User:Fwinter1/sandbox

Introduction

Teachers enjoy regaling that “Wikipedia is an unreliable source”. They don’t regularly cite their source for this statement. They know it can be a good place to find sources, they inevitably explain, but anyone can edit it! Never cite it or take information directly from it!

One school teacher, the urban myth goes, went so far as to edit Wikipedia to demonstrate its fallibility to students, quickly succeeding in his mission to stop them using it by getting the entire school IP-banned. (I tried to find a citation: I can’t find evidence of a school being banned, but there have been teachers trying this. Wikipedia admins found it hilarious every time.)

However, I argue that Wikipedia’s usefulness goes far beyond that of a collection of further sources. Instead it can serve as a crowdsourced base of highly synthesised information on practically any topic, as well as its generally accepted place as a an excellent primer. The only question is whether such summaries are reliable.

Comparison

It’s helpful to compare Wikipedia to any other source. Let’s take, say, a reputable newspaper as a comparison. Both a news story or Wikipedia article consist of information that an author (or multiple) has deemed reliable, either by research or personal knowledge. Either way, the source should be cited, and is more likely to be on Wikipedia than in mainstream publications. This makes verifying suspicious claims far easier on Wikipedia than anywhere else.

Wikipedia has two distinctive characteristics in contrast. First, that it aspires to be an encyclopaedia, stating fact without bias. Whilst some papers aspire to neutrality (aside from the fact that none manage it), reporting news inherently focuses on timely recent events and often attempts to predict, whilst painting a descriptive narrative. Wikipedia does not: “The goal of a Wikipedia article is to create a comprehensive and neutrally written summary of existing mainstream knowledge about a topic”.

Second, any given page for all but the most niche topics will have more than one author. The beauty of Wikipedia comes from its open nature - multiple people with an interest in a topic will contribute to each page, with all edits and their origins being openly visible. Wikipedia is therefore far more likely than most sources (not limited to newspapers) to be accurate simply by virtue of not being the work of a single group or individual. An investigation by Nature, for example, found that against the (far smaller but commercial) Encyclopædia Britannica, Wikipedia maintained only slightly higher rates of error.

Wikipedia therefore functions as a secondary or tertiary source, of higher quality than most. Whilst finding the original source of information is ideal, this isn't always possible: if we are to outlaw Wikipedia on the basis of mixed authors writing it, then we, for consistency, have to either disregard any other non-primary source or thoroughly vet the identity of every author of any source. This is clearly absurd.

Conclusion

Wikipedia is the epitome of what the internet ought to be used for - open source, collaborative and accessible information collation and sharing. It’s far from perfect - less than 25% (and likely far less) of editors are female, and erors and hoaxes can survive (see: the 15-year-surviving pun hoax of “Sheikh Urbuti”).

Wikipedia is not a trove of omniscient fact, but neither is anywhere else. It is possibly the best summary of most topics on the internet. Use it selectively, and it is perfectly valid as a resource and one of your sources in most circumstances. Teachers may argue otherwise.