Dear friend

Wikipedia is a collaborative encyclopedia. It's maintained by a large amount of people, including anonymous people who only come to fix a spelling error; so you can see why some people might want to call it unreliable.  If anyone and anyone can come right on in and change it all, then what's to stop the whole site descending into chaos?

I have a few rebuttals to this.

Firstly, Wikipedia may have the occasional griefer, yes - that's to be expected since it's open to everyone - but the vast majority of users are there to spread valid information in an as objective and truthful way as possible. There are rules and guidelines that Wikipedia specifies, and moderators and trusted users are there make sure these guidelines are kept. Bots also perform maintenance and upkeep around the clock. If repeated acts of vandalism happen from the same IP address, the IP gets blocked. This is why you can't edit Wikipedia in schools. (But let's face it - school kids aren't to be trusted anyway.)

Secondly, the MediaWiki engine that powers Wikipedia keeps a revision history. Any and all changes, even the removal of a single letter, is tracked by the database. If you or any of the members spot a mistake or invalid information, you or they can just go in and revert the article to a previous version. You can easily see if anyone has removed a vast amount of data from a page by looking at this history.

See the (+x) and (-x)? That indicator tells you how many bytes have been added or removed in that particular revision. Too many bytes removed? Go in and compare it and see what happened.

Thirdly, some articles are locked. Articles get locked if they contain valuable information or are about an important topic. Ever gone onto an article and seen a padlock?  That padlock is there to tell you the article has been locked (the green plus means it's a “good article” - it follows the guidelines) and cannot be edited by anyone other than accounts that have been confirmed and are at least 4 days old. This is in place to deter griefers.

And lastly, and I can't stress this one enough, like any other source you cite for your dissertation or essay or anything of the like, CITE THE ORIGINAL FUCKING SOURCE. Wikipedia contains references at the bottom of the page so you can cross-reference it yourself. It isn't just a wall of bullshit! There are sources for all of the information on the article. If it does not, then you'll know! Look at this:

“Citation needed”. “Possibly contains original research”. If you're not an idiot, you can spot this within the text and realise you should take it with a fucking grain of salt. It means that the information hasn't been cited, and therefore isn't as reliable. Cross reference everything you research. ALWAYS follow sources that cite sources back to the original. This is essay-writing 101. You wouldn't cite Google's search results as a source, so why the fuck would you cite Wikipedia? Google doesn't contain original data in its search results, it just spits data it's found back at you. Wikipedia is essentially doing the same thing. It's bad practice to use your own research on Wikipedia, you have to add sources. So fucking use them.

sigh is it just me, or is this world too stupid to understand the basics of anything? How do you people function?

/rant