Is Wikipedia a reliable source?

Wikipedia has been known in any formal education institution for exhibiting systemic bias and inconsistency; they argue that Wikipedia's open nature and a lack of proper sources for much of the information makes it unreliable.

Many university lecturers around the world discourage students from citing any encyclopedia in academic work, preferring primary sources;

In any University in United States you cannot use Wikipedia as a referred reference or resource for any project or work papers. The reason is because the authors are not experienced and they are neither professional or qualified to compose any material that can be used in anyway for tertiary educational platforms.

Similar cases are also with tertiary educational institutions around the world - especially UK and Europe.

Concerns have also been raised regarding the lack of accountability that results from users' anonymity, and that it is vulnerable to vandalism and similar problems

Wikipedia's community has been described as "cult-like, although not always with entirely negative connotations, and criticized for failing to accommodate inexperienced users.

Wikipedia may not be absolutely perfect. Sure, it has some faults. However, for basic information, I think it's pretty dead on, considering most of the information comes from reliable and actual news sources. You can see the references most times, as the links are provided. For whatever reason, I've always felt that Wiki receives a lot of abuse it doesn't deserve. It's a very useful tool that always helps me firm up facts or make sure I get the spelling of names right. While the information can be changed by anyone, I've yet to see absolute bogus information last for very long. Therefore, I feel it's a fairly reliable source.

You're right about Wiki not being very reliable because I could go on there right now and edit an article to say something totally random. People post information on there that is not always accurate.

My teacher had a good way of sorting out good Wiki stuff and bad stuff. She said that we could use Wikipedia to find ideas for things or information, but that we could not use the actual information in our project without looking it up on a more trusted source. So basically, we could search Wiki for facts but we had to find another site with the information, and we would use the second site as our citation.

A good site:

http://www.britannica.com/

and you can always go to google and search for information, or you can go to the library and use real encyclopedias! :-)

P.S. Watch out for sites like answers.com. Sometimes it looks like they have a lot of good information, but really what they do most of the time is copy articles from Wikipedia! The site is okay, but make sure that the information you use from it doesn't come from Wikipedia.

Depending on the subject, Wikipedia has been found pretty accurate, but when it comes to more emotional, business, or political entries, you'll need to dig more in depth. Several entries were found to be "sanitized" by companies and governments lately when a scanner for edits was used (see the last link below for the tool itself).

There are several free online encyclopedias you can use, such as MSN's encarta. Also, doing well-formed searches in Yahoo Search or Google can get you a ton of information as well.

If you do look in Wikipedia for your information, remember two things: First, be sure to look for their citations and look them up. Second, some teachers/professors will refuse to allow Wikipedia as a citation in a paper, so be sure either way.

Good luck!

Sure, there are plenty of wiki projects on the web, like WikiHow, Bulbapedia, and iPodWiKi, but there is only one Comprehensive Encyclopedia Wiki, and that's Wikipedia. So No luck in that department.

Wikipedia is a great site for info. The catch to it is that one can make public changes on the website, so there can be a tangling of certain info. Some famous people, things, or places don't even have pages on wiki, so one can get a downer time to time.

Answers is a good place for info.

There is no information on the internet that is entirely reliable because anyone could have put it there and the same goes for wikipedia. But I've heard that it is about 75% as accurate as the Britanica encyclopedias.. which is pretty good for the internet.

The Wikimedia foundation says that you should NEVER use the wikipedia as a reliable source. You should double check with a regular source before treating wikipedia info as fact.

No, anyone can edit and put wrong info onto wiki articles, and I really don't know any other online encyclopedias XP sorry.

dictionary.com helps too. XDD

No it is not unless the pages have reliable links. If they do then wikipedia can be a good starting point.