Is Wikipedia trustworthy?

Not really. While it’s important to remember that no encyclopedia ever written has been free of error, Wikipedia, as a website written and edited by generally anonymous volunteers (including a significant proportion of schoolchildren), will always be subject to certain types of defects you would not encounter in a traditional encyclopedia.

This includes content manipulations perpetrated under the cover of anonymity by various classes of people that a traditional reference publisher would never have hired. Here are some press stories for you, detailing the problems found:

Hoaxers:

• How a Raccoon Became an Aardvark – The New Yorker
• Student hoaxes world's media on Wikipedia – NBC News/Associated Press
• The story behind Jar’Edo Wens, the longest-running hoax in Wikipedia history – Washington Post
• After a half-decade, massive Wikipedia hoax finally exposed – Daily Dot
• How I accidentally started a Wikipedia hoax about Amelia Bedelia – Daily Dot

PR people:

• Manipulating Wikipedia to Promote a Bogus Business School – Newsweek
• Wikipedia Editors Just Banned 381 Accounts Over a Huge Fraud and Extortion Scandal – Fusion
• The biggest sockpuppet network in Wikipedia history—and the PR company behind it – Daily Dot

Political extremists:

• Caught in the Internet hate machine, by Robert Fisk – The Tribune/The Independent
• Fascists are rewriting Croatia's history on Wikipedia – Daily Dot

Individuals pursuing personal vendettas:

• Revenge, ego and the corruption of Wikipedia – Salon
• The tale of Mr Hari and Dr Rose – New Statesman

In addition to hoaxes and manipulation by bad actors, Wikipedia is also subject to simple error by well-meaning volunteers who lack the requisite qualifications to write a reliable reference source and have no one checking their work.

In the Wikipedia article Desert for example – one of Wikipedia’s most popular, viewed well over a million times a year – a very prolific and highly decorated Wikipedia editor had written that the average winter temperature in polar deserts like Greenland and Antarctica is between –2 and +4 °C. The howler stood for almost a year.

She had also written that birds in cold deserts avoid “the problem of their feet becoming chilled by maintaining their lower limbs at external temperatures”. A moment’s thought should tell anyone that penguins’ feet, if kept “at external temperatures”, would freeze solid when those external temperatures drop to -30 °C, as they do in the Antarctic. The birds would die of frostbite and gangrene. Yet this error, too, stood unnoticed for months.

Such errors and misunderstandings would have been very unlikely to make it through the editorial process of a traditional reference work written and vetted by experts. Yet in Wikipedia, the article containing these errors even won a “Good article” award, marking it as one of the site’s best.

So, where does that leave us? Much information in Wikipedia, especially in articles that receive regular scrutiny from multiple editors, is undoubtedly correct. Some articles, written by passionate and knowledgeable amateurs, students or experts, are truly excellent.

Moreover, Wikipedia has the potential to be far more up to date than a traditional print encyclopedia – a potential it realises in most cases. It is also far more comprehensive than any other encyclopedia in human history.

But as the example of the Desert article shows, even highly visible articles, used as a reference source by thousands of people a day, can contain serious errors. And the more obscure an article is, the more you have to be on your guard.

You should never take anything said in Wikipedia on faith, especially if you intend to use information gleaned from Wikipedia in your own writing, and want to avoid embarrassing gaffes like these:

• Leveson’s Wikipedia moment: how internet ‘research’ on The Independent’s history left him red-faced
• Asian soccer body apologizes for “sand monkeys” slur of UAE team

I’ll leave you with some comments from Amir E. Aharoni, who works for the Wikimedia Foundation, which operates the Wikipedia website. He says “Don't trust Wikipedia”, and explains why. (Skip to time code 0:59.)

So, whenever you read something in Wikipedia and are thinking about presenting it as fact to others, first check whether the fact is backed up by a citation, then check whether the cited source is a trustworthy publication, and then verify that it does indeed say the same thing as the Wikipedia article.

Incidentally, the same rule also applies in Wikipedia itself: Wikipedia policy forbids you from citing one Wikipedia article as a source in another. Wikipedia itself does not class Wikipedia as a “reliable source”. To add content to a Wikipedia article, you are always supposed to cite a traditionally published source (that’s the theory at least – in practice, Wikipedia contains millions of statements that are unsourced, and those you should be very, very wary of).

Whenever writers trust Wikipedia statements blindly, without regard for sourcing, it can lead to both embarrassment and an actual corruption of the world’s knowledge base, as illustrated in the press stories above and the xkcd cartoon below:

It depends on the subject matter, and on who’s doing the editing.

Something neutral like physics or math will be fine, if not excellently written and informative. But more sensitive areas like politics, nationalism, race, and religion will be significantly less so. Venture into any of those areas and you’ll find some real ugliness.

Those topics tend to have dedicated, self-appointed “patrol” editors who will obsessively watch for any changes they don’t like, and then swiftly revert them. And if the reverted editor disagrees with his/her reasoning for the revert, the latter can simply call in their friends from the outside (sometimes including the administrators themselves) to help “subdue” that editor, who will then be powerless to fight back because of Wikipedia’s 3 revert rule.

