Lorelle posted an article recently called Please Don’t Use Google To Research References, and I agree with most of what she says. I especially like that she sends people to Snopes to debunk e-mail rumors. I’m a fan of replying to forwards about how Bill Gates is going to pay everyone to forward this message with links to that site, which is probably why I don’t get those anymore. Mission accomplished! But I think Lorelle (and her commenters) miss the usefulness of Wikipedia.
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Nature, the leading scientific journal, recently conducted a peer review of articles in both Encyclopedia Britannica and Wikipedia. The editors at the journal sent out articles to experts in various scientific disciplines and asked them to grade the articles for accuracy. The experts did not know the source of the articles they were sent.
Only eight serious errors, such as misinterpretations of important concepts, were detected in the pairs of articles reviewed, four from each encyclopaedia. But reviewers also found many factual errors, omissions or misleading statements: 162 and 123 in Wikipedia and Britannica, respectively.
That works out to an average of about 4 errors per Wikipedia article and 3 per article in Brittanica. Considering the price of each, that’s not bad at all.
My attitude about Wikipedia all along has been this: I certainly wouldn’t cite it as a source, but for casual interest or if you need to quickly bone up on something, it’s great. But you get what you pay for. You also have to be at least a little skeptical about what you get out of Wikipedia because any ignoramus or idiot with an agenda can edit it. It’s a handy reference and a good starting point, but I wouldn’t use it for any serious work.
