Wikipedia in no more reliable than citing Rush Limbaugh or Tucker Carlson as your source. 
Here’s one example of a problem with Wikipedia that I doubt you’d find affecting a reputable traditional encyclopedia.
Take the Wikipedia page on Stephen Barrett, the founder of Quackwatch (a website frequently cited on these boards regarding medical hoaxes and frauds). The summary focuses heavily on challenges to Barrett’s credentials and lawsuits connected to his activities, to the exclusion of much of his work against health fraud. The article’s “neutrality” has in fact been challenged, and if you go to the page discussing this, you find that a woman named Ilena Rosenthal who’s a bitter opponent of Barrett and who was (unsuccessfully) sued for Internet libel by him, has been editing the Wikipedia page about him! An individual apparently affiliated with Wikipedia, commenting on the talk (challenge) page had this to say:
“There is a lot of precedent that people directly involved with a person should not be editing related articles. I am formerly asking Ilena (talk • contribs) to stop editing Barrett related articles. Your edits are not improving this article but instead being used to forward your OWN agenda. Please do not bring your arguments with Barrett into the wikipedia domain, but please do use your energy to edit other articles in wikipedia where your edits will be less contention and more constructive.”
If in fact this is a common situation on Wikipedia, people with a major ax to grind regarding a person or issue can continue to “edit” until the situation becomes obvious (if it is discovered at all by the powers that be) and “asked” to stop. What does that say about the reliability of Wikipedia? What “facts” are people taking away from articles written in a long series of edits, where fairness and balance may or may not be reached somewhere down the line, well after many people have viewed the page in question??
Some of you aren’t being fair or honest in applying the same criticisms that you direct at Wikipedia to its traditional competition. We already a favorable comparison between Wikipedia and an elite encyclopedia.
You can’t compare Wikipedia against some mystical gold standard of fairness and accuracy. It can only be compared to similar forms of reporting.
Let’s look at what can happen at the most trusted newspapers in the U.S. for example:
“Last week, New York Times reporter Jayson Blair joined Janet Cooke, formerly of the Washington Post, the New Republic’s Stephen Glass, the Boston Globe’s Patricia Smith, and Jay Forman in Slate as journalists who got caught embellishing, exaggerating, and outright lying in print. The will to fabricate cuts across disciplines, with academics and scientists inventing data, too. Last year, Emory University history professor Michael A. Bellesiles resigned following an investigation of charges that he concocted evidence to support his book Arming America, and Bell Labs fired researcher Jan Hendrik Schon when it discovered he made up scientific data and published it.”
Here are the types of corrections that the NY Times has to publish for itself every day.
At some point you have to realize that you can’t trust anything that you see, hear, or read in the truest sense. It just comes down to track record and an sense of trustworthiness deserved or not. No one has presented any evidence that Wikipedia does significantly worse than direct competition in any broad measure yet people still say that completely distrust it. I have to conclude that implies you either completely distrust all media or you have an irrational trust of other types of media over Wikipedia. Both of those are irrational.
Every single problem with Wiki can also occur on a Web Article, Newspapers, a book or even a Peer Reviewed Journal.
Bias? Sure. Bad Science? Happens. Malicious Editing? Rare, but Websites have been hacked. Typo’s? No doubt.
So, tell me one way in which Wiki is unrelaible where another source is 100% reliable?
Any institution sufficiently devoted to democracy and free exchange will suffer some degree of anarchy. It places the burden of discrimination on the reader and user, which is precisely where that burden should be.
And if nothing else, you can glean a hearty harvest of links and search terms.
One major difference: articles in all those other media have authors. If I read an op-ed piece by someone who’s not a name columnist, there’s a description of who they are and where they work. There’s far greater transparency in a peer-reviewed journal, where not just open identities but statements of possible conflicts of interest and funding sources are aired. If (as happened recently in the New York Times Book Review section) John Dean pans a book co-written by Mark “Deep Throat” Felt, at least we know where the reviewer is coming from and potential bias can be openly debated.
In Wikipedia’s world, anonymity reigns and we have no idea who’s behind articles, what they have to gain or what “edit” might eventually turn out to be reasonably accurate and unbiased.
Again, this is not a huge concern if you want to know what locale holds the one-day record for rainfall in the Continental U.S.*, but when it comes to controversial issues, I go to reliable sources first.
*Alvin, Texas.
