How reliable is Wikipedia as a source of information, and why?

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Melchior Bradney
Melchior Bradney, lived in Kerala, India (2000-2010)

An answer taken from a blog.

Work for just one or two hours a day and earn up to $12,000 per month. If you are an admin in the Wikipedia, then you can earn much more than that amount.

Sounds too good to be true? Well… it is true. Being an active editor in Wikipedia since 2004, I never thought it can be a source of income. In April 2011, I was contacted by a guy named Prince Matthew on my Wikimail (quite sure that it is not his real name, but I came to know that this guy owns a 2,000 acre rubber estate in Kottayam district). He had a very strange offer – He will pay me USD 12,000 if I side with him in a soon-to-be –starting Wikipedia edit war.

I was astonished at first by the offer. So I asked him to clarify. He gave me the details. All I have to do is to work with a 4 member team to change a Wikipedia article. The article he was mentioning was Nair. As we have seen recently, the article has been changed almost entirely, from this version to this. He even offered me to pay a first instalment of $12K as advance payment, either through Paypal or in person! I told him I need some time to think about it, and promised him to contact later.

Being a resident of Kerala, engaging in this sort of activities seemed too risky for me, even if it can get me enough money to live a life of luxury. My decision not to participate in this edit warring was probably inspired by the arrest of KV Shine, an Ezhava blogger who was charged in 2010 by the Kerala Cyber Police. Prince’s edits are more than likely to anger the Nairs, and he wanted to mask his identity by posting using Muslim/ Ezhava usernames. Regretfully I informed him that I am not that interested in the project.

Although I opted out of this venture, I kept my ears open. Within a week, Prince recruited three Wikipedia editors and one admin. These users were:

Sitush

CarTick

MatthewVanitas

Boing! said Zebedee (This was the sole admin)

First to be recruited was CarTick. Being the son of a well known Dalit Panthers of India leader from Tamil Nadu, he is ideologically opposed to Forward Caste communities like Nairs. An offer of $12,000 per month was more than enough for him to join the project. The other three including the admin, were from Liverpool in England. They were not having any ideological reasons to attack the Nairs, but only the monetary factor to join the project.

The work started in mid-April 2011. The four editors were asked to contribute to non-Nair articles for two-three months, in order to mask their intentions. Sitush started editing the article page from 3

rd

May onwards, while his colleagues waited for some more time before joining him. But unfortunately their task was not an easy one. Nair article till that time was maintained by a very strong Cabal lead by a guy called Suresh Varma. This Cabal consisted of at least half a dozen other editors, including Chandrakantha Mannadiar, Anand Nair, Linguisticgeek, Shannon1488, KK.etc.

But as we say, fortune favours the brave. As I could find out from a chat with one of the members of the pro-Nair Cabal, the leader Suresh Varma, was arrested and sent to jail for tax evasion in February 2011. Another editor died in a car accident a month later. This was the opportunity Prince and his cronies had been waiting for a long time.

Cartick started the edit war, and was supported on the talk page by the other two editors. In the absence of Suresh Varma, the Nair Cabal was a disorientated and emotionally driven bunch of inexperienced editors. Very soon, with the help of the admin who is on their side, Prince Matthew and his editors were able to block and ban all the members of the Nair Cabal.

Soon, another problem surfaced. An irate bunch of neutral editors like RajKris and morelMWilliam jumped in to the talk page and started pointing out the inconsistencies of the edits and abusive use of the Admin Power. They were joined by a bunch of mostly Nair newbies. Prince decided that he himself should act now. He created a bunch of sock accounts like KondottySultan, Chekon and Govindsharma. (Each of this accounts were created with a unique purpose. They will hide his real Christian identity. But more importantly, people will think that Kondotty Sultan is a Muslim, Chekon is an Ezhava and Govindsharma is a Brahmin. So he hoped to turn the Nairs against Muslims, Brahmins and Ezhavas in one go!).

