Just saw this somewhere and thought it was an interesting argument so decided to add. Source will remain anonymous.

In response to the belief that Wikipedia is the worst source ever, that it is effectively "popular consensus", or formalized rumor.

Wikipedia is far from the worst source ever. People act as if Wikipedia doesn’t have editors and don’t source their articles. As long as a source is given and you can check it people shouldn’t cry. So sick of teachers pushing that Wikipedia is trash down my throat. If you can check the sources then don’t cry foul. I can understand if the sources aren’t cited but if they are… Everything that can't be verified should indeed be taken with a grain of salt. I’m just sick of people throwing everything out of the window just because someone mentions Wikipedia. And sometimes the only refutable source on a topic IS Wikipedia. For example if you were researching “the scene”.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scene
And sometimes Wikipedia is the BEST place to start your research if you lack direction. Wikipedia can be the best place to start from because it is concise. It’s the same way older generations dismiss video games as art. People act like Wikipedia has no police force. When people see errors on there they usually get corrected. We’ve all seen people mess with articles on there before. I press refresh and then they’re gone. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seigenthaler_controversy
The issue with these instances is that the sources weren't cited which means that it doesn’t fault my argument. And don’t you try to act like since its always changing it can’t be used because when you cite sources you have to put the date the website is retrieved. When something big happens that causes public opinion on a topic to change Wikipedia locks the topic from editing so that there isn’t an influx of changes. Only reason why people started trippin’ on Wikipedia was because of people editing the Kennedy assassination. It got news coverage and now everyone is like, “anyone can edit it" as if the edits will stay. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kennedy_assassination
You're telling me all of the citing of the Warren commission report doesn’t matter which is the GO TO report for the assassination. Sure people can lie about what’s on it but that’s why you CHECK YOUR SOURCES when you write a paper.
Now I’m not going to front. I've seen some "articles" on Wikipedia that looked like they were written by tards but those articles weren’t the important ones. An example of this would be an article I found on a rap group local to Dallas by the name of DSR which looked like a 5th grader wrote it. None of the sources were cited so I took it with a grain of salt.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirty_South_Rydaz
The writer doesn’t even know how to spell clique right, uses "clicks". That was the biggest sign that it wasn't written by someone of competence, that being the lack of punctuation etc.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia#Criticism
These are concerns that people bring up.

Wikipedia's content policies[10] and sub-projects set up by contributors seek to address these concerns.[74] Several scholarly studies have concluded that vandalism is generally short-lived,[12] and that Wikipedia is roughly as accurate as other online encyclopedias.14 With nearly hundreds of thousands of contributors, over 2 million articles in English, hundreds of thousands of articles in other languages, the sheer scope of Wikipedia dwarfs traditional encyclopedias in size of content, human investigative resources, peer-review and editorial efforts and is unrivaled in human history as a collaborative effort in the written language.
In August 2007, a new website developed by computer science graduate student Virgil Griffith named WikiScanner made its public debut. WikiScanner traces the source of millions of changes made to Wikipedia by editors who are not logged in, and has revealed some interesting and controversial edits its first few days of use. Many of these edits came from corporations or sovereign government agencies about articles related to them, their personnel or their work, and were attempts to remove criticism.[75]

The point is:

1. The concerns are being addressed.
2. Most edits are being caught.
3. Vandalism is short-lived.
4. If the sources are cited and checkable, dont cry foul.

In order to improve reliability, some editors have called for "stable versions" of articles, or articles that have been reviewed by the community and locked from further editing – but these efforts have proven unsuccessful due to community disagreement and the fact that it would require a major software overhaul.[59][60] However a similar version is being tested on the German Wikipedia, and there is an expectation that some form of that system will make its way onto the English version in a few months.[61] Software created by Luca de Alfaro and colleagues at the University of California, Santa Cruz is now being tested that will assign "trust ratings" to individual Wikipedia contributors, with the intention that eventually only edits made by those who have established themselves as "trusted editors" will be made immediately visible. [62]

That is all. Charlie Brown fo life!

note: and don't forget to keep it civil in here.

why back in the day we didn't 'download', we had to swim to japan if we wanted fresh anime and that was only if...

