Can You Trust Wikipedia?

Since I use Wikipedia a lot to source stuff and to provide links, this article in The Guardian interested me. In Can You Trust Wikipedia? they have picked up on founder Jimbo Wales’s comments that some of their entries are ‘a horrific embarrassment’ and asked some experts to assess entries in their chosen fields.

What it seems to me is that the denser the subject the less likely the quality is to be high. I’d always use it as a decent starting point.

As it’s the internet you can never trust just one source, it’s always best to look around for two or three and see if the information matches and if it does make sure it’s not just been a direct lift from source A to source B.

This entry from The Guardian’s blog goes into the story in more detail and provides several other links.