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Insulting wikipedia by foxboyprower
I've heard this way too often, "You can't trust Wikipedia. Anyone can go on there and change stuff." It's a really good way to get on my nerves especially that I'm now a member of the site. Wikipedia is a great resource for learning. I will admit that you should never directly cite Wikipedia, but as the founder of the site points out, you shouldn't directly cite any encyclopedia. However you can use Wikipedia to find many sources to backup a piece of knowledge you found in the article that you want to use in a paper. But I should address the common complaint. Yes it's true that anyone can go onto Wikipedia and change stuff. However if this person is not a member their IP address will be recorded along with any change made. This way if they get into the habit of vandalizing articles, it's easy to undo those changes. According to a very well done self assessment, 98% of the vandalizing changes are undone within the first few minutes.
Yes you should treat Wikipedia with a bit of skepticism, but that applies to anywhere else. For the most part, Wikipedia is a wonderful tool to educate the general public. Best of all, unlike a print source, Wikipedia gets updated very quickly ensuring it will be up to date which is more than can be said about reference books. Don't get me wrong, I appreciate reference books, but I feel like Wikipedia doesn't get the respect it deserves.
Insulting wikipedia
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Yep, And they've got a really handy way of letting people say if an article is biased and let someone else sort it out later.
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donqui
I imagine that, if Wikipedia disappeared today, we would have to create a new one tomorrow. It's simply too much an important resource for everybody who needs an overview of any subject. If I want to know if Libya ever went to war against Chad, where else can I (or a professional reporting from the area) find out the answer quickly?
But the real problem of Wikipedia aren't the garden-variety vandals. It's very easy to spot somebody who's screwing with the formatting of the page, or erasing content to replace it with "ed is gay". The biggest problem are people who contribute with well-written, sourced texts which are actually very biased. I usually find that in more obscure pages, where the practice can go unnoticed. I remember seeing something like that some years ago when researching about medieval Indian astronomers. It was obvious that some of the content was written by Indian nationalists citing other Indian nationalists to inflate the importance of the discoveries.
But, as you said, this is a problem that can happen anywhere. You just have to be aware of who is writing the text and which POV they are likely to adopt.