Don't you love when people put Wikipedia as their source for answering questions on here?

As a computer scientist - and this issue has been discussed time and time again in my classes - you are right to a point. Where people can just go and put whatever they want, people do read and report offenses. According to some studies, the science and technology sections are about as accurate as the Encyclopedia Brutanica. In many cases, it was more complete.

Also, many articles link external sources and you can read the discussion on how the article was created and what information needs to be put up there. It's more reliable than most of the websites out there.

Hilarious no? I do the same as well, and usually the info is right. What can we say? Wikipedia is always going to be the website where anybody can edit, forever.

We just put our trust to the website, or maybe we're just slightly lazy to look it up on another website.

Then again, how do you know that the other website has the correct information?

Who is editing that website?

Oh well, Wikipedia is still a good website regardless of this.

Go ahead and put it on there. GIve me the link for me to see. A bot will have modified the article by the time you give me a link, so in reality, wikipedia is somewhat secure. And incase you didnt notice, wikipedia gets its sources from other sites as well, and can be used as a search engine for sites in and of itself with the side-notes and references cited at the bottom of each page. Wikipedia may not be a school creditable source, but this site isnt a reasearch paper, no is it?

Still - it's better than not giving ANY source...

Besides... If 80% of the people on here either Googled their question - or checked Wikipedia first - there would be a LOT less stupid questions. You know - the ones that go:

"When was Abe Lincoln born?" ;););););)

I've found some weird stuff on Wikipedia pages, but usually Wiki has good info. One time I was reading abut the military of Spain, and at the bottom of the page, someone put something like "James is a loser, and he has a small d***!!".

Well, in that respect, is there really any source that can be a definitive one? Any website out there is just someone's writings, at least wiki has multiple contributors, and tons of people fact checking.

But what I love about this site is the questions are dumb! You're telling me you can take the 5 minutes to navigate here to ask a question, but can't look it up yourself?

Looking for lyrics bugs me, can't google lyrics and song title on your own?

well its better than someone giving no source. most people just pull answers out of their head with no source at all, like im doing right now. go ahead and make abe lincoln first president on wikipedia and see how long it stays like that.

wikipedia is good, but there 2 things that really anger me about it:

1. anyone can put anything on there. Once i was reading an answer about troy smith, and at the bottom it was like "Troy Smith was god, now he is a crappy Qb on a crappy team". that kinga angered me cuz Troy Smith plays ion my fav spports them (the Blatimore Ravens)

2. teachers won't let you use it as a source. I could find htoo many sources on the web on a topic i was researching for a history project, but i found a 7 page article on wikipedia!

I don't think it's stupid at all, especially if the information on Wikipedia has reliable sources. I tend to use Wikipedia for everything, even if I don't trust it 100%, for things relating to entertainment or "popular" topics, it's extremely useful.

Fascinating. Try changing the article about Abraham Lincoln to say that he was the first president. It'll be changed back before you even tell us you did.

Just because you can edit it and say something untrue doesn't mean it is likely to be that way for more than 30 seconds. So the odds of encountering false information is quite low.