At this point, editors are encouraged to go to the article’s talk page and hash things out there. But this, too, can be a frustrating and hopeless endeavor, if only for the fact that the “gatekeeping” editors will NEVER change their minds, no matter what you say or what sources you present. When the gatekeeper is unable to refute the opposing side’s arguments, he/she will post an “RFC” (request for comment), which summons editors from all across Wikipedia to throw in a yes or no vote. The side with the most votes wins.

This, obviously, places minority groups at a disadvantage. And for this reason, Wikipedia can be a toxic place for anyone who isn’t white (or Arab, or Muslim), male, cisgendered, etc. To wit, these RFCs are typically made in full knowledge that the minority editor stands no chance of winning. And, indeed, they usually don’t. And so the majority view is then included, no matter how ignorant, privileged, or unacademic it is.

I’ve seen this same exact scenario play out so many times, and on so many different articles, that I’m amazed no one else has noticed it.

Take, for example, any article pertaining to Jews (especially anything to do with Ashkenazi Jews), Israel, or the Israel/Palestine conflict. These articles can - and DO - attract racists in large numbers, and it REALLY shows in most cases. There are some articles - like the main “Jews” article (see here: Jews - Wikipedia) - that are actually pretty good. But others, like the “Jerusalem” article (along with almost every other article about Israel, Israeli history, Israeli cities, Zionism etc) are atrocious - in fact, a large number of them fail to even mention the Israeli perspective at all.

And then there’s the administration itself. Just like the lay editing population, the administration tends to consist of certain demographics, and they mostly tend to hold certain views, which they are (usually) not afraid to enforce.

Privilege is very, very, very real. One only needs to look at Wikipedia for proof.

And that is why sites like Quora are so important: majority groups can’t strong arm or intimidate others into silence on here, and they can’t use the system to help them suppress “annoying” minority perspectives. This site is the closest thing to a meritocracy I’ve seen in my 32 years of existence.

To an extent, yes. Wikipedia has strict rules in place to ensure it remains reliable such as blacklisting the citation of unreliable sources in articles and banning users who the Wikipedia community deem as “counter-productive” or anyone else who works against their editorial standards.

However, Wikipedia is a community-driven project hence its trustworthiness is dependent on the nature of the community which sadly is corrupted by many users who have their own agendas such as political and religious among other types. An example is many members of the Indian Wikipedia community who will work to remove any content or users who say anything that does not portray India positively such as editing articles about the history of the Indian subcontinent so it seems as though the modern state of India merits more recognition than it actually does.

I would, therefore, recommend using Wikipedia on articles that have limited relation to contentious topics such as religion and politics (mostly politics to do with the Middle East, South Asia and East Asia). Apart from this, Wikipedia is quite trustworthy.

It often depends on the subject.

In general it tends to be very reliable. It requires external reliable sources to support the claims made.

Most topics have “dedicated fans” who watch for changes and will correct and/or debate disputed issues.

Esoteric subjects, where the number of editors is significantly smaller, the quality can vary a lot, depending on how knowledgeable and serious the editors are.

Contentious subjects where there are a number of solid opinions, in the Real World, then through debate, can potentially lead Wikipedia to have better content than most other sources. On the other hand, less mature editors can lead to silly edit-wars.

“Battle field” topics, especially when one side is much larger than the other, can be a huge mess. A perfect example would be the entire topic of the Arab–Israeli conflict. Everything is a battle. Because the number of pro-Arab (or anti-Israel) editors is much larger, they most often focus on being disruptive, rather than finding sources for their claims. They try to censor or outright delete inconvenient entries.

It is for this type of topics that the Wikipedia model fails completely. To be fair I have no idea how to make this work. Perhaps to make it somewhat harder to make changes to entries in such topics, but that would most likely require dedicated Administrators.

Wikipedia is a wonderful place to start serious research. It’s a terrible place to finish it.

The Wikipedia article will provide a general overview of the topic, like any encyclopedia. Details may, in some cases, be omitted or glossed over, either because no one’s gotten around to putting them in yet or because they’re too deep into it for a general encyclopedia article.

But why start there? Because the article will list the sources used to write it. If you can find a part of the subject you’re interested in, and go on to read those sources, as well as finding others, it’s a great way to get a start.

So, by all means, start your research on Wikipedia. But remember that encyclopedias are meant to present a generalized, beginner to intermediate level overview of the topic, not a detailed and exhaustive treatment of it. For serious research, click through to the more in depth resources.

Thanks for the A2A Irfan Rashid.

The short answer would be: not always. You see, there are different Wikipedia articles, some of them are really good, well researched and neutral, while some are well researched but biased, but most of them are stubs or one liners. A stub is a very short article. A stub is not always bad, I would say that most of them are neither good, nor bad.

But generally I have the impression that most articles are good and can be trusted, especially if the articles are well referenced from multiple reliable sources.

A biased article could be recognised by a message on top which says: “The neutrality of this article is disputed”. Wikipedia adheres to the so-called ‘neutral point of view. So when you see such a tag, you should be cautious.

References

Wikipedia:Good articles - Wikipedia. A list of good articles which you can trust.

Whataboutism - Wikipedia. An example of an article with the message “The neutrality of this article is diputed”.

Wikipedia:Neutral point of view - Wikipedia