How Good is Wikipedia?

The best answer may be “Compared to what?” Wikipedia wouldn’t be one of the world’s top 10 most visited Web sites (that includes all 250-plus language versions, not just the English Wikipedia) if readers didn’t find it better than available alternatives. To be sure, Wikipedia is an encyclopedia under construction. As the general disclaimer (see the Disclaimers link at the bottom of every page) says, “WIKIPEDIA MAKES NO GUARANTEE OF VALIDITY. Please be advised that nothing found here has necessarily been reviewed by people with the expertise required to provide you with complete, accurate or reliable information.”

On the other hand, Wikipedia has been reviewed by a number of outside experts, most famously in an article published in Nature in December 2005. In that article, a group of experts compared 42 articles in Wikipedia to the corresponding articles in Encyclopaedia Britannica. Their conclusion: “The number of errors in a typical Wikipedia science article is not substantially more than in Encyclopaedia Britannica.” (The actual count was 162 errors vs. 123.) That comparison is now more than 2 years old, and editors have continued to improve those 42 articles as well as all the others that were in the encyclopedia back then. (For a full list of outside reviews of Wikipedia, see the page Wikipedia:External peer review.)

None of which is to say that Wikipedia editors are wildly happy about the quality of many, if not most articles. Those most ...

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