Is Wikipedia a reliable source of information?

Wikipedia is world’s largest reference site and people use it for their research on various topics.
However people usually forget to check the resources when it comes to Wikipedia articles and
their accuracy. You shouldn’t trust Wikipedia wholly since it has issues with reliability.

Many think that Wikipedia is the most reliable source of information and they often use
it for academic research because it contains an abundance of data and information. To some
extent they may be correct but that information is only superficial. As Wikipedia says for itself
they are not 100% reliable and they aren’t even a source of information but only a place where
primary sources about a topic are gathered together.
Furthermore it is widely believed that Wikipedia editors are experts in their fields
because the information they put on Wikipedia is mostly correct. We are talking about 200.000
people that work on articles and edit the text on daily basis, so why wouldn’t we believe them?
Unfortunately, they are wrong because anybody can contribute to Wikipedia. Since the editors
aren’t real experts they can sometimes accidentally make mistakes and put up unconfirmed
statistics.
Lastly, opponents claim that contributors are serious and only want to improve articles.
They are only partially correct but not everyone has good intentions on the Internet. When it
comes to Wikipedia there have been many examples of vandalism concerning the data on the
website. For example, Internet trolls would put up entire articles filled with deceptive
information and you wouldn’t even notice.

To sum up, you shouldn’t trust Wikipedia completely just like you don’t trust everything that
you read. It’s crucially important to understand that not everything on Wikipedia is correct,
there are no specialists to confirm the data and some people might just want to prank you. For
this reason I think everyone should get used to doing their research more thoroughly and check
the sources of information they come across.

Ivana Ilić
2017/0557