WikipediaReviews 175

I've used this site many times to research things, and found it to be incredibly useful. But recently I had the opportunity to post up information on Wiki pages that deal with an issue that I specialize in, and I found out how dysfunctional Wikipedia was. As near as I could tell I was in full compliance with their posting policies, but every time I posted information, it was taken down immediately. When I asked why, I was told it was because I was not an expert. When I probed further it became clear that the person who thought I was not an expert clearly knew far less about the posting topic than I did, and wasn't really qualified to judge my expert status either way. I actually am the Only independent national expert on the topic that I was posting on. After 3 days of back & forth discussions with "citizen monitors" who would not let me post any information, I came to the conclusion that the volunteers who control the posting process and have the right to take down legit postings were poorly trained, and that it would take less time to use other venues to get information out on my topic.
So given the problem that I had trying to contribute useful information on a topic, I have to assume that many other Wiki pages are also compromised by the actions of poorly trained volunteers at Wikipedia.

I think Wikipedia is a fun site and gives you a good broad overview of things. However, the content often has errors and it is not a fully reliable source for information. I will put it this way, my daughter tried to use it was a source for a research paper and the teacher gave the entire class a lesson about finding more valid sources. That is not intended as a putdown to Wikipedia. It is good, general knowledge but if you are seriously researching something you need to dig deeper.

You actually don't need to do primary or secondary schooling. You can just go straight to college. For that, use this website, plus books of course. As of right now the English Wikipedia has 3,945,605 articles in English. The German Wikipedia has 1,383,000 in German. The entire Encyclopedia has over 1 Billion edits. Its free for users to register and join to contribute content.
The website is very well organized. A little trick, Alt + X = random article

You can try to pull the "but it could have been written by a 3 year old" card out for this site but it wouldn't be realistic. Wikipedia is well moderated and there's something to be said for the fact that it appears in the top ten of nearly every internet search.

In fact, I think wikipedia is probably MORE accurate than other "encyclopedias" because of HOW it is moderated.

Either way, if you've been browsing the internet for more than 10 minutes you probably already know (and have used) wikipedia. You don't need yet another review telling you that it's a good thing. You already know.

REASONS TO USE:
[1] Well moderated
[2] Amazingly diverse information library
[3] Relevant to almost every search for information

REASON TO LOSE:
[1] None.

There is a reason why I will not give full ratings for Wikipedia and it has to do with two reasons

1. Everyone likes to see Wikipedia as an information tool which it is but does it have credible and reliable and trustworthy information on it all of the time? The answer is that not all of the time is this the case. At times one will come across pages on Wikipedia where the information may not be able to be trusted because the page does not refer to any actual sources for what has been posted

2. Moderators at times tend to have prejudices against those who post certain kinds of information that they deem "inappropriate" when actually it is not inappropriate at all and eventually gets removed by them sadly. It is many times difficult to get them to take down a tag on a post that they have deemed inappropriate when actually it may not be the case. What a shame!

However the site still has its usefulness!.