wikipedia should be considered a valid source

Wikipedia is checked While Wikipedia does have tags that help identify unverified information, many of these articles have this tag for months or years. For instance, there are articles with unsourced statements from 2006,1 2007,2 2008,3 and 2009,4 and so forth. While many pages may quickly receive verification, many articles have not been checked for up to six years. In total, there are 224,701 articles that have not been sourced.5 As a percentage of the English Wikipedia’s total 3,907,779 articles, this represents 6% of all articles. Six percent of all articles have at least one unsourced statement. There are inevitably more false or unverified statements on other articles. Written by experts No, Wikipedia is not written by experts. For instance, I have written an article on the 1956 Japanese film Warning from Space (. http://goo.gl...) and the 1997 German mathematics book The Number Devil (. http://goo.gl...), but I am not an expert in Japanese cinema or German literature. As with the unsourced statements, there are inevitably thousands of more articles written by the public, as that is what Wikipedia is about, on topics they are only slightly familiar with. Wikipedia’s About page describes how Wikipedia editors are anonymous volunteers.6 Additionally, to get an idea of how actual experts feel about Wikipedia’s featured articles, nevermind the basic ones, I found a survey taken by an interested student on this very subject. After surveying experts on fields related to a wide range of featured articles, experts gave one article a rating of 1, two articles a 3, one article a 4, one article a 5, two articles a 7, one article a 7.5, eight articles an 8, one article an 8.5, and five articles a 9.7 None received a perfect score. While you may look at the higher scores and view this survey optimistically, remember that this survey was taken on Wikipedia’s highest quality work – and the fact that five articles received a poor (x ≤ 5) rating shows it is not meant to be taken seriously. The author of the survey noted, “The articles receiving lower scores, however, show quite convincingly that Wikipedia’s attempt at quality control is failing. ”7 Credible citations As I have already pointed out, almost 6% of all Wikipedia articles contain unverified statements. However, if a source is cited, this doesn’t necessarily make it accurate. For instance, there are 37,906 articles which lack reliable sources.8 There are 690 articles which contain at least one unsourced quote.9 Finally, there are sources which require clean-up ranging from 2007 to 2012.10 Sources, even if listed, cannot be relied upon as completely factual. Tangible evidence Finally, I would like to give the audience some examples of Wikipedia’s editors and articles. Many living people have had their articles falsely changed to describe the subject’s fake death. TIME wrote of this phenomenon, “[…] there is always going to be a few bad apples that mess with that freedom. ”11 Many members of the United States Congress have edited articles of themselves to reflect a more positive outlook of the subject, even if the added information was blatantly untruthful.12 A Turkish history professor came into trouble with local police after false information was displayed on his Wikipedia page.13Wikipedia has also had trouble with editors who claim to hold positions or education they really do not have, and an especially notorious case was a man named Ryan Jordan, who claimed to be a professor with a PhD. It was found that he actually used Catholicism for Dummies as his source for information.14 References 1. . http://goo.gl... 2. . http://goo.gl... 3. . http://goo.gl... 4. . http://goo.gl... 5. . http://goo.gl... 6. . http://goo.gl... 7. . http://goo.gl... 8. . http://goo.gl... 9. . http://goo.gl... 10. . http://goo.gl... 11. . http://goo.gl... 12. . http://goo.gl... 13. . http://goo.gl... 14. . http://goo.gl...