I was reading about the New York Giants beating the Packers on Wikipedia when I came across this:

 

 With a 23-20 overtime win over the Packers in Green Bay they head to Super Bowl XLII. They shouldn't have won the game though because everybody knows the Packers are better. Also the Giants announced that they will forfeit their win and trip to the super bowl because they know they don't deserve it.

 

Now I know why Wikipedia has the reputation that it does.

Wikipedia is not a news site. Over time the articles on Wikipedia are reviewed and authenticated. You have to be careful what you trust on Wikipedia, but it's not worth distrusting the whole thing off the bat.

Yeah, I usually read it for general information, but that caught me by surprise.

Wikipedia is only good for starting your work or for general knowledge.

1. Starting  your work, you get a rough idea of what something is and then you can research on these precise subject, you can also get some good books from the sources at the bottom of the page.

2. For general knowledge, you want to know something but you don't want to spend 6 years reading all 23054 books on the subject and if you wanted too, you'd be better going to the university. You don't care much about it's absolute veracity, it's only so you can have a rough idea of how something works without knowing the full details. Kind of like reading a science magazine about string theory but not reading and understanding how to use mathematics to explain it.

If you do hand in a research paper with most of what you have written related only to wikipedia, expect some spanking, and if you do not live in England, expect a bad mark. 

 

Loomis wrote: Wikipedia is not a news site. Over time the articles on Wikipedia are reviewed and authenticated. You have to be careful what you trust on Wikipedia, but it's not worth distrusting the whole thing off the bat.

---

 

ya know large companies hire people to edit posts about themselves

I read somewhere that the average science article on wikipedia has 4 errors, whereas a typical encyclopedia has 3. I think that's really good, considering wikipedia is user-written, and covers far more information than a traditional published encyclopedia.

Wikipedia is written by average people though, so it gets more and more accurate as time goes on, since people correct, add references, add alterntive viewpoints, and re-correct. It isn't a news site, and if you're reading about things that just happened (especially something like sports where every single person who is interested in it is biased), then yeah, expect to be misinformed. 

That's a football article. Football doesn't matter, but more importantly, it's a non-technical, non-specialist, emotionally charged topic, attracting a wide audience liable to vandalize the page. No one is going to vandalize the "Fission product" page or "Modular arithmetic" - math and science articles on Wikipedia have virtually no vandalism, and are easy to use.