We've brought that matter to the director of our formation, and he said that the situation has indeed clearly evolved in the past few years, and for "niche" pages Wikipedia is in fact reliable, it's just suffering from its past reputation which is why we should do what flyingoctopus said.
Which is a valid point for about every non-academic source : check the references. Even books can say the dumbest shit, seriously. Fact-checking is never optional.
Look up the town of Attica NY, the info changes every few days as people who got traffic tickets in town while they were here visiting relatives change stuff because they’re petty assholes.
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deleted
· 5 years ago
I pity the fools who - in the course of an internet discussion, mind you - step on their soap boxes to condemn Wiki as a source cause someone cited an article to prove them utterly wrong. Basically the same as "You're factually 100% right, too bad your grammar sucks, so according to my rules, you loose"
Edit wars can be fun though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Lamest_edit_wars
Others have covered the mechanics of source references. I’ll mention a couple of things though. Firstly- it’s telephone. It’s not enough to just have sources. Try it. In multiple citations on a paper, Cite a non well known source for a conclusion in your writing, but make your conclusion the opposite of what the source is saying. 9/10 times you’ll probably get away with it. Sourcing means jack crap. Anyone can cite a source, the source exists so that if you care to take the time you can verify it. If the source itself isn’t reliable, doesn’t cite sources, etc... it’s all garbage. So when you cite wiki it means you didn’t check the sources so you have no idea what they actually said and are just giving someone else’s opinion and give a shittitude about the subject. More over- many things online cite others. You can do this with papers and the like. So you get an article written off Wikipedia, and then the Wikipedia article citing that article as a source for the Wikipedia article it...
... is based off of. You can do this with news sights and papers too. Everyone is using each other as sources but they are all getting their information from each other, and in the end there may only be one or two sources you can find through untangling them all which actually had contact with or research from a verifiable first or second party source. So you can’t use Wikipedia as a source not because it isn’t reliable, but because it may be unreliable, and how can you or anyone else prove it is or isn’t without huge amounts of research to verify or reject it? It’s like taking testimony in a court case from someone who wasn’t there but the witness told them all the details, but they are totally honest, even though they aren’t sworn in, and their testimony is only given as a written paper and they left town after. Untangle that mess. Plus you don’t learn the skills to actually do research. Someone writes those articles. The goal is for you to be a good writer of articles, not copier.
Which is a valid point for about every non-academic source : check the references. Even books can say the dumbest shit, seriously. Fact-checking is never optional.
Edit wars can be fun though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Lamest_edit_wars