title: Chuvashia

text: According to the 2010 Census, ethnic Chuvash make up 67.7% of the republic's population. Other groups include Russians (26.9%), Tatars (2.8%), Mordvins (1.1%), and a host of smaller groups, each accounting for less than 0.5% of the total population.


title: Chuvashia

text: Osteopetrosis affects 1 newborn out of every 20,000 to 250,000 worldwide, but the odds are much higher in the Russian region of Chuvashia (1 of every 3,500–4,000 newborns) due to genetic traits of the Chuvash people.


title: Chuvashia

text: According to a 2012 survey, 64.7% of the population of Chuvashia adheres to the Russian Orthodox Church, 4% are Orthodox Christian believers without belonging to any church or members of non-Russian Orthodox churches, 3% of the population (mostly Tatars) follow Islam, 3% are unaffiliated Christians, 1% follow indigenous faiths ("Vattisen Yaly", Chuvash folk religion). In addition, 24% of the population declares to be "spiritual but not religious", 1% is atheist and 2.3% follows other religions or did not answer to the question. There is a growing population of Jehovah's Witnesses among the people despite the official ban by the Russian Government.


title: Chuvashia

text: Study of religion is compulsory for schoolchildren in Chuvashia. Of the students, approximately 76.9% are enrolled for Orthodox Studies, 16.0% for Secular Studies, 15.7% for World Religions Studies and 1.4% for Islamic Studies.


title: Chuvashia

text: There are five higher educational institutions, including the Chuvash State University, the Chuvash State Pedagogical Institute, and the Chuvash State Agricultural Academy located in Cheboksary. These, together with 28 colleges and technical schools, are currently attended by approximately 45,000 students.


title: Chuvashia

text: The Chuvash Republic is the most populous and fertile area in the middle Volga region. There are deciduous woodlands on fertile black earth. In agriculture, wheat and sugar-beet, pigs and beef cattle have become more important than the rye, oats, barley and dairy cattle which are typical for the whole area.


title: Chuvashia

text: The republic is Russia's center for growing hops and is famous throughout the country for its long history of beer brewing. It is also a major center for electrical engineering, especially in the area of power transmission and control systems. Other leading industries are metalworking, electricity generation, and chemical manufacturing. There are also large timber-working mills at Shumerlin.


title: Chuvashia

text: The largest companies in the region include Khimprom Novocheboksarsk (revenues of $ million in 2017), Accond (confectionery maker$, million), Cheboksary Instrument-Making Plant ($ million), NPP EKRA (power engineering$, million).


title: Chuvashia

text: The transport network in the republic is one of the most developed in Russia. The republic's system of roads, railroads, waterways, and airports closely ties the region with others in and outside of Russia.


title: Chuvashia

text: Only four roads in the Chuvash Republic are classified as important federal highways. The most important is Highway M-7, which runs from Nizhny Novgorod through the northern parts of the republic from Yadrinsky Nikolskoye via Malye Tyumerli, Kalmykovo, Khyrkasy, Novye Lapsary, Kugesi, Shivlinsk, Staraya Tyurlema, to Kazan in the Republic of Tatarstan. It also forms a connection via Chuvashia through the southern suburbs of Cheboksary and Novocheboksary to the Mari El Republic and the Vyatka Highway. Part of this road is classified as a motorway, the only one in the republic. From Yadrinsky Nikolskoye, the federal road P-178 runs through Yadrin, Shumerlya, Alatyr, to Surskoye in Ulyanovsk Oblast and further to Ulyanovsk. In the eastern part of Chuvashia, the federal road A-151 runs from Tsivilsk through Kanash, Komsomolskoye, Chkalovskoye, Karabay-Shemursha, Shemursha to Ulyanovsk and Saratov. All other roads in Chuvashia are classified as local area roads.


title: Chuvashia

text: Automobiles, trucks, and buses are the major forms of transportation, with the republic ranking fourth in highway density in all of Russia. Cheboksary is situated on one of the main highways of the Russian Federation leading from Moscow to the industrial areas of Tatarstan, the southern Urals, and Siberia. A recently completed bridge across the Volga River in the north connects the republic to the developed Ural and Volga Federal Districts. To the south, highways connect Chuvashia with Saratov and Volgograd. Extensive public and private bus systems connect all towns within the republic with each other and with the surrounding regions.


title: Chuvashia

text: The standard speed of transportation of containers by road is per day. The average time of delivery from Cheboksary to Moscow is 1.5 days; to Saint Petersburg, 2.5 days; and to Western Europe, 10 to 15 days.


title: Chuvashia

text: The railway network is highly developed, convenient, and accessible year-round. One of the largest railway junctions of Russia – Kanash—is in the center of the republic. Via Kanash, the rail system connects the major towns in Chuvashia with the big industrial centers of eastern Siberia, the Urals, and Moscow. Express trains are reliable and provide a low-cost, comfortable way to travel. Express trains to and from Moscow are available every day, with the overnight journey taking approximately fourteen hours each way.


title: Chuvashia

text: In addition to these lines, there are of gauge industrial lines running from Altyshevo station, on Alatyr-Kanash section, to Pervomaysky, located just west of Starye Aybesi in Alatyrsky District.


title: Chuvashia

text: All railway lines in Chuvashia are operated by the MPS Gorky Railway Division. Steam locomotives were mostly replaced in 1970 by diesel locomotives and when the main Arzamas-Kanash-Sviyazhsk line was electrified, the diesel locomotives were replaced by electric ones.


title: Chuvashia

text: The Arzamas-Kanash-Sviyazhsk line is a double track main line, while the others are single track lines. The 84 km (52 mi) Sviyazhsk-Kanash section was electrified in 1986, the 142 km (88 mi) Kanash-Sergach section in 1987.


title: Chuvashia

text: In 1967, there were four daily passenger trains in both directions on the Alatyr-Kanash line. One of them was the semifast Sochi-Sverdlovsk-Sochi long-distance transit train, halting only at Alatyr, Buinsk, and Kanash. Cheboksary was connected by daily semifast passenger train to Moscow. The travel time was 17.30 hours for the 758 km (471 mi) journey. 21 express and passenger trains used the Arzamas-Kanash-Sviyazhsk main line in the summer high season in both directions. Of these, four did not halt in Chuvashia. Most of the remaining semifast trains stopped at Shumerlya, Piner, Burnary, and Kanash. Four pairs of semifast trains also stopped at Tyurmari. In the 1999–2000 timetable, 11 pairs of Moscow-Kanash-Kazan express trains stopped at Kanash. The Chuvashia 53/54 express trains between Moscow and Kanash took 11.23 hours, back 10.57 hours.


title: Chuvashia

text: In addition to Russian gauge railways, there were six narrow gauge railway lines: two short peat briquette industry lines at Severny and Sosnovka on the north side of the Volga, and four forest railways at Shumerlya, Atrat and Kirya. All opened in the 1930s. In 1965, their total length was :


title: Chuvashia

text: The Volga and Sura Rivers connect Chuvashia to a national and international water network. To the south, Volgograd, Rostov-on-Don, Astrakhan, the Caspian Sea, and Black Sea are directly reachable. To the west, the Volga River connects Cheboksary with Nizhny Novgorod, Yaroslavl, Moscow and the northern regions of Russia. By using river-sea vessels, cargo transportation is possible from Chuvash river ports all the way to Saint Petersburg, Novorossiysk (on the Black Sea), Astrakhan, and ports situated on the Danube River. However, the river is frozen from December through April. Cheboksary is a frequent stop on the many boat tours of the Volga.


title: Chuvashia

text: The international Cheboksary Airport receives both cargo and passenger aircraft of practically all types and sizes. There are regularly scheduled flights to Moscow and other destinations. Additionally, Cheboksary is about a four-hour drive from Strigino International Airport, the airport primarily serving Nizhny Novgorod, which offers a greater number of flights, including connections through Aeroflot and Belavia.


title: Chuvashia

text: While Russian is the predominant business language, the Chuvash language is still spoken by many, especially in the country. The Chuvash language belongs to the Oghur subgroup of the Turkic language group. In ancient times a runic system of writing was used. Chuvashi now uses a modified Cyrillic script that was adopted in 1871.


title: Chuvashia

text: There has been a resurgence of native Chuvash pride, with many people looking back to their Chuvash roots and exploring the culture and heritage and relearning the language. Most building signs, road signs, and announcements are in both Russian and Chuvash.


title: Chuvashia

text: and over 30 amateur theaters, a Philharmonic Society, an Academic Folk Song and Dance Group, an Academic Choir, a Chamber Orchestra, and some professional concert groups.


title: Chuvashia

text: Chuvash Republic has more than 565 public libraries, the book collection being over 10 million units.


title: Chuvashia

text: There are about 627 monuments of architecture in Chuvashia, including 54 of national importance: the Vvedensky Cathedral (1657), the Holy Trinity Monastery (1566), the Salt House, the houses of Chuvash famous merchants (Zeleischikov, Solovtsov, the Efremov family) (18th-19th century) in Cheboksary, the Tolmachev family house and Trinity Cathedral (18th century) in the town of Tsivilsk, the Burashnikov house in the town of Yadrin.


title: Chuvashia

text: Chuvashia, along with Mordovia, has given some of the best modern race walkers, as Vera Sokolova, Olimpiada Ivanova, Yelena Nikolayeva and Vladimir Andreyev. Additionally, the 2008 IAAF World Race Walking Cup was held in Cheboksary.


