User:Isomorphic/Essays/The Question of Accuracy

The point of an encyclopedia isn't to be used as a source in a research paper, it's to get an overview of a topic. The encyclopedia is supposed to give you a way to look for other resources on a topic, and any facts found in an encyclopedia need to be checked and referenced from wherever the encyclopedia writers got them, not the encyclopedia.

These words, from a Kuro5hin entry [1] are probably the simplest, most eloquent defense of Wikipedia I've heard. It perfectly encapsulates how I feel about Wikipedia, and why I use it even though I'm perfectly aware that it contains errors, sometimes even glaring ones.

That's just how the world works. It's full of inaccurate information about all kinds of things. Newspapers certainly don't have any monopoly on the truth. Heck, reading through the articles on Wikipedia:Press coverage turns up errors. They're getting better now that we're well-known, but in the early days the errors were glaring. One newspaper even claimed that Howard Rheingold founded Wikipedia, a mistake they could have corrected with three minutes of research using Wikipedia itself. I see no reason to believe that newspapers are any more accurate when covering other subjects than they are when covering Wikipedia. And yet, nobody suggests that newspapers are useless.

Imagine a friend who knows more than you about almost anything. That's what Wikipedia is. Sure, your friend will be wrong at times, and won't always be unbiased, but that happens in real life too. How often does that stop you from asking your friends questions?

The most accurate information on Wikipedia is in subjects that lots of people know about. Topics like Germany or compact disc aren't going to contain serious errors because there are so many people who could spot them. Now I've heard people say that it's the obscure pages, the ones that people don't know much about, that are the real value of an encyclopedia, and if those are inaccurate then the project has little value. That's missing the point; the fact that many people know a subject doesn't mean I know anything about it at all.

Besides, it's generally easier to check an answer than to find the answer from scratch. Any computer scientist can tell you that, and so can any librarian. Offhand, I have no idea who the important political figures were in sixteenth century Japan, but I'm sure I could find some in Wikipedia. Once I have some names of people and events, it's easier to go looking in more traditional or specialized resources. And that's what a general reference is for.

I feel silly. I checked History of Japan, and it turns out I do know that period, having played far too much of the game Shingen the Ruler as a kid. The sixteenth century was the era of the big civil wars, with folks like Oda Nobunaga and Takeda Shingen. Didn't know it was called the Sengoku period though. See what we learn?