Quote: Stylee TingTing @ 2nd April 2014, 1:20 PM BSTSo, what you're actually saying is that in years gone by, Wikipedia used to be good for gemmologists and that by extension "is excellent for most things". In years gone by, perhaps. But today?
I beg to differ. Your reasoning is unsound, based as it is on the Halo Effect. I find Wikipedia completely unreliable, overrun by scientologist hypers, other PR merchants and teenagers who think it funny to put completely false information on site. In fact, you shouldn't rely on any info on the internet, from any source. It's all potentially corrupted and will never get cleaned up.
Take it all with a pinch of salt. The empirical is all.
No, I mean that most non-emotive subjects are reasonably reliable and emotive ones less-so.
For example, I would hazard a guess that the article for Latent Heat is largely sound and reliable, but the article for the Yom Kippur War would be less-so.
In my experience, the Sciences (excluding controversial topics like Global Warming and Evolution) and most ancient/medieval history to be rock-solid in Wikipedia.
Obviously people are going to f**k-around on the sports topics, and Justin Bieber etc. too, but who's going to f**k-around on the article for the Manx Shearwater?