title: Diver Down

text: Diver Down is the fifth studio album by American rock band Van Halen and was released on April 14, 1982. It spent 65 weeks on the album chart in the United States and had, by 1998, sold four million copies in the United States.


title: Diver Down

text: The album cover artwork displays the "diver down" flag used in many US jurisdictions to indicate a SCUBA diver is currently submerged in the area. Asked about the cover in a 1982 interview with Sylvie Simmons ("Sounds", June 23, 1982), David Lee Roth said it was meant to imply that "there was something going on that's not apparent to your eyes. You put up the red flag with the white slash. Well, a lot of people approach Van Halen as sort of the abyss. It means, it's not immediately apparent to your eyes what is going on underneath the surface." While impressed by Roth's creative marketing spin, manager Noel Monk also explained the sophomoric sexual double-entendre "dive her down" in his 2017 band memoir "Running With the Devil". The back cover of the album features a photo by Richard Aaron of Van Halen on stage at the Tangerine Bowl in Orlando, Florida, that was taken on October 24, 1981, as they concluded a set opening for The Rolling Stones.


title: Diver Down

text: Five of the twelve songs on the album are covers, the most popular being the cover of "(Oh) Pretty Woman", a Roy Orbison song. At the time, the record company thought it had a greater chance of a hit record if the album was composed of songs that were already successful. In retrospect, it turned out to be one of the Van Halen brothers' least-favorite albums, with Eddie stating "I would rather bomb with my own music than be the world's biggest cover band."


title: Diver Down

text: However, at the time while he admitted to the pressure the band was put under to record it, he was able to tell "Guitar Player" (Dec. 1982) that it "was fun":


title: Diver Down

text: In addition to this, two of the original songs were around long before the album was made. "Hang 'Em High" can trace its roots back to the band's 1976 bootlegs as "Last Night", which had the same music but different lyrics. "Cathedral" was also nothing new, being played in its current form throughout 1981 with earlier versions going back to 1980. Additionally, "Happy Trails" had been recorded for their 1977 demos as a joke.


title: Diver Down

text: Two interviews from the period give the best account of how the band – certainly Roth and Eddie – saw the album at the time. The comments here are taken from Roth's interview with Sylvie Simmons ("Sounds", June 23, 1982) and Eddie's interview with Jas Obrecht ("Guitar Player", Dec. 1982).


title: Diver Down

text: "Dave": "We're capable of playing six different Kinks' songs. Because at one time, back in our bar days, I bought a double album from K-Tel or something that had 30 Kinks tunes on it. We learned all of one side and played them into the dirt during the club gigs, twice a night each one, because they sounded so good and they were great to dance to, etc., etc." He added that the band had never met Ray Davies but that "we had a seance once and tried to dredge up his spirit. And Chrissie Hynde materialized for a brief moment."


title: Diver Down

text: "Eddie": "The solo was more sounds than lines. I ran the edge of my pick up and down the strings for some of those effects. I think I used my Echoplex in that song."


title: Diver Down

text: "Dave": "It's like all those Westerns where there's some kind of dissonant sound in the background. Like they'll have one harmonica that hits only one note—eeeeeeeeee—and that's when you know the hero is coming to town or something terrible is going to happen. And what happens is Edward will come up with a song or a riff and then immediately I'll hear it and I'll know right away what the scenario is."


title: Diver Down

text: "Eddie": "The solo was just loose, fun, craziness. I play it better every night than I did on the record, but who cares? It has feeling. Actually that was a really old song."


title: Diver Down

text: "Eddie": "I've been doing 'Cathedral' for more than a year and I wanted to put it on record... it sounds like a Catholic church organ, which is how it got its name. On that cut I use the volume knob a lot. If you turn it up and down too fast, it heats up and freezes. I did two takes of that song, and right at the end of the second take, the volume knob just froze, just stopped."


title: Diver Down

text: "Dave": "The nucleus of the lyrics come from greeting cards and get-well cards that I bought in Albuquerque, New Mexico, on the last tour, and they were written in the style of American Indian poetry. 'May your moccasins leave happy tracks in the summer snows'."


title: Diver Down

text: "Eddie": "I used a Gibson doubleneck 12-string, the model Jimmy Page uses, and played with a flatpick. The solo in 'Secrets' was a first take. I kind of laid back, and it fit the song."


title: Diver Down

text: The music video for "(Oh) Pretty Woman" was one of the first banned by MTV, although VH1 Classic (now MTV Classic) has continuously aired it in recent years. In 1982, Roth explained the ban as the result of complaints that it made fun of "an almost theological figure" the Samurai warrior (Michael Anthony in the video) and also because two little people appeared to molest a woman (actually a Los Angeles area transvestite performer).


title: Diver Down

text: The video, directed by Roth and Pete Angelus, was, he said: "rather like a surrealistic art project ... where they paint the picture and come back three days later and try to figure out what they meant."


title: Diver Down

text: The track "Intruder" on the album, which precedes "(Oh) Pretty Woman", was written specifically to cover the length of the promotional video for the "(Oh) Pretty Woman" single. In his 1982 interview with Simmons, Roth takes credit for "Intruder," stating: "I wrote that... When we finished the movie (i.e., the video) it was about three minutes too long. So, I said, we won't cut any of it; we'll write soundtrack music for the beginning. So we went into the studio and I played the synthesizer and I wrote it. It took about an hour to put that together."


title: Diver Down

text: "Dave": "It sounds like more than four people are playing, when in actuality there are almost zero overdubs — that's why it takes us such a short amount of time [to record]."


title: Diver Down

text: "Eddie": "It takes almost as much time to make a cover song sound original as it does writing a (brand new) song. I spent a lot of time arranging and playing synthesizer on 'Dancing in the Streets,' and (the [critics]) just wrote it off as, 'Oh, it's just like the original.' So forget the critics! These are good songs. Why shouldn't we redo them for the new generation of people?"


title: Diver Down

text: "Dave": "Edward was saying he'd just seen this TV show with a flamenco guy doing all these wonderful things with his fingers, and he says 'I've figured out how to do it with one pick, watch this.' And he did it. And it sounded better than the original... It sounded Mexican to me, so I wrote a song for senoritas." The guitar used on the recording (and subsequent tour) was a miniature Les Paul, built by Nashville luthier David Petschulat and sold to Eddie on the earlier "Fair Warning" tour.


title: Diver Down

text: "Eddie": "I think that the best thing I do is cheat. I came up with the intro after I bought a couple of Carlos Montoya records. I was hearing his fingerpicking, going, 'My God, this guy is great. I can't do that.' So, I just listened to that style of music for a couple of days and I cheated! [Using a pick] I am doing trills on the high "E" and pull-offs with my left hand, and slapping my middle finger on the low "E". If there's something I want to do and can't, I won't give up until I can figure out some way to make it sound similar to what I really can do."


title: Diver Down

text: "Dave": "I think it's a great song. And there's been this thread winding its way through all of Van Halen's music and all of our albums since beginning with 'Ice Cream Man.' I played acoustic guitar and songs like this for quite a while before I ever joined Van Halen. It's music. Why do I have to bang my head to every single song on every single album? I don't think the audience has that much lack of creativity or imagination."


title: Diver Down

text: "Eddie": "It was Dave's idea to do 'Big Bad Bill'. He bought himself one of those Sanyo Walkman-type things with the FM-AM radio, and you can record off the radio if you like something you hear. He was up in his bedroom at his father's house and he found that if he stood in a certain spot and pointed his antenna a certain way, he picked up this weird radio station in Louisville, Kentucky. He recorded 'Big Bad Bill' and played it to us, and we started laughing ourselves silly and going, 'That is bad! Let's do it!' Dave suggested, 'Hey, we can get your old man to play the clarinet.' We said, 'sure.'


title: Diver Down

text: "It's so funny, because I couldn't play the song for you right now. I had to read because there were so many chords, I just couldn't remember it. So here's my father to the left of me, sitting on a chair with a music stand in front of him, and I'm sitting next to him with sheet music in a stand. Mike was there, too, playing like an acoustic guitar bass – the kind they have in Mexican restaurants where they come up, play in front of your face, and aggravate you. We had a great time. It looked like an old '30s or '40s session. I used some thick Gibson hollowbody with f-holes. My father hadn't played in a long time because he had lost his left-hand middle finger about 10 years ago. He was nervous, and we told him, 'Jan, just have a good time. We make mistakes! That's what makes it real.' I love what he did, but he was thinking back 10 years ago when he was smokin', playing jazz and stuff. He played exactly what we wanted."


title: Diver Down

text: "Dave": "I think when you hear Mr. Van Halen playing, you'll have an idea it's a shadow of where Eddie and Alex are now. There's a sense of humour in there, a lot of technique and a whole lot of beer!"


title: Diver Down

text: "Dave": "You know when you have a cockroach and they run round the house and get into a corner? We used to have these shoes called PRFCs – Puerto Rican Fence Climbers, okay? And this was aptly titled because if you were running from the police or what have you, and you were wearing your PRFCs, you could hit the fence at a dead run and your foot would stay in and you could commence climbing immediately, which was the essence of the whole sport anyway. And these were also great shoes for when the cockroach moves into the corner and you can't get at it with your foot or the broom anymore. You just jam your toe into the corner and hit as hard as you can. And if you did it right you got the full bug. So this slang means — bammm! — you have to give it everything you've got. Make the maximum effort, do everything possible, get the full bug."


