The unreliability of Wikipedia- what can we do?

[Imperial]

I still remember the days of high school, when my teachers sang wiki's praises and strongly urged us to use it.

How things have changed...

[Saikuba]

Whenever I hear these criticisms of Wikipedia I remember an old set of encyclopedias my grandparents had. They were filled with racism, religious bias and inaccuracies.

I can find all sorts of "real world" books that tell me all about how the CIA is made of ancient reptile aliens. Its a good thing not just anybody can be published or I wouldn't know that I can trust this.

Noone is saying that printed books should be taken as absolute truth either. I think that the misconception arises from how much people advise people not to use wikipedia, to the point that it seems like scholarly responsibility means "don't use wikipedia." You should always research your sources, no matter what medium they fall in.

The difference, though, with printed sources is that it is usually much clearer where the information is coming from. If the book is written as observations by an expert we can check his credibility. Written encyclopedias differ in that they gain an air of authority over time if they have a history of publishing reliable information. The problem is that each individual page on wikipedia isn't associated with anyone in particular, so each page is essentially a different entity entirely. What I mean is that there are good articles on wikipedia, but they tell you nothing about a random article.

Some of this could be fixed by tieing wikipedia more to its sources, and to be fair they are trying to do this. But for every article I see that does it right, there are far more that are not clear about what comes from their citation, if they cite anything at all. And the amount of plagarism mixed with individual opinions certainly doesn't help matters.

Wikipedia is still in its infancy and should always be viewed with a critical eye. It is filled with problems just like the real world of publishing. In that world experts critique each others work and either validate it or discard it.

Something you have to consider though is that an article published journal will be criticized by a community of experts. A wikipedia article will be criticized by everyone with the most powerful opinions coming from those with clout in the wikipedia community, or simply those more obsessive about the material than others; in short the people who actually control the articles need not know much of anything about the topic at hand.

Also I should point out that one doesn't usually use an encyclopedia in a professional research paper except as a jumping off point, why expect more from wikipedia?

Personally one of the differences I see here is that encyclopedias know their roles and tend to stick within them. They know that they can't give you much more than an introduction and perhaps additional places to look; there just isn't enough space. However the Wikipedia founder actually refers to it (at least ideally) as the "sum of all human knowledge." As far as I've ever seen it the goal of wikipedia has always been that you need not look anywhere else for information, and if I'm misinterpreting that wrong there are at least enough people who treat it that way.