I do trust Wikipedia. I trust it a good deal more than the rest of the Internet. Having worked in newspapers and magazines with online presences, I remain skeptical of anyone with a hidden agenda, and I'm not a huge fan of just Googling away until I find a piece of information that fits with my argument either. That leaves me with Wikipedia as an unbiased source of knowledge that's easy to access, easy to use, and has very rarely let me know. I don't trust it blindly; I look for citations, and I judge those citations, but for the most part I trust that people who put that much effort into writing a page do actually know what they're talking about. Only a few days ago a friend posted a link on Facebook to an article about Silk Road, an online marketplace mostly used to sell illegal drugs. From there, I jumped to the website, a few other news stories (one from Gawker, of all places...) and then just typed Silk Road into Wikipedia and found myself here.
The page has fifteen citations, most with significant information embedded on Wikipedia itself. Amongst these, a significant portion contain content that could only have come from a user of Silk Road. This information would never make it into an 'official' encyclopedia, simply because those compilers don't tend to frequent drug-selling websites that require the use of Tor to access. But this doesn't mean that those that do frequent these websites are any less qualified to write specifically about these websites. The wonder of Wikipedia is that it allows everyone to write about what they know about, no more or no less - or so the system would work in an ideal world. But so lively is the community know that most erroneous edits are quickly corrected, and though I won't quote that too-often-cited study from Nature, I will point out that that was several years ago, and I wouldn't be surprised if Wikipedia is now more accurate than the Encylopedia Britannica.
The page has fifteen citations, most with significant information embedded on Wikipedia itself. Amongst these, a significant portion contain content that could only have come from a user of Silk Road. This information would never make it into an 'official' encyclopedia, simply because those compilers don't tend to frequent drug-selling websites that require the use of Tor to access. But this doesn't mean that those that do frequent these websites are any less qualified to write specifically about these websites. The wonder of Wikipedia is that it allows everyone to write about what they know about, no more or no less - or so the system would work in an ideal world. But so lively is the community know that most erroneous edits are quickly corrected, and though I won't quote that too-often-cited study from Nature, I will point out that that was several years ago, and I wouldn't be surprised if Wikipedia is now more accurate than the Encylopedia Britannica.
