Wikipedia is like any other general resource
Randwolf said:
Is it just me, or do many members use "Oh, that's from Wiki", therefore your whole premise must be wrong as a method of bolstering their positions ? Have we found a whole new category of fallacy? As a disclaimer, I must mention that I, personally have not much run into this problem, but I see the disdain shown in other posts.
I think part of the problem is the credibility many people, when providing a quote from Wikipedia, assign its content. That is, it's convenient. Wikipedia is, as you have noted, a starting point.
Depending on what the information in question is, Wikipedia can be very accurate. Take, for instance, one of my favorite philosophical arguments:
You are fundamentally connected to every other object in the Universe.
I can, in fact, use Wikipedia to prove that: "
Newton's law of universal gravitation"
Now, what I do with that principle is itself open to question, but the fact remains—we are all fundamentally connected to everything in the Universe.
Taking Max's point into account—
Baron Max said:
There's simply so much "information", with lots of it contradictory, that to believe anything on the Internet is damned chancy at best!!!
—we must also recognize that the same holds true for books and other media.
With something like fundamental physics, the complaint is considerably weakened. The Wikipedia community sharply patrols those regions of its information that are well-established and more easily verified. History, however, is a stickier affair. While some broad facts of history are irrefutable—e.g., World War II occurred, the United States dropped two atomic bombs during the conflict—others are not so firm. What was the toll of the Dresden firestorm? Twenty years ago, it was not uncommon to hear numbers in the hundreds of thousands, but more recent estimates are in the tens of thousands. How complex does a Wikipedia article become if they entertain that argument? What of the Holocaust? Here the issue becomes even more tangled. Certainly there are some very low estimates, perhaps a hundred thousand. But these are controversial and supported only by those whose careers have a vested interest in that outcome. The generally accepted number is around six million. How much weight does Wikipedia owe to those who insist on a lower number? One might say that an asserted fact has broad support, but only if we measure that number in raw terms. There are millions around the world who insist that Jesus actually walked the face of the Earth, but there is no historical proof. The fact that over a billion people might believe an assertion does not make it true. Still, though, with widely-known issues, Wikipedia can be fairly reliable.
Where things get truly difficult is when political stakes are on the table. Especially when the detail is obscure or arcane. At this point, Wikipedia is
at best a starting point.
Typically, I like to read
back to sources. I used to do that with news all the time. Very little of what was reported or commented about on television, for instance, was what I considered reliable insofar as the underlying facts are concerned. One of my favorite examples is the 2005 Supreme Court decision in
Roper v. Simmons. I first heard about the decision as conservative pundits were decrying it for liberal judicial activism. So I went and looked up a couple of news stories; a paper of record here, a wire story there. And I couldn't figure out the basis of the complaint, so I looked up the decision itself. And, wonder of wonders, the decision had the majority upholding a
state supreme court. And not just any state. Not a liberal bastion like Massachusetts or California, but the Supreme Court of Missouri. And that was when it finally hit me that the whole judicial activism complaint I had been hearing at least since
Romer v. Evans (struck Colorado Amendment 2, which passed in the 1992 general election) was nothing more than conservative cover flak. At most, judicial activism tends to help conservative outlooks, such as the new application of a civil rights statute of limitations to gender in an outcome favoring the corporation (
Ledbetter v. Goodyear), or, indeed, the majority's decision to fault a public employer for observing over forty years' worth of civil rights case law (
Ricci v. DeStefano). Sometimes, reading back to the source can be enlightening insofar as it highlights rhetorical trends. The same can be done for Wikipedia, but where much criticism of the online encyclopedia arises is that many who would post its contents are happy to leave it to others to do that reading; it's not always worth it to the poster to look more deeply into the hundred or thousand years encapsulated in three sentences in Wikipedia.
In earlier years at Sciforums, the period in which I focused my posts in the Religion subforum coincided with a tremendous increase in my knowledge and understanding that centered around three writers: Karen Armstrong, Elaine Pagels, and Jeffrey Russell Burton. Between these three, the list of primary and secondary source materials I needed to review in order to understand their outlooks on various considerations was tremendous. The internet helped greatly, as many of the primary source materials and a good number of the secondary documents are easily accessible. Irenaeus of Lyon really
did make the insane argument about why there can only be four gospels. Tertullian, for all his historical importance, reads like a second- and third-century right-wing radio host. Polycarp, Ignatius of Antioch, and Clement of Rome were all there, easily transferrable instead of having to retype the sections by hand.
People should not be afraid to read beyond the Wikipedia summary,
especially if they're the one making a certain point. That is, if a certain argument is worth making, isn't it worth understanding?
And that's the thing: Just because something is posted at Wikipedia, or even published in a book somewhere, doesn't mean it's gospel truth. For instance, I encountered last year a strange theory that blames everything wrong in the Middle East on Jimmy Carter. But I couldn't find anything on the argument other than the strange book from which it was taken, and I've yet to find (or put much effort into finding) the book. Who knows? The theory may be credible, but it's not widely recognized, and might actually depend on a thoroughly skewed telling of history.
Wikipedia, in this sense, is like any other tertiary or later resource; one should, generally, be prepared to explore and, as necessary, defend any given assertion cited from its pages.