One of the Nair Cabal members, whom I talked to claimed to know Prince's real identity. He claimed that during the college years, Prince had a crush on a Nair girl. But she rejected him, since he is a Christian. (They claim that they are descendants of Brahmins who were converted by Saint Thomas. But non-Christians in Kerala claim the story is total nonsense and that they are converted Pulayas and Parayas, who tried to escape from the evils of caste system). Prince is single to this date and two decades old revenge is still fuming in his mind. I am still quite suspicious of this story, but the Cabal member pointed out a reply made by one of his sock accounts to a post made by two Nair girls in the Wikipedia talk page. It seems that there is some truth in what he said.

Prince started posting degrading and offensive propaganda using his sock (proxy) accounts. Sitush adopted a new approach. He will cut down 90% of it saying too offensive, but will let the remaining 10% stay. Hardly anyone among the neutral editors (William and Rajkris) knew about this mutual understanding between the two.

By the end of June 2011, the aim had been largely accomplished. The article was completely changed to paint the Nair community in a very bad light. Sitush and his gang of editors were happy with the payments they got, while Prince, whose annual income exceeds 8 million USD hardly, cares about the 1-2% of his annual income going for the pastime. The neutral editors, RajKris & Co. couldn’t concentrate or fight a full fledged war against these professionals and soon gave up.

These sorts of instances come up more and more with Wikipedia getting wildly popular nowadays. People who want to use it as a tool for propaganda dissemination will continue to hire paid editors like Sitush, who did a wonderful job within the last two months.

So what we should do in case we want to earn some money? You just should have the right contacts; you should advertise a bit about yourself in various forums and hope for the best. If you are willing to take the risk, this is going to be a gold mine, as I don’t know any other job which will pay you $400 for a single hour of work.

A testimonial screenshot from another forum:

Does wikipedia remind of you the beggards on this forum?

Carol Moore makes Slate

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Andreas Kolbe
Andreas Kolbe, Wikipedian since 2006, former co-editor-in-chief of the Wikipedia Signpost
Updated 167w ago · Author has 305 answers and 449.7k answer views
It isn't a reliable source, and this is actually the view of Wikipedia itself. See Wikipedia:Identifying reliable sources (emphasis in the original):

Wikipedia employs no systematic mechanism for fact checking or accuracy. Thus Wikipedia articles (or Wikipedia mirrors) are not reliable sources for any purpose.

Here is an employee of the Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit who owns the Wikipedia website, advising people: "Don't trust Wikipedia", and he explains why. Skip to time code 0:59 to hear what he says.


So the basic problem is that there is no consistent editorial oversight. The Wikimedia Foundation, while taking more than $75 million a year in donations (2015 data), is still struggling with how to measure content quality (they are currently looking at machine-based learning methods to get at least a rough idea of whether articles are likely to be of good quality or not) and does not employ staff tasked with checking the accuracy of entries. There are simply too many articles (close to 5 million in the English Wikipedia alone).

As it is today, Wikipedia is a very haphazard affair—it's all driven by self-selecting volunteers, who work on what interests them (and don't work on what doesn't interest them). And often, they're interested in a topic for the wrong reasons: Wikipedia is a honey pot for opinionated activists out to shape public perception of an issue (see Why do people contribute to Wikipedia? and the Newsweek article Manipulating Wikipedia to Promote a Bogus Business School for a particularly egregious case of long-term manipulation of Wikipedia content).

In addition, the number of Wikipedia articles continues to increase (now around 5 million), while the number of highly active contributors has dropped by more than a third since 2007. This means that little-watched articles get less attention than they used to, allowing errors, hoaxes and defamation to slip through.

Overall, the reliability of Wikipedia varies a lot, depending on the quality and amount of attention an article gets. This is not always obvious to the casual reader, a fact that led to the dictum known as Kozierok's 1st Law:

The apparent accuracy of a Wikipedia article is inversely proportional to the depth of the reader's knowledge of the topic.

A Wikipedia user named Flutedude explains this well. He says, (User:Flutedude):

I know a lot about the clarinet. The Wikipedia article on the clarinet seems to me to be a mixture of bald facts, half-truths, misunderstandings and outright hoaxes.

I know next to nothing about Hopf algebra. The Wikipedia article about that looks very accurate to me.

