How reliable is wikipedia?

wikipedia isn't the best source but its still pretty reliable. ONE way to avoid being mislead is to use the reference links that wikipedia provides underneath an article. Those are always more credible than the wikipedia article itself so u can still use that website to ur advantage.

All sources have their errors BUT I find wikipedia usually very accurate and objective except on some very obscure pages that seem to have been written by advertisers or PR people But this is only pages that no-one else cares about which is why they don't get challenged or editted Generally it is (in my opinion) one of the few trustworthy sources on the web

For most cases I've seen, Wikipedia seems to be pretty reliable. You can edit it however, if it is inaccurate it doesn't stay edited long, plus they've made it more difficult to edit.

No source of info is perfect. Even generally reliable sources can make mistakes or just become out of date. The fact that anyone can edit Wikipedia makes people assume it is full of vandalism and unreliable- this is not really the case. Most serious pages have a number of people around the world who will Watch the page and see any changes that are made. I am a Wikipedia editor myself and I see vandalism and mistakes and remove it sometimes. Having such a huge base of thousands of volunteers tends to make it more up-to-date on recent events etc. than most other sources- main news gets put in within less than a day of things happening. Generally, if you want serious information for work or studies you MUST use Wikipedia only as a source of references- click on the refs and read the info source for yourself. I wrote a page on a famous book and it was deleted in LESS THAN AN HOUR becuase I didn't put in proper refs. I have since recreated the page with proper in-line refs and others have made it much better with pix etc! If you want additional info and a background to any arguments about the subject matter, look on the Discussion page related to the article you are interested in - this will show if people are disputing the info on the page -as well as maybe telling you a lot more about the subject, such as info which we don't have refs for yet. Finally, I suggest that if you try editing Wikipedia a little, you will learn a lot about how to interpret what you see there. I would say that Wikipedia is at least as reliable as these Q/A sites- often better. Obviously commercial sites like Encyclopedia Britannica may be more trustworthy, since they use only professionals, but EB DOES make mistakes and it takes much longer to put them right.

I think Wikipedia is a very reliable source. It is centered around fact rather then opinion.

Unless the Wiki page has a bibliography at the end of the page then it usually isn't very reliable. If you are going to use it you may or may not want to check up on some of the information. Wiki can be edited by anyone.