgdot:
The thing Wikipedia is sometimes ridiculed for is almost, I said almost ;) , a strength.

Take this scenario:
If I have site that I only edit and it happened to rank high on search engines, I fill it with wrong info. That's bad right? At least Wikipedia can be corrected, checked and edited.

In this sense one should trust it compared to other online sources. Not really a substitute for physical encyclopedias though. I am tempted between a 4 and 'It all depends...'

Renegade:
I suppose that I shouldn't be very surprised at people's reactions. I'm in the same camp for using Wikipedia as a springboard to start looking into something, or for a quick reference on a factoid that I know exists, but am not sure exactly what it is.

My answer was "it depends".

Paul Keith:
Even the noblest attempts at providing accurate and unbiased information can easily be corrupted by carelessness, deliberate deception, or somebody in a positon of authority who is pursuing a personal agenda or "higher truth."-40hz
--- End quote ---

I think two things need to be distinguish here:

Wikipedia as an entity has never been a noble attempt much less the noblest attempt.

Accurate and unbiased information is in my opinion a red herring to a "higher truth". It would be like saying only left brain info is important. Wikipedia will never be as fast as Wikileaks and Wikileaks is also touted as a "higher truth" but even combined, the finishes product does not provide an attempt of accuracy and unbiased information that isn't tailored to information presented eventually to it's prime culture then it's sub-mass culture (the internet). It can and will not compromise on that limitation and the influential culture doesn't want it to either. (hence the ask model has also eluded Wikipedia and been transferred to things like Yahoo answers or Metafilter or Quora.)

If I have site that I only edit and it happened to rank high on search engines, I fill it with wrong info. That's bad right? At least Wikipedia can be corrected, checked and edited.-rgdot
--- End quote ---

That's pre-social media though. It's very possible to have a collaborative Google Docs page. Forums tend to correct each other which is why it's flameworthy but also why the top mass forums can have more link worthy collections of context than Wikipedia.

More importantly the first need for any place where anything can be corrected, checked and edited is that it should be able to admit it is wrong.

That's where Wikipedia beat authoritative encyclopedias. By being able to wrong, it was able to be faster at accepting and promoting change and it had less agenda because wiki pages still had to compete with other authoritative pages. Google didn't just simply raised it as an immediate link and at the same time, it also competed with spiders. It was the first social curation site.

We're way pass that now. Nowadays even on just mainstream meta topics, we have redditors who would create subreddit of value instead of sticking around something that has reached the mass high point of bad such as the main reddit politics, we have pay club style forums such as Metafilter and SomethingAwful, we have twitter that amasses every G+ circle, friendfeed, vacuum events. That's not including past models such as forums administrated by mouser where polarizing opinions are more allowed or geographic news site that don't rely on a US-first bias like Wikipedia or Amazon/IMDB style reviews. The one page thing is such a micro-argument nowadays. Even those one page sites rely on publishing books to create traction for their blog and blogs that require linkback for their blog articles.

Even the statement for information overload is pass the point of notability now. Information came and for a while it was nice but media didn't leave and we are plenty brainwashed not just by media but by our own self-biases that it doesn't matter whether it's one biased site or one fully unbiased wiki. The net forgot to factor in "the read what we want to get out of this" nature of humanity and when it remembered the community site makers were ok with dumbing down our attitude into votes, discussion pages, Google top links, heated visitors...because that's what generates return visits and Wikipedia is not just the same victim to that, it was one of the prime proponents of that degeneration.

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