Here are some examples that illustrate how Wikipedia can trip people up:

1. AFC sorry for calling UAE football team ‘sand monkeys’, Asian Football Confederation issues apology to UAE after 'Sand Monkeys' gaffe

2. Leveson's Wikipedia moment: how internet 'research' on The Independent's history left him red-faced

3. Most of the Internet believes that either Erica Feldman or Ian Gutgold invented the hair straightener. These are actually the names of school kids that were put into Wikipedia as a joke. Hoaxes, or why Wikipedia needs flagged revisions, Top 5 Trolls

4. "Glucojasinogen" is a completely made-up medical term that entered academic sources (!) through Wikipedia: The medical condition known as glucojasinogen

5. Royal collection duped over fake African painter Helen Anne Petrie

6. Student hoaxes world's media on Wikipedia

7. In 2007, a Turkish scholar named Taner Akcam was detained by security staff at the Canadian border, because someone had vandalised his Wikipedia biography and called him a terrorist: Page on umn.edu

8. The story behind Jar’Edo Wens, the longest-running hoax in Wikipedia history

There are many more such stories. A small selection of them are listed here: How pranks, hoaxes and manipulation undermine the reliability of Wikipedia.

See also Wikipedia: re-writing history for a bit of plain wrong and defamatory content that lasted for years in Wikipedia and came to be quoted by sources including the Associated Press, Wikipedia:List of hoaxes on Wikipedia and After a half-decade, massive Wikipedia hoax finally exposed for one particularly outrageous hoax.

For a more in-depth discussion of source fabrication and falsification in Wikipedia, see How vandals are destroying Wikipedia from the inside.  For an insight into how sheer malice can corrupt Wikipedia content, with bad actors allowed to carry on for years, see Revenge, ego and the corruption of Wikipedia.

There is a more subtle point to bear in mind here, too: a collection of facts, even if all of them are true, is not necessarily a good introduction to a topic. Facts can be badly organised, making a text difficult to understand, and there can be important omissions, or inappropriate emphases.

Many less well-trafficked Wikipedia articles are afflicted by one or both of these flaws, a reflection of the way in which they are written, with random contributors adding "interesting bits" here and there (or deleting bits they don't like ...), without taking responsibility for the overall shape and structure of the article.

There are some initiatives underway (2015) to increase at least the reliability and completeness of medical entries (Cancer Research UK is currently doing some work in this area, as is the Wiki Project Med Foundation), by having them reviewed by medical specialists  and then allowing users to access the reviewed and reliable version, but these efforts are still in their infancy, with the number of articles reviewed not having broken into double digits yet.

For me, journalism professor Charles Seife put it best, in his book "Virtual Unreality":

Wikipedia is like an old and eccentric uncle

He can be a lot of fun—over the years he's seen a lot, and he can tell a great story. He's also no dummy; he's accumulated a lot of information and has some strong opinions about what he's gathered. You can learn quite a bit from him. But take everything he says with a grain of salt. A lot of the things he thinks he knows for sure aren't quite right, or are taken out of context. And when it comes down to it, sometimes he believes things that are a little bit, well, nuts.

If it ever matters to you whether something he said is real or fictional, it's crucial to check it out with a more reliable source.
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Guy Caulfield-Kerney
Guy Caulfield-Kerney, pretty hardcore curiousity, wikipedia and now quora. both teach me as much.
Answered 162w ago · Author has 1.6k answers and 2.9m answer views
Thank you for the A2A;-

Strange, I woke up thinking about this very thing this morning and have a reply already prepared in my head.

You can accept that wikipedia, on the whole, is now the most freely available and precise data base on the planet.

There are two kinds of people;- those that stick dogmatically to old ideas, and those that don't.

At the beginning of wikipedia, like all things, there was a doubt as to it's precision.  Because it really was not that accurate.  So it developped a bad reputation amongst school proffessors and teachers alike, who spread their discord.

Whilst this maybe true at the outset, it quickly became apparent that wikipedia was starting to be taken very seriously indeed.  The controls on what you can write about, and who have become very much more strict.

You can no longer just sign up and start writing anything you want, it will get taken down so fast, that no-one will see it.

They have moderators, like here.  But here on Quora, yo can immediately post, and as such people can and do post some pretty nasty stuff from time to time, which other members immediately downvote to hell or the mysterious land of "your answer has been collapsed".

