W5 : Can we trust Wikipedia ?


When I have presentation in class about a specific subject I usually search information on google and most of the time the first link I find is a Wikipedia page. But my professors always told me to not trust Wikipedia and some of them don’t want Wikipedia as a source, because for them it is not reliable. And this happen for many reasons : some information are outdated so we can’t really rely on them, sometimes the sources are not good or you can have no sources at all for some key information and the main reason one of my professor told me was that Wikipedia is written by common persons so you don’t really know if they have sufficient skills to write on the page.

So to answer the question with these few reasonings, Wikipedia for many people is not really trustworthy at the first sight, because everyone can edit or create an article. Nevertheless, Wikipedia has a real system which cover every single articles like : the article has to have reliable references, it has to be notable and Wikipedia has a classification of what sources are reliable or not. Moreover many articles are deleted because they are not notable or because the sources are not reliable enough. And I think this part of Wikipedia is not known by everyone, especially by those who does not edit things on Wikipedia.

For me, now that I know the underneath of Wikipedia I know that I can trust it if I want information and know how to verify is the article is notable, if the sources are reliable or not.

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