First of all, no source is “100% reliable”. Even referencing a venerable text doesn’t insure that the information in it can’t be challenged by later knowledge. However, with text sources, a) you have a specific record of publication, b) you (generally) have a specific, non-anonymous author, and c) you have a record of editorial changes by publication version. Were I to cite, say, Nature for the week of August 12, 1976, you could go to library archives and confirm or deny that what was stated or assume conforms to the article. However, a citation to a Wikipedia article has no permenance, unless you cite the actual revision ID of the article (a supreme pain in the ass) and even then, there is no tracibility back to the author(s), so any errors or improper internal citations may be the work of a previous author.
Wikipedia is an interesting and often useful collaborative information system, but it is no replacement for permanent, individual publication, and certainly not a replacement for qualified peer review.
Stranger
Looks pretty easy to me, considering that they give you the citations in 8 formats.
Your examples aren’t even relevant. Cooke, Blair, etc all lost their jobs and reputations for what they did. Nobody posting to Wiki comes even close to that sort of punishment for spitting out garbage.
And you listed seven examples, at seven separate institutions, that occured in a 20 year span. How many people are editing Wiki this moment with the intent of grinding their favorite axe?
You also mentioned “broad measures”. I point out the laughably bad article on Monomyths, but am asked to ignore the specifics because of some “broad measure”?
As my grandmother would say, the devil is in the details… 
So how much time do you and others you know spend scrubbing wrong information off the walls of men’s room stalls and writing accurate information over the top?
There are plenty of books that are biased too. You have to make a judgement in any given case. Most biased books don’t include an edit history that shows how others continually tried to correct the book while the author strived to keep it biased, though.
Yes, but there are many books on any given subject. There’s only one Wiki.
The question here (as I read it) isn’t whether any specific book or Wiki article is reliable, but whether Wiki, both in its current inception and its “perfect realization”, is as reliable a source on any topic as the totality of accessable printed material.
In my opinion it is not, precisely because of the editability that Wiki supporters are lauding. The fact that there’s an edit log just begs the issue as the edit log is just as easily editable as the pages themselves.
Yeah, paranoia territory I’m sure. But whether I read Will Durant or George Will, I know I’m reading their words and thoughts, not somebody else’s. When I read the Encyclopedia Britannica, the book tells me who wrote it, who edited it, etc, and that’s never going to change.
When I read Wiki, however, I haven’t the slightest idea as to the level of authority the author brings to the topic, especially if I’m completely new to it. I pretty much have to guess whether the guy who wrote it sounds like he knows his stuff. And, imo, that’s no way to learn anything.
Except that no one has access to every single one of those printed references and without the background to tell the shit from the gold he’s in the same pickle as if he used Wikipedia. My experience with Wikipedia is that it is reasonably accurate and, between the references cited and what one could dig up with the Google-fu of a modern third grader, it is a good and useful intoduction to the topic. So what if there is as much about a family of video games as Baroque music? The music has 300 years of written references a student can find and use if he is so inclined.
Cecil’s dismissal of it is typical for him, stuffy old fart that he is, but he can no doubt talk for hours about the completely worthless books he’s slogged through trying to verify a fact. Having an editor to fix your style and check your facts from the same crappy printed references has prevented few, if any, falsehoods from reaching print. Or twentieth editions, by which time the bullshit has acquired a veneer of truth that is hard to break.
Wikipedia has a fundamental flaw as a citable source. It is never finished. The morning edition of your newspaper is finished and it goes to print. Anything that appears there is the final word, and the editor will be extremely embarassed if it is factually incorrect. Wiki is always pre-press. There is never any point at which the editors say, “this is the story we have.” Also, there are so many editors that no one has any responsibility for the product. I don’t really know how they could, though, since the article is never finished.
Actually, Garfield is correct–a newspaper is never finished. A second edition can change COMPLETELY what was printed in the one before without any notation and erratta on a later date can correct what was printed at first. Wikipedia at least has an easily-followed “paper” trail.
Among the gold standards of acceptable citations are peer reviewed journal articles.
Why are the articles given such a high measure of credibility? Because the author is an an established expert? Occasionally, but more often, it is due to an appeal to the authority of the reviewers…who are for the most part anonymous. It boils down to trusting an editorial staff to choose reviewers who are experts, and the fact that the reputation of the journal or editors are at stake.
Personally, I don’t see a huge difference between citing anonymous authors (wikipedia) and citing an article by an unknown author who’s paper has been blessed by anonymous reviewers.
Yes, but a newspaper has one individual who is personally invested in the veracity of what appeared in the first edition. I use the first edition for my example, because that’s what the libraries get. Screw that up, and your official story is wrong til the end of civilization.
But these people almost always screw things up as well to some degree. The NY Times and all other newspapers screw it up every single day and they typically have a section to prove that. Even prestigious books do as well.