title: Diver Down

text: "Eddie": "Dave plays the acoustic guitar and harmonica on the intro of 'The Full Bug.' My lines in the middle of that are different. I've been doing a lot of stuff with Allan Holdsworth, and he inspires me."


title: Diver Down

text: "Dave": "Joke 'em if they can't take a fuck, Sylvie! You wouldn't believe the number of TV commercials and radio jingles this band can sing in four-part harmony. I was nannied and weaned by TV—that's the babysitter around here when you're growing up, to sit in front of the tube. You turn into a vidiot. I remember all the commercials. We've been singing 'Happy Trails' for general airport use for years. And we wanted to do something wonderful and different for you."


title: Diver Down

text: In 2022, "Diver Down" was named #3 of 'The 25 greatest rock guitar albums of 1982' list in Guitar World.


title: Reliability of Wikipedia

text: Select assessments of its reliability have examined how quickly vandalism—content perceived by editors to constitute false or misleading information—is removed. Two years after the project was started, in 2003, an IBM study found that "vandalism is usually repaired extremely quickly—so quickly that most users will never see its effects". The inclusion of false or fabricated content has, at times, lasted for years on Wikipedia due to its volunteer editorship. Its editing model facilitates multiple systemic biases: namely, selection bias, inclusion bias, participation bias, and group-think bias. The majority of the encyclopedia is written by male editors, leading to a gender bias in coverage and the make up of the editing community has prompted concerns about racial bias, spin bias, corporate bias, and national bias, among others. An ideological bias on Wikipedia has also been identified on both conscious and subconscious levels. A series of studies from Harvard Business School in 2012 and 2014 found Wikipedia "significantly more biased" than "Encyclopædia Britannica" but attributed the finding more to the length of the online encyclopedia as opposed to slanted editing.


title: Reliability of Wikipedia

text: The prevalence of non-neutral or conflict-of-interest editing and the use of Wikipedia for "revenge editing" has attracted publicity for inserting false, biased, or defamatory content into articles, especially . Articles on less technical subjects, such as the social sciences, humanities, and culture, have been known to deal with misinformation cycles, cognitive biases, coverage discrepancies, and editor disputes. The online encyclopedia . It is seen as a valuable "starting point" for researchers when they pass over content to examine the listed references, citations, and sources. Academics suggest reviewing reliable sources when assessing the quality of articles.


title: Reliability of Wikipedia

text: Its coverage of medical and scientific articles such as pathology, toxicology, oncology, pharmaceuticals, and psychiatry were compared to professional and peer-reviewed sources in a 2005 "Nature" study"." A year later "Encyclopædia Britannica" disputed the "Nature" study, whose authors, in turn, replied with a further rebuttal. Concerns regarding readability and the overuse of technical language were raised in studies published by the American Society of Clinical Oncology (2011), "Psychological Medicine" (2012), and "European Journal of Gastroenterology and Hepatology" (2014). Wikipedia's popularity, mass readership, and free accessibility has led the encyclopedia to command a substantial second-hand cognitive authority across the world.


title: Reliability of Wikipedia

text: Wikipedia allows for anonymous editing; contributors are not required to provide any identification or an email address. A 2007 study at Dartmouth College of the English Wikipedia noted that, contrary to usual social expectations, anonymous editors were some of Wikipedia's most productive contributors of valid content. The Dartmouth study was criticized by John Timmer of the "Ars Technica" website for its methodological shortcomings.


title: Reliability of Wikipedia

text: Wikipedia trusts the same community to self-regulate and become more proficient at quality control. Wikipedia has harnessed the work of millions of people to produce the world's largest knowledge-based site along with software to support it, resulting in more than nineteen million articles written, across more than 280 different language versions, in fewer than twelve years. For this reason, there has been considerable interest in the project both academically and from diverse fields such as information technology, business, project management, knowledge acquisition, software programming, other collaborative projects and sociology, to explore whether the Wikipedia model can produce quality results, what collaboration in this way can reveal about people and whether the scale of involvement can overcome the obstacles of individual limitations and poor editorship which would otherwise arise.


title: Reliability of Wikipedia

text: Fact-checking of Wikipedia is the process through which Wikipedia editors perform fact-checking of content published in Wikipedia, while fact-checking using Wikipedia is the use of Wikipedia for fact-checking other publications. The broader topic of fact checking in the context of Wikipedia also includes the cultural discussion of the place of Wikipedia in fact-checking. Major platforms including YouTube and Facebook use Wikipedia's content to confirm the accuracy of information in their own media collections. Seeking public trust is a major part of Wikipedia's publication philosophy.


title: Reliability of Wikipedia

text: Several "market-oriented" extrinsic measures demonstrate that large audiences trust Wikipedia in one way or another. For instance, "50 percent of [US] physicians report that they've consulted ... [Wikipedia] for information on health conditions", according to a report from IMS Institute for Healthcare Informatics.


title: Reliability of Wikipedia

text: On October 24, 2005, British newspaper "The Guardian" published a story titled "Can you trust Wikipedia?" in which a panel of experts were asked to review seven entries related to their fields, giving each article reviewed a number designation from 0 to 10. Most of these reviewed articles received marks between 5 and 8. The most common critiques were poor prose, or ease-of-reading issues (three mentions), omissions or inaccuracies, often small but including key omissions in some articles (three mentions), and poor balance, with less important areas being given more attention and vice versa (one mention). The most common praises were factually sound and correct, no glaring inaccuracies (four mentions), and much useful information, including well-selected links, making it possible to "access much information quickly" (three mentions).


title: Reliability of Wikipedia

text: In December 2005, the journal "Nature" published results of an attempted blind study seeking reviewer evaluations of the accuracy of a small subset of articles from Wikipedia and "Encyclopædia Britannica". The non-peer-reviewed study was based on "Nature"s selection of 42 articles on scientific topics, including biographies of well-known scientists. The articles were compared for accuracy by anonymous academic reviewers, a customary practice for journal article reviews. Based on their reviews, on average the Wikipedia articles were described as containing 4 errors or omissions, while the "Britannica" articles contained 3. Only 4 serious errors were found in Wikipedia, and 4 in "Britannica". The study concluded that "Wikipedia comes close to "Britannica" in terms of the accuracy of its science entries", although Wikipedia's articles were often "poorly structured".


title: Reliability of Wikipedia

text: "Encyclopædia Britannica" expressed concerns, leading "Nature" to release further documentation of its survey method. Based on this additional information, "Encyclopædia Britannica" denied the validity of the "Nature" study, stating that it was "fatally flawed". Among "Britannica"s criticisms were that excerpts rather than the full texts of some of their articles were used, that some of the extracts were compilations that included articles written for the youth version, that "Nature" did not check the factual assertions of its reviewers, and that many points the reviewers labeled as errors were differences of editorial opinion. "Britannica" further stated that "While the heading proclaimed that 'Wikipedia comes close to "Britannica" in terms of the accuracy of its science entries,' the numbers buried deep in the body of the article said precisely the opposite: Wikipedia in fact had a third more inaccuracies than "Britannica". (As we demonstrate below, 's research grossly exaggerated 's inaccuracies, so we cite this figure only to point out the slanted way in which the numbers were presented.)" "Nature" acknowledged the compiled nature of some of the "Britannica" extracts, but denied that this invalidated the conclusions of the study. "Encyclopædia Britannica" also argued that a breakdown of the errors indicated that the mistakes in Wikipedia were more often the inclusion of incorrect facts, while the mistakes in "Britannica" were "errors of omission", making ""Britannica" far more accurate than "Wikipedia", according to the figures". "Nature" has since rejected the "Britannica" response, stating that any errors on the part of its reviewers were not biased in favor of either encyclopedia, that in some cases it used excerpts of articles from both encyclopedias, and that "Britannica" did not share particular concerns with "Nature" before publishing its "open letter" rebuttal.


title: Reliability of Wikipedia

text: The point-for-point disagreement between these two parties that addressed the compilation/text excerpting and very small sample size issues—argued to bias the outcome in favor of Wikipedia, versus a comprehensive, full article, large sample size study favoring the quality-controlled format of "Britannica"—have been echoed in online discussions, including of articles citing the "Nature" study, e.g., where a "flawed study design" for manual selection of articles/article portions, the lack of study "statistical power" in its comparing 40 articles from over 100,000 "Britannica" and over 1 million English Wikipedia articles, and the absence of any study statistical analyses (e.g., reported confidence intervals for study results) has also been noted.


title: Reliability of Wikipedia

text: In June 2006, Roy Rosenzweig, a professor specializing in American history, published a comparison of the Wikipedia biographies of 25 Americans to the corresponding biographies found on Encarta and "American National Biography Online". He wrote that Wikipedia is "surprisingly accurate in reporting names, dates, and events in U.S. history" and described some of the errors as "widely held but inaccurate beliefs". However, he stated that Wikipedia often fails to distinguish important from trivial details, and does not provide the best references. He also complained about Wikipedia's lack of "persuasive analysis and interpretations, and clear and engaging prose".


