Why do people use the wikipedia site so much when it is also written by everyone?

Question

If you look at the wikipedia site, it has edit on the right hand side.
When you first open the page it even says "the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit." Why do people trust it?

Answer 1

While I would not trust it as a definitive source of information, there are a couple of things that the Wikipedia community as a whole does to make the information more accurate:

1) Peer review - Depending on how obscure the information is, there will be a lot of eyeballs looking at the information and they will correct the more outrageous of the information into a neutral, encyclopedic form.
2) References - Many pages have reference links that point to other information either on the Internet or in other sources such as books, industry journals or news sources that back up the information being presented.

Answer 2

Because it can be edited by anyone, it can be corrected by anyone. There are whole groups of people of Wiki that constantly check it for accuracy and delete incorrect info.

Answer 3

Not all people trust Wikipedia, and, among the people who trust it, there are some who trust it more and some who trust it less.

If you ask yourself who're among the people who don't trust Wikipedia, there're for example former Encyclopedia Britannica editor in chief Robert McHenry and other Encyclopedia Britannica people, the editors of Encarta Feedback at http://encarta.msn.com/encnet/support/encartafeedback.aspx ("Encarta is different from open-content encyclopedias found elsewhere on the Web that post users' changes immediately."), "Web 2.0" critic Nicholas Carr of the blog http://roughtype.com , on-line journalist Andrew Orlowski at http://forms.theregister.co.uk/search/?q=orlowski+wikipedia , and many former Wikipedia editors who got disillusioned with Wikipedia after they realized it's not nearly as good as advertised, like those of a message board which is now at http://www.wikipediareview.org .

You also have to realize that Wikipedia is not really an encyclopedia but a database created with a computer programming script modeled after that of the first wiki, Wiki Wiki Web, which is about computer programming and still running.at http://c2.com/cgi/wiki .

In addition, when the Wikipedia slogan says "free", you have to understand that the Wikipedia administrators don't mean by that free of charge, but that it's a euphemism for "free of free-market capitalism" and "free of authors' copyrights" and "free of the right to property", since Wikipedia users have to license their content under the GNU Free Documentation License, a content license which limits editors' copyrights and allows anyone to copy the submitted content as long as it's attributed to Wikipedia, and whose use was suggested to Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales by computer programmer Richard Stallman, whose ultimate goal is that of having software created by governments instead of businesses through what he calls "Software Tax", who wrote the GNU Manisfesto (inspired by the Communist Manifesto), and who shows his extremely left-leaning, communistic, collectivistic ideas in favor of collectivization and disappropriation of privately owned computer networks, in favor of ACLU slip-and-fall lawyers and against copyright law on his blog http://www.stallman.org .

What's more, not anyone can edit Wikipedia, since many people don't have Internet access, many others who do have Internet access get blocked, many others are intimidated by know-it-all, brow-beating administrators, and, on top of that, the editions of those who can edit are always at risk of getting overwritten by users who have more time to spend patrolling Wikipedia pages and imposing their views.

The hypothesis behind trusting Wikipedia is that editors try to increase the utility of the database of the wiki, and--so goes the hypothesis--in the long run the utility of the wiki increases since the errors get reduced like the graph of an exponential function with base greater than zero but smaller than one, even though in the short run it hovers/oscillates up and down constantly.

However, that's just a hypothesis by the collectivistic people who trust Wikipedia and tend to dislike individualism. So it helps explain why some people trust Wikipedia even though in practice the hypothesis doesn't hold water.

In reality, like McHenry said in his latest article criticizing Wikipedia at http://www.opendemocracy.net/media-edemocracy/wikipedia_bias_3621.jsp, "talent [...] is not equally distributed among the population" which edits Wikipedia, so you can expect the content to be low-quality anyway, and, besides, "truth [...] is not democratically determined", because, as proven by history, the masses can also believe in big lies and spread big lies. So that's why Wikipedia should be taken with a grain of salt.

Because of Wikipedia's bad administration you have to consider that Wikipedia is worse than the average wiki, so you should trust it less than you would trust an average wiki.

Answer 4

i don't always trust it, but it can be informative.