> Wikipedia looks like a fantastic resource, but it's not really a reliable source of information. Everyone can write things there, including people with biases and conflicting interests. Their rules about editing are really annoying and unfair, they don't care about facts.
This is what lecturers and teachers a tell us.
Yet it’s far and away the most accurate and comprehensive resource I know of. When I search the few topics I think I deeply understand, it’s very rarely wrong. I corrected the last error I found.
It was a small one and wouldn’t have tripped the unwary.
Something can be technically correct, yet unreliable. How? Simply by reporting with a bias. The easiest example would be to look at a left (or right) leaning but accurate news organization like Vox or WSJ - they’re absolutely great at many topics, but read only one of the two and you’d have a slightly distorted view of everything. Being unbiased is incredibly hard even for newspapers, let alone a volunteer run org.
For a more specific example of wiki’s biases, think of the average Reddit bias - like their insistence of “if you can’t prove it it doesn’t exist”. A lot of people in the world would be very sad if they learnt that their god supposedly vanished.
This is what lecturers and teachers a tell us.
Yet it’s far and away the most accurate and comprehensive resource I know of. When I search the few topics I think I deeply understand, it’s very rarely wrong. I corrected the last error I found. It was a small one and wouldn’t have tripped the unwary.