03-14-2012, 05:39 PM
sekker wrote: I'm not sure why people have an axe to grind with Wikipedia. Honestly have no clue.It's always seemed pretty well spelled out to me -- Wikipedia garners it's information from unvetted sources and relies on more unvetted sources for corrections. The system yields good and bad results. For my purposes, a mixed bag, even one that skews towards the good, is not going to be my first choice.
I will use wikipedia for quick and dirty information mining, but I do tend to add the caveat of 'but that's just wikipedia' when citing the results. But even then it's rare that I'll only use wikipedia.
For as long as I can remember, as far back as grade school, I've been taught that for anything you consider the least bit important you always get more than one source. It's a reflex to check two or three sources now.