title: Reliability of Wikipedia

text: A web-based survey conducted from December 2005 to May 2006 by Larry Press, a professor of Information Systems at California State University at Dominguez Hills, assessed the "accuracy and completeness of Wikipedia articles". Fifty people accepted an invitation to assess an article. Of the fifty, seventy-six percent (76%) agreed or strongly agreed that the Wikipedia article was accurate, and forty-six percent (46%) agreed or strongly agreed that it was complete. Eighteen people compared the article they reviewed to the article on the same topic in the "Encyclopædia Britannica". Opinions on accuracy were almost equal between the two encyclopedias (6 favoring "Britannica", 7 favoring Wikipedia, 5 stating they were equal), and eleven of the eighteen (61%) found Wikipedia somewhat or substantially more complete, compared to seven of the eighteen (39%) for "Britannica". The survey did not attempt a random selection of the participants, and it is not clear how the participants were invited.


title: Reliability of Wikipedia

text: The German computing magazine "c't" performed a comparison of "Brockhaus Multimedial", "Microsoft Encarta", and the German Wikipedia in October 2004: Experts evaluated 66 articles in various fields. In overall score, Wikipedia was rated 3.6 out of 5 points (B-). A second test by "c't" in February 2007 used 150 search terms, of which 56 were closely evaluated, to compare four digital encyclopedias: Bertelsmann Enzyklopädie 2007, Brockhaus Multimedial premium 2007, Encarta 2007 Enzyklopädie and Wikipedia. It concluded: "We did not find more errors in the texts of the free encyclopedia than in those of its commercial competitors."


title: Reliability of Wikipedia

text: Viewing Wikipedia as fitting the economists' definition of a perfectly competitive marketplace of ideas, George Bragues (University of Guelph-Humber), examined Wikipedia's articles on seven top Western philosophers: Aristotle, Plato, Immanuel Kant, René Descartes, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Thomas Aquinas, and John Locke. Wikipedia's articles were compared to a consensus list of themes culled from four reference works in philosophy. Bragues found that, on average, Wikipedia's articles only covered 52% of consensus themes. No errors were found, though there were significant omissions.


title: Reliability of Wikipedia

text: "PC Pro" magazine (August 2007) asked experts to compare four articles (a small sample) in their scientific fields between Wikipedia, "Britannica" and Encarta. In each case Wikipedia was described as "largely sound", "well handled", "performs well", "good for the bare facts" and "broadly accurate". One article had "a marked deterioration towards the end" while another had "clearer and more elegant" writing, a third was assessed as less well written but better detailed than its competitors, and a fourth was "of more benefit to the serious student than its Encarta or Britannica equivalents". No serious errors were noted in Wikipedia articles, whereas serious errors were noted in one Encarta and one "Britannica" article.


title: Reliability of Wikipedia

text: In October 2007, the Australian magazine "PC Authority" published a feature article on the accuracy of Wikipedia. The article compared Wikipedia's content to other popular online encyclopedias, namely "Britannica" and Encarta. The magazine asked experts to evaluate articles pertaining to their field. A total of four articles were reviewed by three experts. Wikipedia was comparable to the other encyclopedias, topping the chemistry category.


title: Reliability of Wikipedia

text: In December 2007, German magazine "Stern" published the results of a comparison between the German Wikipedia and the online version of the 15-volume edition of "Brockhaus Enzyklopädie". The test was commissioned to a research institute (Cologne-based "WIND GmbH"), whose analysts assessed 50 articles from each encyclopedia (covering politics, business, sports, science, culture, entertainment, geography, medicine, history and religion) on four criteria (accuracy, completeness, timeliness and clarity), and judged Wikipedia articles to be more accurate on the average (1.6 on a scale from 1 to 6 versus 2.3 for "Brockhaus", with 1 as the best and 6 as the worst). Wikipedia's coverage was also found to be more complete and up to date; however, "Brockhaus" was judged to be more clearly written, while several Wikipedia articles were criticized as being too complicated for non-experts, and many as too lengthy.


title: Reliability of Wikipedia

text: In its April 2008 issue British computing magazine "PC Plus" compared the English Wikipedia with the DVD editions of "World Book Encyclopedia" and "Encyclopædia Britannica", assessing for each the coverage of a series of random subjects. It concluded, "The quality of content is good in all three cases" and advised Wikipedia users "Be aware that erroneous edits do occur, and check anything that seems outlandish with a second source. But the vast majority of Wikipedia is filled with valuable and accurate information."


title: Reliability of Wikipedia

text: A 2008 paper in "Reference Services Review" compared nine Wikipedia entries on historical topics to their counterparts in "Encyclopædia Britannica", "The Dictionary of American History" and "American National Biography Online". The paper found that Wikipedia's entries had an overall accuracy rate of 80 percent, whereas the other encyclopedias had an accuracy rate of 95 to 96 percent.


title: Reliability of Wikipedia

text: A 2010 study assessed the extent to which Wikipedia pages about the history of countries conformed to the site's policy of verifiability. It found that, in contradiction of this policy, many claims in these articles were not supported by citations, and that many of those that were, sourced to popular media and government websites rather than to academic journal articles.


title: Reliability of Wikipedia

text: In April 2011, a study was published by Adam Brown of Brigham Young University in the journal "PS Political Science & Politics" which examined "thousands of Wikipedia articles about candidates, elections, and officeholders". The study found that while the information in these articles tended to be accurate, the articles examined contained many errors of omission.


title: Reliability of Wikipedia

text: A 2012 study co-authored by Shane Greenstein examined a decade of Wikipedia articles on United States politics and found that the more contributors there were to a given article, the more neutral it tended to be, in line with a narrow interpretation of Linus's law.


title: Reliability of Wikipedia

text: Reavley et al. (2012) compared the quality of articles on select mental health topics on Wikipedia with corresponding articles in "Encyclopædia Britannica" and a psychiatry textbook. They asked experts to rate article content with regard to accuracy, up-to-dateness, breadth of coverage, referencing and readability. Wikipedia scored highest on all criteria except readability, and the authors concluded that Wikipedia is as good as or better than "Britannica" and a standard textbook.


title: Reliability of Wikipedia

text: A 2014 perspective piece in the "New England Journal of Medicine" examined Wikipedia pages about 22 prescription drugs to determine if they had been updated to include the most recent FDA safety warnings. It found that 41% of these pages were updated within two weeks after the warning, 23% were updated more than two weeks later, and the remaining 36% had not been updated to include the warning as of more than 1 year later as of January 2014.


title: Reliability of Wikipedia

text: A 2014 study in the "Journal of the American Pharmacists Association" examined 19 Wikipedia articles about herbal supplements, and concluded that all of these articles contained information about their "therapeutic uses and adverse effects", but also concluded that "several lacked information on drug interactions, pregnancy, and contraindications". The study's authors therefore recommended that patients not rely solely on Wikipedia as a source for information about the herbal supplements in question.


title: Reliability of Wikipedia

text: Another study published in 2014 in "PLOS ONE" found that Wikipedia's information about pharmacology was 99.7% accurate when compared to a pharmacology textbook, and that the completeness of such information on Wikipedia was 83.8%. The study also determined that completeness of these Wikipedia articles was lowest (68%) in the category "pharmacokinetics" and highest (91.3%) in the category "indication". The authors concluded that "Wikipedia is an accurate and comprehensive source of drug-related information for undergraduate medical education".


title: Reliability of Wikipedia

text: In a 2004 interview with "The Guardian", self-described information specialist and Internet consultant Philip Bradley said that he would not use Wikipedia and was "not aware of a single librarian who would". He then explained that "the main problem is the lack of authority. With printed publications, the publishers have to ensure that their data are reliable, as their livelihood depends on it. But with something like this, all that goes out the window."


title: Reliability of Wikipedia

text: In 2005, the library at Trent University in Ontario stated Wikipedia had many articles that are "long and comprehensive", but that there is "a lot of room for misinformation and bias [and] a lot of variability in both the quality and depth of articles". It adds that Wikipedia has advantages and limitations, that it has "excellent coverage of technical topics" and articles are "often added quickly and, as a result, coverage of current events is quite good", comparing this to traditional sources which are unable to achieve this task. It concludes that, depending upon the need, one should think critically and assess the appropriateness of one's sources, "whether you are looking for fact or opinion, how in-depth you want to be as you explore a topic, the importance of reliability and accuracy, and the importance of timely or recent information", and adds that Wikipedia can be used in any event as a "starting point".


title: Reliability of Wikipedia

text: A 2006 review of Wikipedia by "Library Journal", using a panel of librarians, "the toughest critics of reference materials, whatever their format", asked "long standing reviewers" to evaluate three areas of Wikipedia (popular culture, current affairs, and science), and concluded: "While there are still reasons to proceed with caution when using a resource that takes pride in limited professional management, many encouraging signs suggest that (at least for now) Wikipedia may be granted the librarian's seal of approval". A reviewer who "decided to explore controversial historical and current events, hoping to find glaring abuses" said, "I was pleased by Wikipedia's objective presentation of controversial subjects" but that "as with much information floating around in cyberspace, a healthy degree of skepticism and skill at winnowing fact from opinion are required". Other reviewers noted that there is "much variation" but "good content abounds".


title: Reliability of Wikipedia

text: In 2007, Michael Gorman, former president of the American Library Association (ALA) stated in an "Encyclopædia Britannica" blog that "A professor who encourages the use of Wikipedia is the intellectual equivalent of a dietician who recommends a steady diet of Big Macs with everything".


title: Reliability of Wikipedia

text: "Information Today" (March 2006) cites librarian Nancy O'Neill (principal librarian for Reference Services at the Santa Monica Public Library System) as saying that "there is a good deal of skepticism about Wikipedia in the library community" but that "she also admits cheerfully that Wikipedia makes a good starting place for a search. You get terminology, names, and a feel for the subject."


