2007-05-21 09:38:25 · 12 answers · asked by Anonymous in Computers & Internet ➔ Internet ➔ Wikipedia
CHECK OUT THE FOLLOWING SITES.
1. wikia.com
2. freebase.com
3.techmambo.blogspot.com
2007-05-21 10:53:20 · answer #1 · answered by Anonymous · 0⤊ 2⤋
The answer to your question is no. Anyone can contribute to Wikipedia, and therefore it will never be as accurate as an encyclopedia researched by fixed team. It should also be noted that people often use Wikipedia as a platform to express their own political or moral beliefs - take a look at the page on "Jew" for example, it is now locked because so many anti-semites vandalised it.
Think of Wikipedia as being a more in depth form of Yahoo Answers. You will find useful material, but you can never be certain that it is correct unless you do your own research.
I personally use Wikipedia frequently to get an introduction to a new area of knowledge. In this respect it is one of the best sites on the net. Just don't believe everything you read on Wikipedia, and keep an open mind and you won't go wrong.
Also never write an essay for school or university and cite Wikipedia as a source - because many of it's authors are anonymous it cannot be considered to be authorotative.
2007-05-21 16:56:05 · answer #2 · answered by Anonymous · 1⤊ 2⤋
Wikipedia is accurate and getting better!
In a Nature Magazine comparison, Wikipedia bested Britannica in a dozen science articles.
Experiments have indicated that deliberate errors introduced into Wikipedia are generally corrected in a matter of hours. If you spot and inaccuracy, fix it.
The error Mande mentions was fixed in less than 1 minute!
2007-05-22 01:50:30 · answer #3 · answered by Charley M 3 · 1⤊ 0⤋
I heard where Wikipedia, which can be confused with Webopedia, can contain information which is just plain blogs and not verifiable data. For that reason I removed it from my Favorites and kept only Webopedia.
What is Wikipedia?
Added December 29, 2006
Wikipedia is a free online encyclopedia. The name is a portmanteau of the Hawaiian word for quick, "wiki", and "encyclopedia". Actively updated in over 100 languages, including constructed languages such as Esperanto, the English language Wikipedia contains over one and a half million articles.There are 11 other language editions with over 100,000 articles each, and over 50 languages with over 10,000 articles each. The lack of language barriers, and the fact that anybody with an Internet connection and a web browser can edit its contents, has Wikipedia termed as a "sum of public human knowledge." However, as in all fields of knowledge, there is much dispute over the accuracy of some information contained in Wikipedia. The encyclopedia therefore has resources dedicated the resolving such issues, and usually strives to publish all sides of any disputes.
Wikipedia was founded as an extension of the expert-written Nupedia project. However, the idea of a publicly-written collaborative encyclopedia was rejected by Nupedia's advisory board, and the project was managed independently by several top Nupedia contributors. Despite this, Wikipedia soon eclipsed Nupedia in terms of content and traffic. Within two years the Nupedia project was abandoned, and all its content was incorporated into Wikipedia. Much of today's Wikipedia staff are former Nupedia staff.
A very common criticism of Wikipedia is its inconsistent and unauthoritative submission model. The encyclopedia allows anybody to edit its pages, even anonymously. To address this issue, and to ensure quality, accurate content, all submissions and edits are moderated and regulated by a staff of regular volunteers. However, all information learned from Wikipedia should be independently verified by interested parties, and citing Wikipedia as a reference work is usually frowned upon in most academic circles. It should be noted that in 2005 the scientific publication Nature performed a comparison of the accuracy of Wikipedia and Encyclopedia Britannica, the leading print encyclopedia. It found that while the amount of errors per article in Wikipedia and Britannica were the same, the severity of errors in Wikipedia were worse. Encyclopedia Britannica suffered mostly from fact omission, whereas Wikipedia suffered from inaccurate information.
Source: http://what-is-what.com/what_is/wikipedia.html
2007-05-21 16:44:56 · answer #4 · answered by TheHumbleOne 7 · 1⤊ 2⤋
People need to chill on the wikipedia haterade. Yeah, sure people can post whatever they want on it, but if it's a popular topic, you can usually feel safe about it. The more popular something is, the higher chance that a good citizen will clean up a vandalized article.
2007-05-22 21:54:19 · answer #5 · answered by sacor1192 2 · 0⤊ 0⤋
I haven't found any great, glaring inaccuracies in Wikipedia. I often double check their version with an encyclopedia and find them very accurate.
2007-05-21 16:42:04 · answer #6 · answered by Anonymous · 0⤊ 1⤋
it is great for getting ideas... it usually is never that bad... try answers.com they offer things on a wide range of topics that are true and do offer things from wikipedia also
2007-05-21 22:04:50 · answer #7 · answered by Anonymous · 0⤊ 1⤋
yes they are very accurate
2007-05-21 21:24:01 · answer #8 · answered by spyder_paintballer24 2 · 1⤊ 0⤋
most of the time they update
but very accurate!
2007-05-21 16:46:22 · answer #9 · answered by Saad Imran 3 · 0⤊ 2⤋
not really accurate....
check out:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_colonization_of_the_Americas
it said christopher columbus likes poopie on it! lol!
2007-05-21 18:17:58 · answer #10 · answered by TheApocalypticOrgasm 6 · 0⤊ 1⤋