W5: Can we trust wikipedia ?

To answer the question we must first of all understand it from wikipedia point of view ? As we all know wikipedia is a collective intelligence website, which goal is to combine and share the knowledge of all the people in the world. But how can it certify the knowledge is true ? The knowledge must be reliable.

That is why wikipedia implemented three main policies : no original research, verifiability and neutral point of view. The meaning behind these policies is don’t let the way you see thing corrupt the truth, let everyone know where does your knowledge comes from.

This establish the main condition to reliability : sources. Where does your sources comes from ? Your source must allow the fact checking accuracy and must be from a third party. A source is a piece of work, the creator of the work or even the publisher of the work.

The interesting things about the sources, is their date. As we saw in class the dates are really important because it can deem a knowledge obsolete. Usually newest research corrects the old ones.

But in my opinion if a piece of work is too new, or the author is new as well on the topic, can it really be trusted ? Because if the newest that just got published is quoted as a source, it cannot be deemed as reliable, for it has not yet faced the criticizism of this particular field community (painting, mathematics .....)

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