: Re: Is Wikipedia Trustworthy? So in elementary school, I was told not to use Wikipedia too much because you can't trust what they write. So then for all the projects, I used the Canadian Encyclopedia,

@BetL639

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Wikipedia policy requires that editors cite sources to support their edits. However, there's no systematic process for checking that editors are accurately representing the sources they cite, or that the sources are reliable, or that they even exist.

It usually works pretty well when a page attracts attention from multiple editors who are willing to scrutinise and challenge one another. For instance, if I add something to George W. Bush's Wikipedia page that isn't true, it's very likely that somebody else who has good knowledge of W's life will notice and call me on it. At that point, if I can't produce an acceptable source to support my edit, that edit will be reverted, and if I keep trying to push the point I'll probably eventually get banned.

However, there are cases where the Wikipedia model doesn't work so well. A couple of examples:

(1) Wikipedia policy leans heavily on the notion of "reliable sources", which is inherently difficult to define - in some cases the same newspaper/etc. may be reliable on certain topics and unreliable on others.

As an example, a friend of mine edited the Wiki article on one of her favourite entertainers, adding a "fact" about him which she'd just made up. It was plausible and innocuous, but utterly fictional. She didn't include a citation for this "fact", but nobody challenged it at the time, because it wasn't the kind of page that attracts close scrutiny.

A couple of years later, two major newspapers wrote profiles of this guy. Both of them used information from the Wikipedia article including my friend's "fact" without mentioning that they'd taken it from Wikipedia, and apparently without checking it.

Both of these papers would generally be considered "reliable sources" by Wiki's standards - one is among the world's most prestigious newspapers - and the Wikipedia article now cites both of them as evidence for the "fact". If you google his name, my friend's fake "fact" now appears at the top of the search results.

(No, I'm not going to give more details; it's not harming anybody and it's a useful reminder that even newspapers of record get lazy with fact-checking sometimes.)

(2) Wikipedia editors vastly prefer online sources for reasons of convenience. A source that's not available online is much less likely to be checked, and this can be exploited. Back when I was editing Wikipedia I found one bad-faith editor who was making up cites to sources that simply didn't exist, because it was much easier for him to make things up than it was for other editors to go track down an off-line source available in only one location to check whether it really said what he claimed.

As others have suggested, it's generally a bad idea to cite Wikipedia directly, but it can be a very good place to start: read the Wikipedia article, check what sources it cites, and then go look up those sources... and check whether the Wikipedia article has represented them accurately.

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