PSA: Wikipedia Pledge Season

[jducoeur]

FYI, Wikipedia is on what seems to be turning into an annual fundraising drive. I recommend considering it: while it isn't crucial for everyone, it's certainly becoming an important tool for me, one that I use most days to research one topic or another. So I think of it as shareware -- it's well worth tossing them some money each year for operating expenses. If you use it regularly, give it some thought...

Comments

[jducoeur]

While I can understand that, this is mostly true for virtually all information. Even academic-sounding sources are only as reliable as your willingness to actually *check* the citations. (Witness the SCA's fondness for the game Tablero de Jesus, based on a lovely well-cited source that turned out to be completely a pack of lies. It took us 20 years to realize that, though, because everyone took the citations at face value.)

Wikipedia's self-checking nature *tends* to weed out misinformation. It doesn't always succeed, but by and large I've found it to be the most accurate general source of information on the Web, and better than 90% of focused sources. (And better than 75% of all books as well, whether cited or not.)

So I don't much sympathize with holding the flubs too stringently against it. Virtually nothing is truly "reliable", and Wikipedia is far better than most...