title: Reliability of Wikipedia

text: "PC Pro" (August 2007) cites the head of the European and American Collection at the British Library, Stephen Bury, as stating "Wikipedia is potentially a good thing—it provides a speedier response to new events, and to new evidence on old items". The article concludes: "For [Bury], the problem isn't so much the reliability of Wikipedia's content so much as the way in which it's used." "It's already become the first port of call for the researcher", Bury says, before noting that this is "not necessarily problematic except when they go no further". According to Bury, the trick to using Wikipedia is to understand that "just because it's in an encyclopedia (free, web or printed) doesn't mean it's true. Ask for evidence ... and contribute."


title: Reliability of Wikipedia

text: A 2006 article for the Canadian Library Association (CLA) discussed the Wikipedia approach, process and outcome in depth, commenting for example that in controversial topics, "what is most remarkable is that the two sides actually engaged each other and negotiated a version of the article that both can more or less live with". The author comments that:


title: Reliability of Wikipedia

text: Shi "et al." extended this analysis in discussing "The wisdom of polarized crowds" in 2017 based on content analysis of all edits to English Wikipedia articles relating to politics, social issues and science from its start to December 1, 2016. This included almost 233,000 articles representing approximately 5 percent of the English Wikipedia. They wrote: "Political speech [at least in the United States] has become markedly more polarized in recent years ... . [D]espite early promise of the world-wide-web to democratize access to diverse information, increased media choice and social networking platforms ... [create] echo chambers that ... degrade the quality of individual decisions, ... discount identity-incongruent opinions, stimulate and reinforce polarizing information ... foment conflict and even make communication counter-productive. Nevertheless, a large literature documents the largely positive effect that social differences can exert on the collaborative production of information, goods and services. Research demonstrates that individuals from socially distinct groups embody diverse cognitive resources and perspectives that, when cooperatively combined ... outperform those from homogeneous groups." They translated edit histories of millions of Wikipedia editors into a 7-point political identification scale and compared that with Wikipedia's assigned via a machine learning algorithm. They found that "articles attracting more attention tend to have more balanced engagement ... [and] higher polarization


title: Reliability of Wikipedia

text: Academics have also criticized Wikipedia for its perceived failure as a reliable source and because Wikipedia editors may have no expertise, competence, or credentials in the topics on which they contribute. Adrian Riskin, a mathematician in Whittier College commented that while highly technical articles may be written by mathematicians for mathematicians, the more general maths topics, such as the article on polynomials, are written in a very amateurish fashion with a number of obvious mistakes.


title: Reliability of Wikipedia

text: Because Wikipedia cannot be considered a reliable source, the use of Wikipedia is not accepted in many schools and universities in writing a formal paper, and some educational institutions have banned it as a primary source while others have limited its use to only a pointer to external sources. The criticism of not being a reliable source, however, may not only apply to Wikipedia but to encyclopedias in general—some university lecturers are not impressed when students cite print-based encyclopedias in assigned work. However, it seems that instructors have underestimated the use of Wikipedia in academia because of these concerns. Researchers and academics contend that while Wikipedia may not be used as a 100 percent accurate source for final papers, it is a valuable jumping off point for research that can lead to many possibilities if approached critically. What may be missing in academia is the emphasis on critical analysis in regards to the use of Wikipedia in secondary and higher education. We should not dismiss Wikipedia entirely (there are less inaccuracies than there are errors of omission) but rather begin to support it, and teach the use of Wikipedia as an education tool in tandem with critical thinking skills that will allow students to filter the information found on the online encyclopedia and help them critically analyze their findings.


title: Reliability of Wikipedia

text: An empirical study conducted in 2006 by a Business School lecturer in Information Systems at the University of Nottingham, the subject of a review on the technical website "Ars Technica", involving 55 academics asked to review specific Wikipedia articles that either were in their expert field (group 1) or chosen at random (group 2), concluded that: "The experts found Wikipedia's articles to be more credible than the non-experts. This suggests that the accuracy of Wikipedia is high. However, the results should not be seen as support for Wikipedia as a totally reliable resource as, according to the experts, 13 percent of the articles contain mistakes (10% of the experts reported factual errors of an unspecified degree, 3% of them reported spelling errors)."


title: Reliability of Wikipedia

text: The Gould Library at Carleton College in Minnesota has a web page describing the use of Wikipedia in academia. It asserts that "Wikipedia is without question a valuable and informative resource", but that "there is an inherent lack of reliability and stability" to its articles, again drawing attention to similar advantages and limitations as other sources. As with other reviews, it comments that one should assess one's sources and what is desired from them, and that "Wikipedia may be an appropriate resource for some assignments, but not for others." It cited Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales' view that Wikipedia may not be ideal as a source for all academic uses, and (as with other sources) suggests that at the least, one strength of Wikipedia is that it provides a good starting point for current information on a very wide range of topics.


title: Reliability of Wikipedia

text: In 2007, the "Chronicle of Higher Education" published an article written by Cathy Davidson, Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies and English at Duke University, in which she asserts that Wikipedia should be used to teach students about the concepts of reliability and credibility.


title: Reliability of Wikipedia

text: In 2008, Hamlet Isakhanli, founder and president of Khazar University, compared the "Encyclopædia Britannica" and English Wikipedia articles on Azerbaijan and related subjects. His study found that Wikipedia covered the subject much more widely, more accurately and in more detail, though with some lack of balance, and that Wikipedia was the best source for the first approximation.


title: Reliability of Wikipedia

text: In 2011, Karl Kehm, associate professor of physics at Washington College, said: "I do encourage [my students] to use [Wikipedia] as one of many launch points for pursuing original source material. The best Wikipedia entries are well researched with extensive citations".


title: Reliability of Wikipedia

text: Some academic journals do refer to Wikipedia articles, but are not elevating it to the same level as traditional references. For instance, Wikipedia articles have been referenced in "enhanced perspectives" provided on-line in the journal "Science". The first of these perspectives to provide a hyperlink to Wikipedia was "A White Collar Protein Senses Blue Light", and dozens of enhanced perspectives have provided such links since then. The publisher of "Science" states that these enhanced perspectives "include hypernotes—which link directly to websites of other relevant information available online—beyond the standard bibliographic references".


title: Reliability of Wikipedia

text: In his 2014 book "Virtual Unreality", Charles Seife, a professor of journalism at New York University, noted Wikipedia's susceptibility to hoaxes and misinformation, including manipulation by commercial and political organizations "masquerading as common people" making edits to Wikipedia. In conclusion, Seife presented the following advice:


title: Reliability of Wikipedia

text: Seife observed that when false information from Wikipedia spreads to other publications, it sometimes alters truth itself. On June 28, 2012, for example, an anonymous Wikipedia contributor added the invented nickname "Millville Meteor" to the Wikipedia biography of baseball player Mike Trout. A couple of weeks later, a "Newsday" sports writer reproduced the nickname in an article, and "with that act, the fake nickname became real". Seife pointed out that while Wikipedia, by some standards, could be described as "roughly as accurate" as traditional publications, and is more up to date, "there's a difference between the kind of error one would find in Wikipedia and what one would in "Britannica" or "Collier's" or even in the now-defunct Microsoft Encarta encyclopedia ... the majority of hoaxes on Wikipedia could never have appeared in the old-fashioned encyclopedias." Dwight Garner, reviewing Seife's book in "The New York Times", said that he himself had "been burned enough times by bad online information", including "Wikipedia howlers", to have adopted a very sceptical mindset.


title: Reliability of Wikipedia

text: In November 2012, Brian Leveson was accused of having forgotten "one of the elementary rules of journalism" when he named a "Brett Straub" as one of the founders of "The Independent" newspaper in his report on the culture, practices and ethics of the British press. The name had been added to the Wikipedia article on "The Independent" over a year prior, and turned out to be that of a 25-year-old Californian, whose friend had added his name to a string of Wikipedia pages as a prank. Straub was tracked down by "The Telegraph" and commented, "The fact someone, especially a judge, has believed something on Wikipedia is kind of shocking. My friend went on and edited a bunch of Wikipedia pages and put my name there. [...] I knew my friend had done it but I didn't know how to change them back and I thought someone would. At one point I was the creator of Coca-Cola or something. You know how easy it is to change Wikipedia. Every time he came across a red linked name he put my name in its place."


title: Reliability of Wikipedia

text: A 2016 BBC article by Ciaran McCauley similarly noted that "plenty of mischievous, made-up information has found its way" on to Wikipedia and that "many of these fake facts have fallen through the cracks and been taken as gospel by everyone from university academics to major newspapers and broadcasters." Listing examples of journalists being embarrassed by reproducing hoaxes and other falsifications from Wikipedia in their writing, including false information propagated by major news organizations in their obituaries of Maurice Jarre and Ronnie Hazlehurst, McCauley stated: "Any journalist in any newsroom will likely get a sharp slap across the head from an editor for treating Wikipedia with anything but total skepticism (you can imagine the kicking I've taken over this article)."


title: Reliability of Wikipedia

text: The "Daily Mail"—itself banned as a source on Wikipedia in 2017 because of its perceived unreliability—has publicly stated that it "banned all its journalists from using Wikipedia as a sole source in 2014 because of its unreliability".


