[WikiEN-l] Thousands of *awful* articles on websites

[Matthew Brown]

On 1/4/07, Robth <robth1 at gmail.com> wrote:
> That's obviously a pretty susceptible article, but it isn't the only
> example, just the one that jumped to mind for me, and I can't convince
> myself that the belief (inherent in the edits that produced that page)
> that Wikipedia is a place to put information you found on the internet
> doesn't in some part stem from the fact that we have a number of
> articles that are, well, a place to put stuff you found on the
> internet.

How inaccurate the online sources are depends on the subject matter,
however.  Generally internet sources are not much worse than the
popular press when it comes to accuracy; such an article,
pre-Internet, would likely pick up the same kind of errors from the
popular press if they were used as the source.

For some subject areas, the academic works are published online and
available.  In others, there are no academic works to use, and
sometimes the most authoritative works are online.

-Matt