On wikipedia, more and more changes go through the moderator proccess before they can be posted.

You have to be a registered user to post as well.   This group of volunteer writers, by now have been thinned out into the seriously determined and those that stay on.
So, not too many vandals in the pack, that write aprocryphal crap just to have a laugh.

Wikipedia

Is the page, about wikipedia itself.

Now, bearing in mind, that it is still very young, you can always cross check something by comparing it to the rest of the Webz, there are many other sites of general reference available.
This should be done anyway, even when reading encyclopedias;  all databases have errors, that's logical, as each and every year new things have been found out about old facts.  The controlling authority at the time of publication had a whole bunch of stuff that gets thrown out later on.

I have a collection of old encyclopedias that are very pretty to look at, but lamentable in their precision, in comparrison to today's editions.

Wikipedia, is as far as I know certainly the fastest auto-correcting database that I have ever seen, there are a lot of very qualified people writing that stuff.  You have to be able to write in a nuetral way, that is difficult.

I use a general rule of thumb when researching anything on the web,

The more the publicity, the less I'm going to find useful.
There is a commercial interest in getting me to use their site, so no.
News sites, are just for when you have nothing better to do.
There is invariably a political agenda, in every news article.

Sites with high numbers of hotlinks and commercial banners or games banners, are not going to give you the best choice either, as the content is only there to get you to click on the other guff.

Non of which you have on wikipedia.  This kind of indicates that there is a higher calling involved.

I think that you could question wikipedias credibility, if it was working to an other agenda, or had so many links taking you away from the page.

Another reason as to why it is becoming so precise, is the legal aspect.
If somebody writes something that is rattified by the site, that turns out to be wrong and dangerous, and someone gets injured, there can be a return on the site.  So a lot of work goes into the legal aspect of what is posted.

Credibility is based on the stakes.  The higher the stakes, the higher the credibility, (except when it involves governements, that rule falls completely to bits with governements, because governements don't have the same level of control over them, I suppose).

The people that moderate wikipedia have got to be some really top level intelligentsia to manage to keep it under control and clean, otherwise if they let people like me on there, with my writing style, you can imagine what it would look like, and then you could question its credibility.  Like at the beginning.
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Tom Morris
Tom Morris, Wikipedia administrator
Answered 310w ago · Upvoted by Mark Hetherington, Wikipedia administrator for over a decade and Steven Walling, Wikipedia editor and admin, 50,000 edits. · Author has 1.3k answers and 2.3m answer views
How reliable is Twitter as a source? That's a very strange question to ask, isn't it? I mean, NPR and the New York Times and the UN and national governments have Twitter accounts and so do goofy teenagers posting cat photos. How you determine "reliability" is context dependent. Sources aren't just magically reliable or unreliable, it depends on what you are doing with them.

The way we traditionally understood reliability is that it flowed from authority. The New York Times printed it, that settles it. This wasn't actually a very good way of knowing about the world because sometimes authority figures lie. Authority figures told me that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction, that the only type of sex that is normal and morally permissible is heterosexual missionary position with the lights off and that the War on Drugs is winnable.

In fact, the things we tend to trust aren't authorities but processes. Science (including medical science) is pretty trustworthy because there's a process. That's not to say science never makes mistakes, but it is a self-correcting system. Scientists are motivated to rip holes in each other's work in public. Throw enough scientists at a problem and the truth will eventually come out.

How about Wikipedia then? Well, Wikipedians aren't asking you to trust it. That's why the sources exist. We don't put them there just because we like footnotes (although some of us do rather like footnotes), but so that you can verify information. Huge amounts of that information is on the public web, so verifying facts takes only one click. Wikipedia quite openly shows you where the flaws are: when articles have problems, users will flag that up with warning templates. Those are there to inform you. Heed their warning.

Similarly, good articles and featured articles exist, and you can use the designations given to those articles as a way to boost your trust in them. Good articles have little green "plus" symbols in the top-right corner. Featured articles have a purple/grey star. The latter requires considerable source checking in order to be passed.

