On 4/7/08, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
When the issue of Wikipedia's "unreliability" comes up, I like to point out that we can't, don't and have never promised "reliability" - what we are, in fact, is *useful*. (I make such a bold claim based on our horrendous mainstream popularity. Hands up all the old hand encyclopedia nerds here who thought it would get this far this quickly ...)
Indeed. We are useful. And I am hard pressed to believe that if you asked a random, non-wonk user if our usefulness to them was based on the fact that we are generally accurate, the answer would be "yes" almost all of the time.
To dismiss accuracy as some philosophical technicality is to deny the reality of why people look things up in encyclopedias.
-Phil