I dream of a better tomorrow... where chickens can cross roads and not have their motives questioned.

lol, that's hilarious. especially the seigenthaler one. the satire is pretty undertoned

but i always use wikipedia, and choose some random other site as the source instead. the teachers never check the sources anyways, they just make sure that wiki isn't on there

"Rule No. 1 is, don't sweat the small stuff. Rule No. 2 is, it's all small stuff." - Robert Eliot, Writer

"Oh boy, here we go...again." - Israfel

I'm getting too old....

I love Wikipedia!

I always use that as a starting point as well, I would click the sources that they have there and use that as a source.

Oh yea, the wikiscanner, heard about that one too 🤣 Even major corporations and whatnots are editing their own stuff.

yep. saves so much time

me and my friend both made an article about ourselves. lol, too bad they killed it after a week. i was insulted. apparently you have to be famous to be on wikipedia, and i wasn't famous enough XD

"Rule No. 1 is, don't sweat the small stuff. Rule No. 2 is, it's all small stuff." - Robert Eliot, Writer

"Oh boy, here we go...again." - Israfel

I'm getting too old....

Quote from Israfel

yep. saves so much time

me and my friend both made an article about ourselves. lol, too bad they killed it after a week. i was insulted. apparently you have to be famous to be on wikipedia, and i wasn't famous enough XD

LOL, that was what i was going to do, but then got lazy and all. lie on the floor because it's freaking hot

R-18 below
[img]https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/32718267/aot.jpg[/img]
Detective Horror Series

Tracker BakaBT

Aw, I would have read it even if you weren't famous yet! 😀

Wikipedia = ban, in my university. Though, I think it's a good thing. I don't like wikipedia sometimes... ex. "Jamaica is a country that I really like" 😐 and then I refreshed it, and it disappeared.

Quote from Israfel

yep. saves so much time

me and my friend both made an article about ourselves. lol, too bad they killed it after a week. i was insulted. apparently you have to be famous to be on wikipedia, and i wasn't famous enough XD

LOL it's because you needed to cite sources! And you have to translate it to a few other languages 😛

I think Wikipedia is awesome, I use it all the time 😃

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I've never met a teacher that thinks Wikipedia is bogus.

For a while I didn't trust wiki either but after looking elsewhere for an assignment, I finally found something worth while on wiki. Now I use it all the time.

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Quote from E-chan52

I've never met a teacher that thinks Wikipedia is bogus.

hahah, really? none of my teachers allow wikipedia as an official source. not that i dont use it though. ;P

[img]http://i94.photobucket.com/albums/l87/xinvisible/pacman.gif[/img]

Funny stuff they deleted off Wiki...

** [color=green]Mad people either have no sense or too many extra senses... [/color]**
[color=red]On the net, men are men, women are men and children are the FBI. =D[/color]

Quote from kiddo

Quote from E-chan52

I've never met a teacher that thinks Wikipedia is bogus.

hahah, really? none of my teachers allow wikipedia as an official source. not that i dont use it though. ;P

Same here 🤣 (Well, I don't know about the source thing, but my teacher doesn't want us to use it 😛 )

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All of my research starts with wikipedia...

Quote from blakraven66

All of my research starts with wikipedia...

So does mine, but just as a jumping off point to what I should type in google. (And I check the links/references-cause there tend to be good sources there.)

There was an article in Nature a while ago that found that on average wiki was more correct than many encyclopedias, (but it's since been criticized, so take with a grain of salt) and I'm finding some other studies, just too lazy to comb through abstracts at the moment. That being said, the usual arguments with wiki not being a citeable source still holds, and actually holds for encyclopedias too, which is why you won't find many of them cited either. Authorship, version control, and I forget what else, probably how the encyclopedia attains/presents its data. (source). Wiki actually has a solid page on what's considered a good source:
link

My professors have generally allowed wiki as a source for informal assignments like homework and initial research proposals. Not for papers or essays. The only exception I could think of was my technical writing paper on wiki, and that was probably simply because I was writing about the code/architecture and all of wikis documentation is in a wiki.

Hahaha... go wikipedia rant! I totally agree... there was this one time where I cited wiki on a quiz or something... and my professor was like, wiki is not a credible source!

...but I got the question right...

...and also, the reason why i cited it was because i didn't get that knowledge from myself or the book. 😛 it was easier to type it... and therefore, i wanted to give credit where it was due.

...

so yeah! XD

-Max