Stan Shebs wrote:
Jimbo is being a little too modest when he says that scholars haven't picked articles for fact-checking - we have a number of scholars and other authorities who are WPers, the articles in their areas get pretty thoroughly fact-checked, and they watch those articles closely to see that new errors don't get in. The only thing that hasn't happened yet is a large-scale systematic review.
But that wasn't the question. The article asked if Wikipedia had tested its reliability by taking a number of RANDOMLY-SELECTED articles and submitting them to scholars for fact-checking, to which Jimbo admitted that they hadn't.
It's certainly true that some individual articles in the Wikipedia have been carefully vetted for accuracy by "scholars and other authorities," but that doesn't mean that all or even most articles meet that standard.
Just out of curiosity, I clicked the "Random page" link a few times. Out of ten articles, I found five stubs, two of which had frequent grammatical errors. The remaining five included one article that seemed strongly opinionated about the [[Nintendo Seal of Quality]], and four articles of varying length that appear from what I can tell to be accurate and appropriate for their topics. (Of course, I'm not really qualified to judge the accuracy of some of the articles which discuss topics outside my areas of interest.)
My little experiment isn't sufficient to serve as the basis for any conclusions, but if two out of ten articles are grammatically-flawed stubs, it would seem to support the article's contention that Wikipedia doesn't yet meet the quality-control standards of a commercial encyclopedia like Encyclopedia Britannica.
On the other hand, Wikipedia beats Britannica with regard to sheer NUMBER of articles.
--Sheldon Rampton