title: Reliability of Wikipedia

text: "Slate" said in 2022 that "Screenshots of vandalized Wikipedia articles, even when reverted within minutes, often have a much longer afterlife in news reports and on social media, creating the public impression that the platform is more vulnerable to abuse than it actually is."


title: Reliability of Wikipedia

text: Science and medicine are areas where accuracy is of high importance and peer review is the norm. While some of Wikipedia's content has passed a form of peer review, most has not.


title: Reliability of Wikipedia

text: A 2008 study examined 80 Wikipedia drug entries. The researchers found few factual errors in this set of articles, but determined that these articles were often missing important information, like contraindications and drug interactions. One of the researchers noted that "If people went and used this as a sole or authoritative source without contacting a health professional...those are the types of negative impacts that can occur." The researchers also compared Wikipedia to Medscape Drug Reference (MDR), by looking for answers to 80 different questions covering eight categories of drug information, including adverse drug events, dosages, and mechanism of action. They have determined that MDR provided answers to 82.5 percent of the questions, while Wikipedia could only answer 40 percent, and that answers were less likely to be complete for Wikipedia as well. None of the answers from Wikipedia were determined factually inaccurate, while they found four inaccurate answers in MDR. But the researchers found 48 errors of omission in the Wikipedia entries, compared to 14 for MDR. The lead investigator concluded: "I think that these errors of omission can be just as dangerous [as inaccuracies]", and he pointed out that drug company representatives have been caught deleting information from Wikipedia entries that make their drugs look unsafe.


title: Reliability of Wikipedia

text: A 2009 survey asked US toxicologists how accurately they rated the portrayal of health risks of chemicals in different media sources. It was based on the answers of 937 members of the Society of Toxicology and found that these experts regarded Wikipedia's reliability in this area as far higher than that of all traditional news media:


title: Reliability of Wikipedia

text: In 2010 researchers compared information about 10 types of cancer on Wikipedia to similar data from the National Cancer Institute's Physician Data Query and concluded "the Wiki resource had similar accuracy and depth to the professionally edited database" and that "sub-analysis comparing common to uncommon cancers demonstrated no difference between the two", but that ease of readability was an issue.


title: Reliability of Wikipedia

text: A study in 2011 came to the result that categories most frequently absent in Wikipedia's drug articles are those of drug interactions and medication use in breastfeeding. Other categories with incomplete coverage were descriptions of off-label indications, contraindications and precautions, adverse drug events and dosing. Information most frequently deviating from other sources used in the study were that of contraindications and precautions, drug absorption and adverse drug events.


title: Reliability of Wikipedia

text: A 2012 study reported that Wikipedia articles about pediatric otolaryngology contained twice as many errors and omissions as the medical database eMedicine.


title: Reliability of Wikipedia

text: In a U.S. study in 2014, 10 researchers examined 10 Wikipedia health articles of the most costly medical conditions in the United States and found that 90% of the entries contained errors and statements that contradicted latest medical research. However, according to Stevie Benton of Wikimedia UK the sample size used in the research may have been too small to be considered representative.


title: Reliability of Wikipedia

text: Only part of the data was made public, and for two statements that were released for other researchers to examine, the claim that Wikipedia's statements were contradictory to the peer-reviewed literature was called into question.


title: Reliability of Wikipedia

text: A 2014 study published in "PLOS One" looked at the quality of Wikipedia articles on pharmacology, comparing articles from English and German Wikipedia with academic textbooks. It found that "the collaborative and participatory design of Wikipedia does generate high quality information on pharmacology that is suitable for undergraduate medical education".


title: Reliability of Wikipedia

text: References to Wikipedia in United States judicial opinions have increased each year since 2004. In a 2017 ruling, the Supreme Court of Texas advised against reliance on the information in Wikipedia for judicial rulings, arguing that its lack of reliability prevents using it as a source of authority in legal opinions.


title: Reliability of Wikipedia

text: The Supreme Court of India in its judgment in "Commr. of Customs, Bangalore vs. ACER India Pvt." (Citation 2007(12)SCALE581) held that "We have referred to Wikipedia, as the learned Counsel for the parties relied thereupon. It is an online encyclopaedia and information can be entered therein by any person and as such it may not be authentic."


title: Reliability of Wikipedia

text: In a 2004 piece called "The Faith-Based Encyclopedia", Robert McHenry, a former editor-in-chief of "Encyclopædia Britannica", stated that Wikipedia errs in billing itself as an encyclopedia, because that word implies a level of authority and accountability that he believes cannot be possessed by an openly editable reference. McHenry argued that "the typical user doesn't know how conventional encyclopedias achieve reliability, only that they do". He added:


title: Reliability of Wikipedia

text: In the September 12, 2006, edition of "The Wall Street Journal", Jimmy Wales debated with Dale Hoiberg, editor-in-chief of "Encyclopædia Britannica". Hoiberg focused on a need for expertise and control in an encyclopedia and cited Lewis Mumford that overwhelming information could "bring about a state of intellectual enervation and depletion hardly to be distinguished from massive ignorance". Wales emphasized Wikipedia's differences, and asserted that openness and transparency lead to quality. Hoiberg replied that he "had neither the time nor space to respond to [criticisms]" and "could corral any number of links to articles alleging errors in Wikipedia", to which Wales responded: "No problem! Wikipedia to the rescue with a fine article", and included a link to the Wikipedia article "Criticism of Wikipedia".


title: Reliability of Wikipedia

text: While experienced editors can view the article history and discussion page, for normal users it is not so easy to check whether information from Wikipedia is reliable. University projects from California, Switzerland and Germany try to improve that by methods of formal analysis and data mining. Wiki-Watch from Germany, which was inspired by the WikiBu from Switzerland, shows an evaluation up to five-stars for every English or German article in Wikipedia. Part of this rating is the tool WikiTrust which shows the trustworthiness of single text parts of Wikipedia articles by white (trustworthy) or orange (not trustworthy) markings.


title: Reliability of Wikipedia

text: may rely on Wikipedia as a reference source, sometimes indirectly. If the original information in Wikipedia was false, once it has been reported in sources considered reliable, Wikipedia can use them to reference the false information, giving an apparent credibility to falsehood. This in turn increases the likelihood of the false information being reported in other media. A known example is the Sacha Baron Cohen article, where false information added in Wikipedia was apparently used by two newspapers, leading to it being treated as reliable in Wikipedia. This process of creating reliable sources for false facts has been termed "citogenesis" by webcomic artist Randall Munroe.


title: Reliability of Wikipedia

text: Somewhat related to the "information loop" is the propagation of misinformation to other websites (Answers.com is just one of many) which will often quote misinformation from Wikipedia verbatim, and without mentioning that it has come from Wikipedia. A piece of misinformation originally taken from a Wikipedia article will live on in perhaps dozens of other websites, even if Wikipedia itself has deleted the unreliable material.


title: Reliability of Wikipedia

text: In one article, "Information Today" (March 2006) likens comparisons between Wikipedia and "Britannica" to "apples and oranges":


title: Reliability of Wikipedia

text: Andrew Orlowski, a columnist for "The Register", expressed similar criticisms in 2005, writing that the use of the term "encyclopedia" to describe Wikipedia may lead users into believing it is more reliable than it may be.


title: Reliability of Wikipedia

text: BBC technology specialist Bill Thompson wrote that "Most Wikipedia entries are written and submitted in good faith, and we should not let the contentious areas such as politics, religion or biography shape our view of the project as a whole", that it forms a good starting point for serious research but that:


title: Reliability of Wikipedia

text: Thompson adds the observation that since most popular online sources are inherently unreliable in this way, one byproduct of the information age is a wiser audience who are learning to check information rather than take it on faith due to its source, leading to "a better sense of how to evaluate information sources".


title: Reliability of Wikipedia

text: In his 2007 "Guide to Military History on the Internet", Simon Fowler rated Wikipedia as "the best general resource" for military history research, and stated that "the results are largely accurate and generally free of bias". When rating Wikipedia as the No. 1 military site he mentioned that "Wikipedia is often criticised for its inaccuracy and bias, but in my experience the military history articles are spot on."


title: Reliability of Wikipedia

text: In July 2008, "The Economist" magazine described Wikipedia as "a user-generated reference service" and noted that Wikipedia's "elaborate moderation rules put a limit to acrimony" generated by cyber-nationalism.


title: Reliability of Wikipedia

text: Jimmy Wales, a co-founder of Wikipedia, stresses that encyclopedias of any type are not usually appropriate as primary sources, and should not be relied upon as being authoritative.


title: Reliability of Wikipedia

text: Carnegie Mellon Professor Randy Pausch offered the following anecdote in his book "The Last Lecture". He was surprised that his entry to "World Book Encyclopedia" on virtual reality was accepted without question, so he concluded, "I now believe Wikipedia is a perfectly fine source for your information, because I know what the quality control is for real encyclopedias."


