Why I trust Wikipedia

Wikipedia has become an enormously important way of sharing information. It's used by everyone from elementary school students to doctors and CEOs. However, it seems to be a commonly held belief that Wikipedia is not an accurate resource. Most schools don't accept Wikipedia as a citation for reports; some even specify that "any website except Wikipedia" can be used. Why is it so many people don't trust Wikipedia? And, more importantly, are they right not to?

Wikipedia is not perfect, of course — but I intend to show in this post that it is one of the best and most reliable sources on the internet. I'll start by responding to some of the common arguments against Wikipedia.

"Wikipedia can be edited by anyone at any time and is therefore unreliable."

This is probably the most common argument out there. Yes, it's true that anybody with an internet connection can edit Wikipedia. Yes, there's always the possibility that a vandal decides to deface a page the moment before a reader views it. This, however, doesn't discredit the reliability of the entire encyclopædia. Here's why.

• Edits to Wikipedia are constantly being monitored. There are hundreds of people watching the recent changes feed at any given time. There are counter-vandalism programs like Huggle, Twinkle, and others which many people make use of. On top of that, there are many readers looking through pages on Wikipedia who will remove any vandalism they find.
• Edits by anonymous users are automatically flagged as suspicious. It's true that anyone can edit Wikipedia, but those that do so without registering for an account (so-called IP Users, since their IP is displayed in place of a username) risk having their edits removed simply due to the fact that they don't have a reputation in the Wikipedia community. If an anonymous user adds content that is unsourced, it is far more likely to be removed than if an established user does so. If an anonymous user hopes for his or her edits to remain on Wikipedia, the edits should be accompanied with a link to a relevant policy page justifying them. It's common to see edit summaries like "Miscellaneous information section removed as per WP:TRIVIA." If an anonymous user makes a change and doesn't include a good edit summary, their change probably won't last longer than a few seconds. Edits are more likely to persist if they're made by established users who have a good reputation in the Wikipedia community.
• Users identified as vandals are blocked. If a user (whether anonymous or logged in) makes an edit that is identified as vandalism and is then reverted, the user usually receives a warning on their talk page. The warning messages increase in severity with each unconstructive edit until the user is reported as a vandal and blocked from editing by an administrator. If they're an anonymous user, their IP is blocked. There have been cases where entire schools and offices have been blocked because someone using the IP repeatedly vandalized Wikipedia.
• There are bots on Wikipedia to immediately revert changes that are clearly vandalism. Examples include edits which insert strings of profanity or random sexual words throughout the page. Edits like this are flagged by bots like ClueBot right away and removed. These bots also have the ability to warn users and request blocks.
• Edits which are detected as being suspicious are flagged by the software. There are a number of reasons why the MediaWiki software might flag an edit as suspicious; perhaps the editor only joined Wikipedia today, or their IP address has a history of vandalism, or the edit blanked large sections of the page, or the edit contained some links to external sites. Edits like this are marked with a red exclamation point on the recent changes feed so that reviewers will pay them extra attention. The edit can only be unflagged if an established user marks it as patrolled.
• Pages which are likely to be vandalized or have been vandalized a lot are restricted from editing. The process is called page protection, and it restricts any anonymous users (as well as users whose accounts are less than four days old or have less than ten edits) from making any changes to the page. Pages about controversial subjects (such as politics or abortion) are frequently protected in anticipation of vandalism. So, the belief that anyone can edit anything on Wikipedia is not entirely true.
• Wikipedia requires valid sources. If significant content is added to a page without a citation, it is removed, or at least annotated with the infamous ^{[ citation needed]} template. Often, citations (and their corresponding facts) are removed because they are not reputable or reliable enough. Articles with only one citation are either deleted or modified to include a bunch of flags and disclaimers at the top (for an example, see the page on Mandingo Theory; at the time of posting, there are quite a few disclaiming templates at the top). There are actually a lot of other templates like the citation needed one which indicate a problem with a statement or section (see here).

"Content on Wikipedia isn't peer-reviewed."

This argument is commonly used in contrasting Wikipedia with academic journals and print encyclopædias. It's true that a scholarly article written by someone with a Ph.D. in the subject will probably be more reliable than a Wikipedia article on the same subject. However, a mistake on Wikipedia will certainly be corrected sooner than a mistake in a scholarly article. Wikipedia may not always be peer-reviewed by academics, but whether it's better to have an article reviewed by two or three graduate students or 90,000 non-graduate editors is up for debate.

On that note, there is still some degree of professional peer-review on Wikipedia. Articles about very specific or complex topics are often fitted with a template stating they are in need of attention from an expert. The template is removed when someone with a degree in the field reviews and edits the article.

Long story short, while you probably shouldn't refer to Wikipedia if you're about to attempt brain surgery or defuse a bomb, it's certainly reliable and accurate enough for more common usage.

When it comes to comparing Wikipedia with other encyclopædias, there has been a lot of research done into the comparison of Wikipedia and Encyclopædia Britannica which I'll discuss in the next section.

"There are many articles on Wikipedia that are poorly written."

This is a rather weak argument for a number of reasons. Consider:

• There are many articles on Wikipedia that are written very well. See the list of Featured Articles for some examples. The fact that there are many poor-quality articles on Wikipedia is a product of the fact that there are many articles on Wikipedia. By nature, articles which are searched more and draw more public interest (and are hence more important) are the ones which are more comprehensive and accurate. The article on a random high school in Ohio might not be the most lengthy or accurate, but the article on maple syrup certainly is. What matters more than number of errors or poor-quality articles, is the ratio of good articles to bad and the ratio of correct facts to incorrect facts. One way to quantitatively rate these ratios on Wikipedia is to compare it to another encyclopedia.
• Wikipedia has less errors per word than the peer-reviewed Encyclopedia Britannica. Check out the study done by Nature in 2005 comparing the two. This isn't meant to criticize EB, but rather to illustrate why the Wikipedia approach to information sharing is superior. If an error is found in EB, it will probably last at least a couple of weeks, if it's even found in the first place. Errors on Wikipedia are a) far more likely to be found, and b) much easier to correct.