There are problems in Wikipedia, and those problems will tend to exist more in the rarely-viewed articles. The problems do tend to get better, quality does tend to improve slowly over time. It's not evenly distributed by subject, sadly. Wikipedia will often have a superbly referenced article on an X-Files episode or a video game but then you look up some topic in ancient philosophy and it's just in a sorry state. This is unfortunate, but understandable given the demographics of who writes for Wikipedia.

Anyway, back to the question: how reliable is Wikipedia? That depends on what you are relying on it for. For most common uses of a reference work, it's pretty good. As a reader, I've compared it with Britannica in a lot of instances and it is usually as good as Britannica in terms of accuracy, but much, much better in terms of completeness.

For most situations, you'll want to use Wikipedia as a starting point, a useful summary of the current common wisdom on a topic, and then plunge into the sources for more context, and cite the sources directly. Generally, you shouldn't cite generalist encyclopedias.

See also:

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Sam Hopper
Sam Hopper, works at The High School Experience
Answered 9w ago · Author has 184 answers and 291.7k answer views

I edit Wikipedia with some frequency, love it a lot, and am quite familiar with its best and worst parts. Most Wikipedia articles are good (if a bit lacking in completeness or style), some are excellent, and some are bad. A good general rule is that more popular articles will be good, while less popular articles may not be because they don't get enough attention.

The main way to tell whether an article is accurate or not is to look for inline citations, which look like this

[3][4].

Clicking on them will show you the source for the statement the citations follow. If you think the statement seems dubious, check the source yourself - I have seen citations that don't support their statements at all. Be cautious with uncited statements.

A primary indicator of problems with articles are tags at the top of the article or section with a problem. These tags can note lots of issues, including that the sources cited are insufficient (example), that the article may be biased (example), or several issues all at once (example 1, example 2). Of course, there is also the classic inline

[citation

needed]

and the lesser-known but even more worrisome

[dubious

-

discuss]

. Also, definitely look out for

[original

research?]

. It sounds benign, but the issue it documents is serious - that the editor that wrote the statement may have synthesized or deduced it from several sources themselves, which is something Wikipedia editors generally do not have the expertise to do properly.

An indicator that articles are good is that they have a little plus or star in the upper right corner. To get the plus, the article has to be certified by an editor who didn't work on it as meeting certain criteria. To get the star, it has to undergo a very rigorous review at a central forum (only about 5000 articles currently have a star). Keep in mind, however, that articles change a lot, and the quality of articles can degrade after they are awarded the plus or star to the point where they don't deserve it anymore.

Wikipedia is not an appropriate source to cite because it's not an authoritative source. All the information on Wikipedia is (supposed to be) taken from other sources, which are provided to you. If you cite Wikipedia, you're essentially saying "108.192.112.18 said that a history text said Charlemagne conquered the Vandals in 1892". Just cite the history text directly! There's also a residual fear that anybody could type whatever they wanted and you'd just accept it as fact.

Regardless, it is reliable 99% of the time, I've only encountered small details of innacuracy, and the occasional person who thinks they are funny and edits an entry (which usually gets corrected <6hr).

Wikipedia is perfectly fine for:

  • Getting an overview of a subject
  • Finding real sources
  • Winning internet arguments
Rafael Garcia
Rafael Garcia, User since 2003, administrator since 2004, low level participant since becoming a parent. Attended Wikimani...
Updated 357w ago · Upvoted by Tom Morris, Wikipedia administrator · Author has 399 answers and 436.4k answer views
(This answer was written in response to an earlier version of the question)

Evaluating the accuracy of a Wikipedia article is a lot of work, if you want to do it right, but here's what it would involve. Pick the article. Find the most authoritative secondary and tertiary sources on that same topic. Read and correctly understand these sources. Evaluate how what you have learned differs from the content of the Wikipedia article. Try to figure out cause for the discrepancies, by examining the sources cited in the Wikipedia article.

You will probably find that the article was pretty good, but with some weakness. After you have done all this work, you will be in a very good position to improve the article yourself. 

(As an aside, I disagree with the premise of the question. For many purposes, Wikipedia is not only a good source of information, it's the best that has ever existed. It's not a "serious avenue for academic research", but then neither is any encyclopedia)
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