My point obviously isn’t that traditional works are worthless because they contain errors. It is that you have to use the same stats to compare both of them and nobody has shown Wikipedia unfavorable in that light. At the same time, both Wikipedia and the tradional print media are two different things. For example, if someone showed that Wikipedia is much more accurate than traditional second-tier newspapers in the U.S. (something I could easily believe), then I would counter that Wikipedia actually has more resources and time to get things right so both are still relevant sources.
I understand that, but at least a newspaper is actually finished at some point. Wikipedia is always being re-edited, so there is no pressure at all to get the facts straight, ever. The New York Times had a publisher resign because of what one of his writers produced. The “Mr. S.” incident had no parallel fallout. If everyone* is responsible for the quality of the content, then no one is.
*And it is everyone. Complaints about a specific error in Wikipedia are always met with an admonishment that the individual should have just registered and participated, in order to make it better. It’s not my job to improve someone else’s publication. My responsibility goes no further than reading it and paying for it, if necessary.
I realize that no matter how many times this is repeated, you probably won’t actually believe it, but:
No, it isn’t.
Part A) A major newspaper which I’m familiar with prints at least three editions EVERY DAY, and at least four editions for the Sunday paper. Each of those three (or four) editions is usually zoned at least three ways. Frequently, and perhaps even more often than not, a later paper will have an article that wasn’t even in the first edition. Less frequently, a later edition will not have a story that was in the first edition. Nearly always there will be changes between the stories in each edition, sometimes very significant changes. Nearly always, each zone will get certain stories specific to that zone, and will not get stories specific to other zones.
So, if we don’t live in the same geographical area, and your paper is a final edition while mine is a first edition, there’s likely to be many, many articles in which there is a substantial difference between our papers. At least with Wikipedia everybody has access to any particular revision of an article, and it’s trivially easy to show someone which revision you mean with a link. With newspapers, I can’t really just say “It’s in today’s paper, page B11,” because you might have a different edition, a different zone or both. First off, I’d have to recognize that the paper is zoned and has different editions (I think you could make the argument that more people know that Wikipedia has an edit history log than know that many major daily papers are zoned and editioned to the extent they are), then I’d have to figure out how to identify which zone and edition I have, then I’d have to tell you which zone and edition I’m looking at, then you’d have to figure out how to tell which zone and edition you’re looking at, then you’d have to go find the correct version (which might be all but impossible, if you’re living in the outer-reaches of the circulation area and it’s more than a day or two later).
I’d rather provide a link.
Part B) I said “final edition” up there, but I didn’t really mean it. Sure, papers don’t (usually) reprint articles nearly word for word with minor changes, but they sure do followups, run corrections, do series on different subjects and revisit subjects as new events warrant. I don’t see how that’s much different than the constant revision of Wikipedia articles. As a story breaks, you get the bare-bones facts, then the next edition has quotes. Tomorrow’s paper has a complete recap of what happened and by next week, you’re going to get an in-depth look at how it happened and all the times it happened before. This is no different than Wikipedia.
Also, I get the “but it isn’t attributed to anyone” deal. How do you know if an anonymous contributor knows what he’s talking about? How do you know if a reporter knows what she’s talking about? You don’t – you trust that if they screw up enough, they won’t be allowed to contribute anymore. If a reporter screws up enough, he or she gets fired. If a Wikipedia contributor screws up enough, he or she gets banned. And it’s a whole lot easier to see what any particular Wikipedia editor has edited (particulary what they edited recently) than it is to see a reporter’s portfolio (particularly if their paper isn’t a major one with a big online presence).
Finally, I’m not sure if you realize how easy it would be for a determined person to screw up a newspaper, and how much less detectable to the reader it would be to do in print than on Wikipedia. It’s extremely easy for anyone from the reporter to the photographer to the editor to the designer to the copy editor to the graphics person to intentionally put an error in print. It would then be much harder for the end user to determine where that error was introduced and by whom, and it would likely be nearly impossible for the average reader to determine what the correct information was before the error was introduced. With Wikipedia, you click on the “History” tab and the “Compare selected versions” button, and then working your way back you can see exactly what was added or removed, when, and by whom.
I’m not trying to cut down newspapers here – they’re hopefully going to provide me with enough money to live on some day – but there seems to be a lot of misconceptions about them, and a bit of idealization going on here.
And I realize I can repeat this endlessly and you won’t get it:
Yes, they do. Go to your library. Look up the New York Times. You will see one (1) copy of each day’s edition preserved there. You can search a story about a publisher who had to resign because of what appeared in his paper. He didn’t write the story. It was still his ass. He didn’t get to constantly change the story. The story is still in the archive as well. So is the report of the ombudsman. When Jimmy Wales is held to the same standard as Howell Raines was, I may take Wikipedia seriously.