Wikipedia: Should you trust it?

Wikipedia

Should you trust it?

By Qile Wu, Class of 2024

If you’re doing any type of research online, or just simply googling something, you will likely face this question: Is Wikipedia reliable? Well, the answer to this question might be more complicated than you would think. In this article we will explore different reasons about whether you should or shouldn’t trust Wikipedia, and at the end of the article I will talk about my own views on the topic. 

One of the main criticisms of Wikipedia not being reliable is that anyone can write anything on the website without citing sources or having any expertise on the article they are contributing to, as long as they are human. Which leads us to the first reason that you shouldn’t trust Wikipedia: Its open editing system often leads to untrustworthy results.

Ok, so there are times when Wikipedia might produce inaccurate information. But besides being inaccurate, the content might be biased towards one side or the other. Now as we mentioned previously, anyone can contribute to Wikipedia. Not only are the contributors not guaranteed to be reliable, they might be biased in their writing. Here is the truth: we are all prejudiced, and this is because we as human beings are all different and unique, and since we are different, we can’t be expected to be unbiased.

Also, if you want data, statistics and real time information, Wikipedia might not be the right place for you to go. Instead, the correct choice would be to explore government census, research journals, or the specific website for the topic. For example, if I want to find the population of the United States, I would much rather visit the official website of the U.S. Census Bureau, because anyone can edit wikipedia articles, and I have no way of knowing if it has been modified by a random person.

These are the main reasons why a lot of teachers don’t recommend their students to use Wikipedia. And by now you probably understand their reactions when students do use them.

But, everything I just said is nothing new. Wikipedia has been criticized so often, that chances are you have already heard one or more of the reasons above. Surprisingly, there are a few reasons why Wikipedia is useful. And we will now take a look at each of them.

I mentioned previously that Wikipedia allows its users to edit articles, and while it might cause some issues, it also gave rise to a large community of voluntary fact-checkers, who monitored the article to make sure that they are well-written, easily comprehensible and factual. Now Wikipedia is a non-profit and operates on user donation, which means that they don’t hire a bunch of people to do the fact-checking, but the people doing it aren’t expecting payment either.

Speaking of fact-checkers, it’s also a good time to mention Wikipedia’s citation features, which – as the name implies – allows editors to cite external sources like websites, articles and research papers. If you scroll to the bottom of a Wikipedia article, under “References” you will find a sea of MLA citations, referring to the original source. However, it is important to note that not everything in the articles has references, so you might want to be careful when using the citation feature to decide what information to trust.

Now that we summarized each of the reasons for whether you should trust Wikipedia or not, I would like to present my view on the problem: Overall, I think that Wikipedia is a great tool if you want to get some general information, but not so great when it comes to opinions or sensitive topics.

Nevertheless, let’s end this article with a meme: