I was just researching, and I found that I can EDIT the articles! Anyone can! How can we ever trust wikipedia, when anyone can change the words to mean something entirely different??? Is anything on the site written by credible and accurate journalists or historians?
2006-10-02 21:28:10 · 17 answers · asked by maya 3 in News & Events ➔ Media & Journalism
You can't "trust" Wikipedia. If you are a college student, writing term papers for just about any class, and you pop up with a "wikipedia" reference on your citations page, you can just about guarantee getting a low grade and perhaps the order to rewrite.
That being said, the idea behind wikipedia is that all of us are smarter than any ONE of us.
In general, the information is pretty good. If it weren't correct, the next person reading it could/can/does introduce a change in the document to reflect the accurate info.
Wackos can write whatever they want, its true, but the information I have found in Wiki has been generally useful and for the most part correct.
2006-10-09 14:10:49 · answer #1 · answered by chocolahoma 7 · 0⤊ 0⤋
Wikipedia
Wikipedia (a combination of the word wiki and encyclopedia) is an on-line "copyleft" encyclopedia that is constantly evolving and can be edited by anyone. Hosted and supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation, this open source resource is collaboratively created and maintained by thousands of users worldwide. Any article contributed to Wikipedia becomes free content that may be used, edited, copied and redistributed by users. All materials contributed to Wikipedia must be verifiable by other users.
On September 20, 2004, Wikipedia reached the milestone of including one million articles in 105 different languages. At that time, nearly 2,500 articles were being added each day, with some 25,000 articles being updated daily.
2006-10-02 21:38:05 · answer #2 · answered by flaphen f 1 · 0⤊ 0⤋
You can't trust it, just as you can't trust half of what is on the internet. There are those sites that are copyrighted and published and have been through a process of verification and standardization, but then you have those sites that are user-based and are open to bias, lies, and incomplete information. Wikipedia falls in the middle because although any user can submit information, there has to be a system of follow-up in regard to the submitted information and if it's a topic that is popular, multiple people will admit the same story, which combined and averaged will leave you with a semblance of truth. Wikipedia is fine for day-to-day information, but if writing a paper or submitting work that is to be correct (for a lab), credible sources need to be used.
2006-10-02 21:32:01 · answer #3 · answered by bansri47 4 · 0⤊ 0⤋
The term Wiki refers to the sites that are created, edited, and updated by anyone on the web, resulting in mass amount of information available for free, more up to date than any other source. The question you raise is a valid question comes to all minds. Wikis are maintained and monitored by many people. People tend to have monitoring tools for articles of their interest, on any update, they get notified and go to check it. If they disagree, they will update it again. This will keep going on until eventually the situation comes to balance. Some people ofcourse tend to create chaos and trouble, those people can be monitored and blocked perhaps. Some hot disbutable articles, like George Bush may be freezed from public editing, and only admis can update it to avoid extreme cases.
In a comparison made between wikipedia and the Britannica on 42 articles, the journal found little disparity in accuracy. You can check the article here: http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/DA32B7D8-8D95-40A7-98CB-14372F1C0ACB.htm
There was a famous case however whem some guy posted on the Wiki about his friend involvement in John Kennedy assasination, and it became a world wide hot topic. Ofcourse this got spotted, corrected. The guy was identified, and quit his job, saying it was a stupid joke that got larger than he expects.
http://www.spotlightingnews.com/article.php?news=1457
For more information on the Wikipedia it self, go to howstuff works: http://computer.howstuffworks.com/wiki.htm
2006-10-02 21:45:23 · answer #4 · answered by Guybrush 2 · 0⤊ 0⤋
Short answers:
Yes you can change it to whatever you want, but there's probably an editor watching it who'll swoop in and take out any garbage pretty rapidly.
And yes I would say that a LOT of the articles are written or moderated by credible journalists and historians AND scientists.
2006-10-02 21:34:38 · answer #5 · answered by John F 3 · 0⤊ 0⤋
Wikipedia shouldn't be used as a reference for professional or academic research. It is a great tool, however, in that it usually contains references with which you can verify the content. Some people are more strict about that, but often an article is flagged if it cannot be verified. There is an association called the Association of Deletionist Wikipedian that advocates deleting articles if they do not meet strict guidelines
2006-10-02 21:32:34 · answer #6 · answered by KP 2 · 0⤊ 0⤋
You only JUST found out that you could edit it?
Anyway, yeah, what some others have said is right - if someone changes things, it's usually put right very quickly. There's a feature where they can revert it back to an older version of the page so they don't have to type everything out again.
2006-10-02 22:32:14 · answer #7 · answered by actor_girl_1986 3 · 0⤊ 0⤋
You can't because you can go on wikipedia and edit those pages they could be false information and they can't do anything about it.
2006-10-02 21:37:29 · answer #8 · answered by Anonymous · 0⤊ 0⤋
Wikipedia is probably a lot more reliable than this site
2006-10-02 22:34:54 · answer #9 · answered by rules27 6 · 1⤊ 0⤋
So did you try to edit those articles? maybe they mean that you can give them more information, and they will decide whether to publish it or not?
2006-10-03 00:26:13 · answer #10 · answered by Avner Eliyahu R 6 · 0⤊ 0⤋