Is wikipedia a good source of information

Contention 1While anyone may be able to open edit Wikipedia for a brief period of time, in many cases your edit does not even get published and if it is published it is subject to extensive fact checks. If your information does not pass these checks it is then blocked from publishing and/or deleted. Also, Wikipedia after extensive studies has been shown to be nearly as accurate as the Encyclopedia Britannica. [1] In a study over a broad range of articles Wikipedia was found to only have 39 more errors than the Encyclopedia Britannica. Your court case was dated 2008 which was 4 years ago. Wikipedia really stepped up its image shortly after that and is not high accurate and accepted. My school accepts it as a source. Your source is out of date. Contention 2 The fact that Wikipedia cites any sources is fantastic in and of itself. Most articles on the web never site sources about anything. Take for example this link: http://www.guitar-maker.com...It is the history of the steel string guitar but there are no sources cited. Does this make this article completely unreliable? When searching "steel string guitar" on Google this was the second link presented and yet it cites no sources! By your logic this article is automatically less reliable than the Wikipedia page because it shows no sources. If you think about it many sites do not have any sources at all of any kind. Also, you picked on article on Wikipedia, there are articles with literally hundreds of sources. Take the page American Revolution on Wikipedia. There are 135 cited sources, roughly 50 References given and roughly 100 works in the Bibliography. [2] As you can see this site is clearly a good source of information for the topic of the American Revolution. Most sites on the Internet don't site sources and the fact that Wikipedia is actually gives it a leg up on reliability and diversity. Contention 3 Just because the editors are men doesn't mean that there is a gender bias. For the topic such as... the computer mouse. How can you insert gender bias? The only articles you could insert bias into would be in an extremely narrow niche such as Abortion or Birth Control and if you look at those articles you can see no signs of bias. You can't be biased about facts. Can you provide a specific quotable example of bias? Also, your 5th source does not cite any sources. Therefore I cannot rely on the information given. That site is obviously not a credible source of information. Right? Contention 4 The only time I can see missing credentials as a problem is if there are no sources posted. If there are sources posted you can count on the sources to fill in for credentials. What are your credentials? I don't need to know who you are to read your stuff and trust your words. Do you know who writes your local paper? Do you know who the editors of the NY Times are? Do you spend extensive time looking up who wrote your text books etc? I bet you don't.Credentials don't matter if: The information passes the Wikipedia fact checkersSources are postedPosted sources with reliable information is an acceptable filler for credentials. Also people have the right to write under a pseudonym or anonymously. Many great authors wrote under a pen name to protect their identities such as Mark Twain. This does not hurt the value of the information. [1] http://www.time.com... [2] http://en.wikipedia.org...