title: Reliability of Wikipedia

text: Fernanda Viégas of the MIT Media Lab and Martin Wattenberg and Kushal Dave of IBM Research studied the flow of editing in the Wikipedia model, with emphasis on breaks in flow (from vandalism or substantial rewrites), showing the dynamic flow of material over time. From a sample of vandalism edits on the English Wikipedia during May 2003, they found that most such acts were repaired within minutes, summarizing:


title: Reliability of Wikipedia

text: Lih (2004) compared articles before and after they were mentioned in the press, and found that externally referenced articles are of higher quality work. An informal assessment by the popular IT magazine "PC Pro" for its 2007 article "Wikipedia Uncovered" tested Wikipedia by introducing 10 errors that "varied between bleeding obvious and deftly subtle" into articles (the researchers later corrected the articles they had edited). Labeling the results "impressive" it noted that all but one was noted and fixed within the hour, and that "the Wikipedians' tools and know-how were just too much for our team." A second series of another 10 tests, using "far more subtle errors" and additional techniques to conceal their nature, met similar results: "despite our stealth attempts the vast majority... were discovered remarkably quickly... the ridiculously minor Jesse James error was corrected within a minute and a very slight change to Queen Anne's entry was put right within two minutes". Two of the latter series were not detected. The article concluded that "Wikipedia corrects the vast majority of errors within minutes, but if they're not spotted within the first day the chances... dwindle as you're then relying on someone to spot the errors while reading the article rather than reviewing the edits".


title: Reliability of Wikipedia

text: A study in late 2007 systematically inserted inaccuracies into Wikipedia entries about the lives of philosophers. Depending on how exactly the data are interpreted, either one third or one half of the inaccuracies were corrected within 48 hours.


title: Reliability of Wikipedia

text: A 2007 peer-reviewed study that measured the actual number of page views with damaged content stated: "42% of damage is repaired almost immediately, i.e., before it can confuse, offend, or mislead anyone. Nonetheless, there are still hundreds of millions of damaged views."


title: Reliability of Wikipedia

text: Loc Vu-Quoc, professor for Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the University of Florida, stated in 2008 that "sometimes errors may go for years without being corrected as experts don't usually read Wikipedia articles in their own field to correct these errors".


title: Reliability of Wikipedia

text: In August 2007, WikiScanner, a tool developed by Virgil Griffith of the California Institute of Technology, was released to match anonymous IP edits in the encyclopedia with an extensive database of addresses. News stories appeared about IP addresses from various organizations such as the Central Intelligence Agency, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, Diebold, Inc. and the Australian government being used to make edits to Wikipedia articles, sometimes of an opinionated or questionable nature. The BBC quoted a Wikimedia spokesperson as praising the tool: "We really value transparency and the scanner really takes this to another level. Wikipedia Scanner may prevent an organization or individuals from editing articles that they're really not supposed to."


title: Reliability of Wikipedia

text: The WikiScanner story was also covered by "The Independent", which stated that many "censorial interventions" by editors with vested interests on a variety of articles in Wikipedia had been discovered:


title: Reliability of Wikipedia

text: The WikiScanner is thus an important development in bringing down a pernicious influence on our intellectual life. Critics of the web decry the medium as the cult of the amateur. Wikipedia is worse than that; it is the province of the covert lobby. The most constructive course is to stand on the sidelines and jeer at its pretensions.


title: Reliability of Wikipedia

text: WikiScanner only reveals conflict of interest when the editor does not have a Wikipedia account and their IP address is used instead. Conflict of interest editing done by editors with accounts is not detected, since those edits are anonymous to everyone—except for "a handful of privileged Wikipedia admins".


title: Reliability of Wikipedia

text: Wikipedia has been accused of systemic bias, which is to say its general nature leads, without necessarily any conscious intention, to the propagation of various prejudices. Although many articles in newspapers have concentrated on minor, indeed trivial, factual errors in Wikipedia articles, there are also concerns about large-scale, presumably unintentional effects from the increasing influence and use of Wikipedia as a research tool at all levels. In an article in the "Times Higher Education" magazine (London) philosopher Martin Cohen frames Wikipedia of having "become a monopoly" with "all the prejudices and ignorance of its creators", which he describes as a "youthful cab-drivers" perspective. Cohen's argument, however, finds a grave conclusion in these circumstances: "To control the reference sources that people use is to control the way people comprehend the world. Wikipedia may have a benign, even trivial face, but underneath may lie a more sinister and subtle threat to freedom of thought." That freedom is undermined by what he sees as what matters on Wikipedia, "not your sources but the 'support of the community'."


title: Reliability of Wikipedia

text: Critics also point to the tendency to cover topics in a detail disproportionate to their importance. For example, Stephen Colbert once mockingly praised Wikipedia for having a "longer entry on 'lightsabers' than it does on the 'printing press'." In an interview with "The Guardian", Dale Hoiberg, the editor-in-chief of "Encyclopædia Britannica", noted:People write of things they're interested in, and so many subjects don't get covered; and news events get covered in great detail. In the past, the entry on Hurricane Frances was more than five times the length of that on Chinese art, and the entry on "Coronation Street" was twice as long as the article on Tony Blair.


title: Reliability of Wikipedia

text: This critical approach has been satirised as "Wikigroaning", a term coined by Jon Hendren of the website Something Awful. In the game, two articles (preferably with similar names) are compared: one about an acknowledged serious or classical subject and the other about a popular topic or current event. Defenders of a broad inclusion criteria have held that the encyclopedia's coverage of pop culture does not impose space constraints on the coverage of more serious subjects (see ""). Ivor Tossell wrote:


title: Reliability of Wikipedia

text: That Wikipedia is chock full of useless arcana (and did you know, by the way, that the article on "Debate" is shorter than the piece that weighs the relative merits of the 1978 and 2003 versions of Battlestar Galactica?) isn't a knock against it: Since it can grow infinitely, the silly articles aren't depriving the serious ones of space.


title: Reliability of Wikipedia

text: Wikipedia has been accused of deficiencies in comprehensiveness because of its voluntary nature, and of reflecting the systemic biases of its contributors. Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger stated in 2004, "when it comes to relatively specialized topics (outside of the interests of most of the contributors), the project's credibility is very uneven." He expanded on this 16 years later in May 2020, by comparing how coverage impacts tone between the articles of U.S. presidents Donald Trump (seen as negative) and Barack Obama (seen as positive).


title: Reliability of Wikipedia

text: In a GamesRadar editorial, columnist Charlie Barrat juxtaposed Wikipedia's coverage of video game-related topics with its smaller content about topics that have greater real-world significance, such as God, World War II and former U.S. presidents. Wikipedia has been praised for making it possible for articles to be updated or created in response to current events. Its editors have also argued that, as a website, Wikipedia is able to include articles on a greater number of subjects than print encyclopedias can.


title: Reliability of Wikipedia

text: A 2011 study reported evidence of cultural bias in Wikipedia articles about famous people on both the English and Polish Wikipedias. These biases included those pertaining to the cultures of both the United States and Poland on each of the corresponding-language Wikipedias, as well as a pro-U.S./English-language bias on both of them.


title: Reliability of Wikipedia

text: Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales stated in 2006: "The Wikipedia community is very diverse, from liberal to conservative to libertarian and beyond. If averages mattered, and due to the nature of the wiki software (no voting) they almost certainly don't, I would say that the Wikipedia community is slightly more liberal than the U.S. population on average, because we are global and the international community of English speakers is slightly more liberal than the U.S. population. There are no data or surveys to back that."


title: Reliability of Wikipedia

text: A number of politically conservative commentators have argued that Wikipedia's coverage is affected by liberal bias. Andrew Schlafly created Conservapedia because he found Wikipedia "increasingly anti-Christian and anti-American" for its frequent use of British spelling and coverage of topics like creationism and the effect of Christianity on the Renaissance. In 2007, an article in "The Christian Post" criticised Wikipedia's coverage of intelligent design, saying that it was biased and hypocritical. Lawrence Solomon of the "National Review" stated that Wikipedia articles on subjects like global warming, intelligent design, and "Roe v. Wade" are slanted in favor of liberal views. In a September 2010 issue of the conservative weekly "Human Events", Rowan Scarborough presented a critique of Wikipedia's coverage of American politicians prominent in the approaching midterm elections as evidence of systemic liberal bias. Scarborough compared the biographical articles of liberal and conservative opponents in Senate races in the Alaska Republican primary and the Delaware and Nevada general election, emphasizing the quantity of negative coverage of Tea Party movement-endorsed candidates. He also cites some criticism by Lawrence Solomon and quotes in full the lead section of Wikipedia's article on the conservative wiki Conservapedia as evidence of an underlying bias. Jonathan Sidener of "The San Diego Union-Tribune" wrote that "vandalism and self-serving misinformation [are] common particularly in the political articles". A 2015 study found that negative facts are more likely to be removed from Wikipedia articles on U.S. senators than positive facts but did not find any significant difference relating to political affiliation.


title: Reliability of Wikipedia

text: Amid the George Floyd protests, there were several disputes over racial justice on Wikipedia. The Wikipedia community voted against a proposal to black out the website in support of Black Lives Matter because it may have threatened Wikipedia's reputation for . It also led to the creation of the , in line with AfroCROWD's Juneteenth efforts to improve the coverage of civil rights movement-related topics; the Black Lives Matter project was nominated for deletion on the grounds that it was "non-neutral advocacy." In Wikipedia, neutrality is more of a process that is achieved through . Social scientist Jackie Koerner took issue with the word "neutrality" and said she preferred the word "balance" to neutrality because one of Wikipedia's goals should be knowledge equity.


title: Reliability of Wikipedia

text: Although Wikipedia is stated not to be a primary source, it has been used as evidence in legal cases. In January 2007, "The New York Times" reported that U.S. courts vary greatly in their treatment of Wikipedia as a source of information, with over 100 judicial rulings having relied on the encyclopedia, including those involving taxes, narcotics, and civil issues such as personal injury and matrimonial issues.


