How reliable do you consider Wikipedia to be at this point?

MadSquabbles500 said:
What about the other info pages like About.com?
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I can't remember the last time I used About.com for anything. As I mentioned earlier, I do use britannica.com fairly regularly though and I feel like it's an underutilized resource. When it's good, it's really good, like Wikipedia but with the professional quality control you expect from an organization like Britannica. The main drawbacks are that Wikipedia is just so much bigger in terms of the number of articles it hosts and often times the Wiki article on a certain topic has a lot more information than the Britannica article on that same topic.

When I want to gain an overview of a subject I always pull up the Wiki article but I usually also go see what Britannica has to offer as well.
 
shadow_priest_x said:
I can't remember the last time I used About.com for anything. As I mentioned earlier, I do use britannica.com fairly regularly though and I feel like it's an underutilized resource. When it's good, it's really good, like Wikipedia but with the professional quality control you expect from an organization like Britannica. The main drawbacks are that Wikipedia is just so much bigger in terms of the number of articles it hosts and often times the Wiki article on a certain topic has a lot more information than the Britannica article on that same topic.

When I want to gain an overview of a subject I always pull up the Wiki article but I usually also go see what Britannica has to offer as well.
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Britannica really fallen by the wayside, which is strange because they are for profit. They should have the resources to overtake Wiki.
 
Johnson said:
I had actual hardback encyclopedias with each letter getting its own volume when I was younger, so I think an update-able encyclopedia are more accurate compared to those written in stone like the former.
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The advantages of a digital, easily updated encyclopedia are obvious, but I have to say, I still miss having a hard-bound set of encyclopedias on my bookshelf. If the power grid ever goes down we're going to regret abandoning them.
 
MadSquabbles500 said:
Britannica really fallen by the wayside, which is strange because they are for profit. They should have the resources to overtake Wiki.
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Yeah, I don't know how many people even think about Britannica anymore. Nevertheless, they have a fully-functioning Internet encyclopedia and it's a solid resource overall.

As for overtaking Wiki, the problem is that they just don't have the resources to generate nearly the same amount of content, since they rely on actual experts along with their small army of editors to write everything. The last I looked Wikipedia hosts something like 5.5 million individual articles in the English version of the site. Britannica.com, on the other hand, has about 120,000 (which you can compare to the old print edition, which had about 40,000).
 
shadow_priest_x said:
Yeah, I don't know how many people even think about Britannica anymore. Nevertheless, they have a fully-functioning Internet encyclopedia and it's a solid resource overall.

As for overtaking Wiki, the problem is that they just don't have the resources to generate nearly the same amount of content, since they rely on actual experts along with their small army of editors to write everything. The last I looked Wikipedia hosts something like 5.5 million individual articles in the English version of the site. Britannica.com, on the other hand, has about 120,000.
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Britannica makes advertising money. They should just hire more people, and can assure the authenticity with the money. Then more people will go to their site, and they can make more advertising money. Britannica must be run by cucks.

Look at the Youtube. They have huge content, and make advertising money. Brittannica needs to step up the game.
 
When the article is protected I would think that article is a very reliable source.
 
also it is foolish at this point to doubt the accuracy of Wikipedia for the vast majority of articles. To see how even handed and scholarly it is, take a look at controversial topics like
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesus

Where it fails is on very niche topics without verifiable sources. But any broadly studied subject is well represented and accurate.
 
Reliable enough to start a search. But if I’m more than casually interested, I’ll have to find more resources. Sometimes a good page has decent citations though that allow me to go to the next level.
 
bad seed said:
also it is foolish at this point to doubt the accuracy of Wikipedia for the vast majority of articles. To see how even handed and scholarly it is, take a look at controversial topics like
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesus

Where it fails is on very niche topics without verifiable sources. But any broadly studied subject is well represented and accurate.
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WTF? Jesus war'nt no Jew, boy. You best get off my property befurr I stand my ground.
 
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