Back
Reliability of Wikipedia
referenceCredibility Rating
3/5
Good(3)Good quality. Reputable source with community review or editorial standards, but less rigorous than peer-reviewed venues.
Rating inherited from publication venue: Wikipedia
Relevant for AI safety researchers who use Wikipedia as a knowledge source or training data, as understanding its reliability limitations informs how AI systems may inherit or propagate errors from this widely-used corpus.
Metadata
Importance: 20/100wiki pagereference
Summary
This Wikipedia article examines the reliability of Wikipedia's volunteer-driven editing model, reviewing studies, surveys, and historical patterns of accuracy and error. It documents both criticisms and improvements over time, noting that while misinformation can persist, vandalism is typically corrected quickly and reliability has generally improved since the 2000s.
Key Points
- •Wikipedia's reliability has been tested through comparative reviews and statistical analysis, with mixed but improving results over time.
- •False information can persist for years and propagate widely, as illustrated by the 'Brazilian aardvark' hoax lasting six years.
- •Vandalism is typically repaired very quickly, with most users never encountering it, according to studies including a 2003 IBM analysis.
- •Wikipedia's English edition has been generally praised for reliability in the late 2010s and early 2020s, a notable improvement from earlier criticism.
- •Structural weaknesses include article instability and susceptibility to cognitive biases inherent in crowdsourced editing.
Cited by 1 page
| Page | Type | Quality |
|---|---|---|
| AI-Era Epistemic Infrastructure | Approach | 59.0 |
Cached Content Preview
HTTP 200Fetched Apr 9, 202698 KB
Reliability of Wikipedia - Wikipedia
Jump to content
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This is an encyclopedic article discussing Wikipedia's reliability. For Wikipedia's own standpoint on reliability, see Wikipedia:General disclaimer .
A South American coati . In July 2008, a 17-year-old student added an invented nickname to the Wikipedia article Coati as a private joke, calling them " Brazilian aardvarks ". The false information lasted for six years and was propagated by hundreds of websites, several newspapers, and even a few books published by university presses. [ 1 ] [ 2 ]
The reliability of Wikipedia and its volunteer-driven and community-regulated editing model , particularly its English-language edition , has been questioned and tested. Wikipedia is written and edited by volunteer editors (known as Wikipedians ) who generate online content with the editorial oversight of other volunteer editors via community-generated policies and guidelines. The reliability of the project has been tested statistically through comparative review, analysis of the historical patterns, and strengths and weaknesses inherent in its editing process. [ 3 ] The online encyclopedia has been criticized for its factual unreliability, principally regarding its content, presentation, and editorial processes . Studies and surveys attempting to gauge the reliability of Wikipedia have mixed results. Wikipedia's reliability was frequently criticized in the 2000s but has been improved; its English-language edition has been generally praised in the late 2010s and early 2020s. [ 4 ] [ 5 ] [ 6 ]
Article instability and susceptibility to cognitive biases are two potential problem areas in a crowdsourced work like Wikipedia.
Select assessments of its reliability have examined how quickly vandalism —content perceived by editors to constitute false or misleading information—is removed. Two years after the project was started, in 2003, an IBM study found that "vandalism is usually repaired extremely quickly—so quickly that most users will never see its effects". [ 7 ] [ 8 ] The inclusion of false or fabricated content has, at times, lasted for years on Wikipedia due to its volunteer editorship. [ 9 ] [ 10 ] Its editing model facilitates multiple systemic biases, namely selection bias , inclusion bias , participation bias , and group-think bias . The majority of the encyclopedia is written by male editors, leading to a gender bias in coverage , and the make up of the editing community has prompted concerns about racial bias , spin bias , corporate bias, and national bias, among others. [ 11 ] [ 12 ] [ 13 ] An ideological bias on Wikipedia has also been identified on both conscious and subconscious leve
... (truncated, 98 KB total)Resource ID:
731bcab842214102 | Stable ID: sid_N7n2FeNgQD