Help:Wikipedia: The Missing Manual/Appendixes/Reader's guide to Wikipedia: Difference between revisions

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== 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 vversions, not just the English Wikipedia) if readers didn't find it better than available alternatives. T<ref>oTo be sure, Wikipedia is an encyclopedia under ersions, not just the English Wikipedia) if readersconstructionconstruction. 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 Encyclopædia 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 several 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]].)

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You'll find that each article contains clues to its reliability. If you see a well-written article with at least a reasonable number of footnotes, then you should be reasonably confident that almost all the information in the article is correct. If you see a lot of run-on sentences and templates noting a lack of sources, point of view problems, and so on, then you should be skeptical.

You can get more clues from the article talk (discussion) page; just click the "discussion" tab. At the top, see if a Wikipedia WikiProject (a group of editors working on articles of common interest) has rated the article. Also at the top, look for links to archived talk pages, indicating that a lot of editors have talked a lot about the art<ref>iclearticle, and have therefore edited it a lot.

If there are no archive pages, and not much indication of activity on the talk page you're looking at, then the opposite is true—few editors have been interested in editing the article. That doesn't mean it's not good—some excellent good editors toil in relative backwaters, producing gems without much discussion with other editors. Still, absence of editor activity should make you more doubtful that you've found an example of Wikipedia's best.

Bottom line: Think of Wikipedia as a starting place. If you're just interested in a quick overview of a topic, it may be an ending place as well. But Wikipedia's ideal is for articles to cite the sources from which their content was created, so that really interested readers can use those sources to get more information. If the editors at Wikipedia are doing things right, ''those sources'' are the ones that readers can absolutely depend upon to be informative and accurate.

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== Navigating Within Wikipedia ==