How reliable is Wikipedia?

In elementary and middle school, on the rare occasion, I was allowed to use an online source. I was always cautioned to not use Wikipedia. In high school, while the guidelines for sources were greatly lowered, Wikipedia was still banned by all of my teachers.

“Anyone can edit it,” was the most common reason given.

“No one checks the accuracy,” comes in close second. In this article, I am going to address the question, “How reliable is Wikipedia?”

The Myth 

            First though, I need to dispel some myths. The first myth is the most egregious one, and, unfortunately, is still widely believed, especially by professors in college above the age of 30.* “No one checks the accuracy of Wikipedia,” is blatantly false. For starters, multiple bots* are devoted to checking the spelling and grammar of Wikipedia. Similarly,bots regularly scan pages looking for vandalism. Although Wikipedia vandalism may sound odd to some people, it is a real and dramatic problem for the user generated non-profit organization. They define it as changes that are “intentionally disruptive” to Wikipedia’s goal of creating a free encyclopedia. Additionally there are 1,239 administrators of the English Wikipedia as of January 2018. Granted the privilege to block users, and rename and delete pages among other things, Wikipedia administrators, are not employees, but they are more experienced typical editors. From there, the Wikipedia hierarchy becomes more complicated. However, the not-for-profit official foundation behind Wikipedia, as well as other projects, is called the Wikimedia Foundation. The foundation’s entire job is to supporting the regular users who try to build Wikipedia.

The Science 

            Alright, now with that myth out of the way I can get down to the actual question. How reliable is Wikipedia? News outlets quickly grabbed onto the study whose abstract reads, “…Wikipedia comes close to Britannica in terms of the accuracy of its science entries...”  But that’s just one study. Except, there’s more. Thomas Chesney complete a study called “An empirical examination of Wikipedia’s credibility” where quote, “the experts [questioned in the study] found Wikipedia’s articles to be more credible than the non–experts. This suggests that the accuracy of Wikipedia is high.” However, Chesney also cautions against trusting Wikipedia completely as “according to the expects, 13 percent of the articles contain mistakes.” 

        Even one of the firststudies to evaluate Wikipedia said,  “…Torvalds, leader of the Linux open source movement once said,“Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.” He was referring to software development, but it is equally relevant to Wikipedia...This use of more “eyeballs” is a rather unique feature of participatory journalism, as it benefits directly from more traffic and more users making their impression by scrutinizing or contributing to content.”

      Another study*** in 2008 said, “Overall, we found that the degree to which Wikipedia is lacking depends heavily on one’s perspective. Even in the least covered areas, because of its sheer size, Wikipedia does well, but since a collection that is meant to represent general knowledge is likely to be judged by the areas in which it is weakest… It cannot be a coincidence that two areas that are particularly lacking on Wikipedia—law and medicine—are also the purview of licensed experts...Despite the noted difficulties of partitioning Wikipedia into topical domains, the sheer number of articles presented by Wikipedia far outstrips the bound encyclopedias we investigated.” 

       Like this study indicates, another study found that Wikipedia is often inaccurate in medical information. However, there is a difference between using Wikipedia for finding biographical information of authors and consulting it for dosage information. One should clearly be heavily discouraged.**** Unfortunately, some might be confused as to which one, as they still think Wikipedia is unreliable. For those people, I present the best argument for Wikipedia as a source down below.

           

The Best Argument 

            Finally the best argument for using Wikipedia as a source is that you don’t even have to use it. You can use the sources that Wikipedia users themselves cited to build the articles. Wikipedia is an ok source by itself and is perfectly fine when used in conjunction with other sources, which you should do anyways. You should almost never***** use just one source.  So, if your college professor, or teacher, or whoever still hasn’t come to that realization, then just use the sources that Wikipedia uses. It still saves a lot of time and they look fancier to people who don’t like Wikipedia, than it does.  

Notes: 

*Aka all college professors (At least, I’ve never met one younger). 

** computer programs designed for specific functions that run basically almost all the time

*** There are even more studies than the ones I mentioned, but I don't know what they say and I can't read most of them as there are paywalls around them. In a way that is just another win for wikipedia if not in how reliable it is, definitely in how much it's needed. 

****Clearly the medial one. Ask your doctor and not Web MD either.  

*****I say almost, because I’m sure there’s probably instances where using just Wikipedia is ok, but I also say never because, while I was writing, editing, formatting and posting this article, I couldn’t thing of ANY. So yeah almost never.

Sources: 

Image Credit: "Wikipedia 10" by jay walsh