Wikipedia, with certain standards, can be used as a source on debate.org

"I am absolutely not for wikipedia as a source of information. " Mmhmm, you're supposed to be against it. "Anybody can just edit it theirfore it is not a viable source of info. " It's true anybody can edit it. But let's go through the statistics. 3,578,000+ english articles. That's not even counting the millions of articles that are in different languages. Let's be pessimistic and say there are 1,000 vandalizers. Each vandalizer would have to destroy 5,000 articles each to take out all of them. Basically, the chances of the article you're accessing is vandalized = very low. But that's not enough. Wikipedia has an edit patrol system. Basically, after every edit, it is sent to a list to be checked for accuracy. Only members of the patrol system who have been elected can patrol edits. If an edit is found to be vandalism or inaccurate, it is reverted. It takes less than a day to be found and reverted. In fact, if it’s anything close to wikihow’s patrol system, it should take an hour or less. Still not impressed? Let’s take it farther. Let’s say you just get really bad luck and you do find a vandalized article. Most of them are extremely obvious. I do WikiHow, and I’m an edit patroller. Out of 3,000 or so edits patrolled, I have yet to see a vandalizer put false information rather than something obvious like profanity or something to that effect. One last obstacle. Remember in my first post, how I stated that you can only use it if a source is cited? When in doubt of the information, simply check for a source. Most vandalizers just put HAHAHA or something on the pages. I don’t think any have ever actually made a false claim and cited a source. In summary, there’s about a 1 in 5 million chance that you will find a vandalized article, even without the patrol system. Add in the patrol system, and it raises that bar much higher. Add in the fact that 99% of edits are obvious, and you have a nearly impossible chance of getting the wrong information. Lastly, add in the obstacle of always checking sources. As you can see, Wikipedia is perfectly fine for quoting as a source. I’d like to quote my opponent here: “these books now contain scribbles in them and are no longer a good source of information” Exactly. They have little penciled in scribbles. No one is going to use the scribbles as evidence, just the text. Plus, imagine my opponent doing this in the library of congress. Except with five million books. What are the chances that you will stumble upon one book he has scribbled in? Now imagine that as soon as a book is used and then put back in the shelf, it is sent to an office to be inspected for edits. A computer highlights the new text in the book, and the person in the office deletes the text and sends it back to the bookcase. Now what are the chances that on any given day you’ll walk into the library, find the very book that was scribbled in, and find it before it’s sent to be checked? Add in that it’s scribbles, so it’s easy to see. So if you by some crazy bad luck find that book, you see the scribbles and immediately know that’s vandalism so you don’t read that. Obviously, you’re probably shaking your head thinking of that slim chance. It’s the same and even less for Wikipedia. To put that small chance into perspective, I have an article from (. http://www.livescience.com...) that shows the chances of dying from a given problem. Heart Disease 1-in-5 Cancer 1-in-7 Stroke 1-in-23 Accidental Injury 1-in-36 Motor Vehicle Accident 1-in-100 Intentional Self-harm (suicide) 1-in-121 Falling Down 1-in-246 Assault by Firearm 1-in-325 Fire or Smoke 1-in-1,116 Natural Forces (heat, cold, storms, quakes, etc. ) 1-in-3,357 Electrocution 1-in-5,000 Drowning 1-in-8,942 Air Travel Accident 1-in-20,000 Flood 1-in-30,000 Legal Execution 1-in-58,618 Tornado 1-in-60,000 Lightning Strike 1-in-83,930 Snake, Bee or other Venomous Bite or Sting 1-in-100,000 Earthquake 1-in-131,890 Dog Attack 1-in-147,717 Asteroid Impact 1-in-200,000 Tsunami 1-in-500,000 Fireworks Discharge 1-in-615,488 None of these are even close to one million. Let alone 5 million, or 10 million, which is around the chances of finding a sneakily vandalized article in Wikipedia and quoting the wrong information. Oh, that adds another element I forgot! (There are a lot of factors going into the chances of this). Wikipedia articles are generally more than seven to eight pages long. When you’re quoting something, you usually need one sentence or maybe a paragraph at the most. You have a very slim chance of actually using the vandalized material. You trust that you won’t be killed by fireworks with much grimmer chances than you trust you will use sneakily vandalized material from Wikipedia. Summary of all that I’ve said? Don’t worry about finding incorrect information from vandalism. You have a twenty times higher chance of dying from fireworks than doing so.