title: Reliability of Wikipedia

text: In April 2012, "The Wall Street Journal" reported that in the five years since the 2007 "The New York Times" story, federal courts of appeals had cited Wikipedia about 95 times. The story also reported that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit vacated convictions in a cockfighting case because a juror used Wikipedia to research an element of the crime, expressing in its decision concerns about Wikipedia's reliability.


title: Reliability of Wikipedia

text: In one notable case, the trademark of Formula One racing decision, the UK Intellectual Property Office considered both the reliability of Wikipedia, and its usefulness as a reliable source of evidence:


title: Reliability of Wikipedia

text: In the United States, the United States Court of Federal Claims has ruled that "Wikipedia may not be a reliable source of information." and "...Articles [from Wikipedia] do not—at least on their face—remotely meet this reliability requirement...A review of the Wikipedia website reveals a pervasive and, for our purposes, disturbing ...". Such disclaimers include the Wikipedia not being able to guarantee the validity of the information on its articles and having no formal peer review.


title: Reliability of Wikipedia

text: Among other reasons for these statements about Wikipedia's reliability are the stability of the articles (which due to editing may cause new readers to find information that differs from the originally cited) and, according to Stephen Gillers, a professor at New York University Law School, "the most critical fact is public acceptance", therefore "a judge should not use Wikipedia when the public is not prepared to accept it as authority".


title: Reliability of Wikipedia

text: Wikipedia has also become a key source for some current news events such as the 2007 Virginia Tech massacre, when "The New York Times" cites Wikimedia to report 750,000 page views of the article in the two days after the event:


title: Reliability of Wikipedia

text: "The Washington Post" commented, in the context of 2008 presidential election candidate biographies, that despite occasional brief vandalism, "it's hard to find a more up-to-date, detailed, thorough article on Obama than Wikipedia's. As of Friday (14 September 2007), Obama's article—more than 22 pages long, with 15 sections covering his personal and professional life—had a reference list of 167 sources."


title: Reliability of Wikipedia

text: Several commentators have drawn a middle ground, asserting that the project contains much valuable knowledge and has some reliability, even if the degree is not yet assessed with certainty. Others taking this view include danah boyd, [sic] who in 2005 discussed Wikipedia as an academic source, concluding that "[i]t will never be an encyclopedia, but it will contain extensive knowledge that is quite valuable for different purposes", and Bill Thompson who stated "I use the Wikipedia a lot. It is a good starting point for serious research, but I would never accept something that I read there without checking."


title: Reliability of Wikipedia

text: Dan Gillmor, a Silicon Valley commentator and author commented in October 2004 that, "I don't think anyone is saying Wikipedia is an absolute replacement for a traditional encyclopedia. But in the topics I know something about, I've found Wikipedia to be as accurate as any other source I've found."


title: Reliability of Wikipedia

text: Larry Sanger stated on Kuro5hin in 2001 that "Given enough eyeballs, all errors are shallow", which is a paraphrase of Linus' Law of open-source development.


title: Reliability of Wikipedia

text: Likewise, technology figure Joi Ito wrote on Wikipedia's authority, "[a]lthough it depends a bit on the field, the question is whether something is more likely to be true coming from a source whose resume sounds authoritative, or a source that has been viewed by hundreds of thousands of people (with the ability to comment) and has survived."


title: Reliability of Wikipedia

text: In a 2008 letter to the editor of "Physics Today", Gregg Jaeger, an associate professor at Boston University, has characterized Wikipedia as a medium that is susceptible to fostering "anarchy and distortions" in relation to scientific information.


title: Reliability of Wikipedia

text: People known to use or recommend Wikipedia as a reference source include film critic Roger Ebert, comedian Rosie O'Donnell, University of Maryland physicist Robert L. Park, Rutgers University sociology professor Ted Goertzel and scientific skepticism promoter and investigator James Randi. Periodicals that publish articles featuring citations of Wikipedia as a source include the American science magazines "Skeptic" and "Skeptical Inquirer". In the January 2013 episode of his talk show, "Stossel", about how ideas can flourish without regulation, journalist John Stossel interviewed Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales, and discussed the success of Wikipedia's model versus that of Britannica, during which Stossel stated that his own Wikipedia article exhibited only one error.


title: Reliability of Wikipedia

text: Jean Goodwin wrote on the reasons why Wikipedia may be trusted. According to him, while readers may not assess the actual expertise of the authors of a given article, they may assess the passion of Wikipedians, and in so far provide a reason for trust.


title: Reliability of Wikipedia

text: Inaccurate information may persist in Wikipedia for a long time before it is challenged. The most prominent cases reported by mainstream media involved biographies of living persons. The Seigenthaler incident demonstrated that the subject of a biographical article must sometimes fix blatant lies about his or her own life. In May 2005, a user edited the biographical article on John Seigenthaler Sr. so that it contained several false and defamatory statements. The inaccurate claims went unnoticed between May and September 2005 when they were discovered by Victor S. Johnson, Jr., a friend of Seigenthaler. Wikipedia content is often mirrored at sites such as Answers.com, which means that incorrect information can be replicated alongside correct information through a number of web sources. Such information can develop a misleading air of authority because of its presence at such sites: "Then [Seigenthaler's] son discovered that his father's hoax biography also appeared on two other sites, Reference.com and Answers.com, which took direct feeds from Wikipedia. It was out there for four months before Seigenthaler realized and got the Wikipedia entry replaced with a more reliable account. The lies remained for another three weeks on the mirror sites downstream."


title: Reliability of Wikipedia

text: Seth Finkelstein reported in an article in "The Guardian" on his efforts to remove his own biography page from Wikipedia, simply because it was subjected to defamation: "Wikipedia has a short biography of me, originally added in February 2004, mostly concerned with my internet civil liberties achievements. After discovering in May 2006 that it had been vandalised in March, possibly by a long-time opponent, and that the attack had been subsequently propagated to many other sites which (legally) repackage Wikipedia's content, the article's existence seemed to me overall to be harmful rather than helpful." He added: "For people who are not very prominent, Wikipedia biographies can be an 'attractive nuisance'. It says, to every troll, vandal, and score-settler: 'Here's an article about a person where you can, with no accountability whatsoever, write any libel, defamation, or smear. It won't be a marginal comment with the social status of an inconsequential rant, but rather will be made prominent about the person, and reputation-laundered with the institutional status of an encyclopedia.


title: Reliability of Wikipedia

text: In the same article, Finkelstein recounts how he voted his own biography as "not notable enough" in order to have it removed from Wikipedia. He goes on to recount a similar story involving Angela Beesley, previously a prominent member of the foundation which runs Wikipedia. Taner Akçam, a Turkish history professor at the University of Minnesota, was detained at the Montreal airport, as his article was vandalized by Turkish nationalists in 2007. While this mistake was resolved, he was again arrested in US for the same suspicion two days later.


title: Reliability of Wikipedia

text: On March 2, 2007, MSNBC reported that Hillary Clinton had been incorrectly listed for 20 months in her Wikipedia biography as valedictorian of her class of 1969 at Wellesley College. (Hillary Rodham was not the valedictorian, though she did speak at commencement.) The article included a link to the Wikipedia edit, where the incorrect information was added on July 9, 2005. After the msnbc.com report, the inaccurate information was removed the same day.


title: Reliability of Wikipedia

text: Attempts to perpetrate hoaxes may not be confined to editing Wikipedia articles. In October 2005 Alan Mcilwraith, a former call center worker from Scotland created a Wikipedia article in which he claimed to be a highly decorated war hero. The article was quickly identified by other users as unreliable (see ); however, Mcilwraith had also succeeded in convincing a number of charities and media organizations that he was who he claimed to be: "The 28-year-old, who calls himself Captain Sir Alan McIlwraith, KBE, DSO, MC, has mixed with celebrities for at least one fundraising event. But last night, an Army spokesman said: 'I can confirm he is a fraud. He has never been an officer, soldier or Army cadet.


title: Reliability of Wikipedia

text: In May 2010, French politician Ségolène Royal publicly praised the memory of Léon-Robert de l'Astran, an 18th-century naturalist, humanist and son of a slave trader, who had opposed the slave trade. The newspaper "Sud-Ouest" revealed a month later that de l'Astran had never existed—except as the subject of an article in the French Wikipedia. Historian Jean-Louis Mahé discovered that de l'Astran was fictional after a student, interested by Royal's praise of him, asked Mahé about him. Mahé's research led him to realize that de l'Astran did not exist in any archives, and he traced the hoax back to the Rotary Club of La Rochelle. The article, created by members of the Club in January 2007, had thus remained online for three years—unsourced—before the hoax was uncovered. Upon "Sud-Ouest"'s revelation—repeated in other major French newspapers—French Wikipedia administrator immediately deleted the article.


title: Reliability of Wikipedia

text: There have also been instances of users deliberately inserting false information into Wikipedia in order to test the system and demonstrate its alleged unreliability. Journalist Gene Weingarten ran such a test in 2007 by anonymously inserting false information into his own biography. The fabrications were removed 27 hours later by a Wikipedia editor who was regularly watching changes to that article. Television personality Stephen Colbert lampooned this drawback of Wikipedia, calling it wikiality.


title: Reliability of Wikipedia

text: "Death by Wikipedia" is a phenomenon in which a person is erroneously proclaimed dead through vandalism. Articles about the comedian Paul Reiser, British television host Vernon Kay, French professor Bertrand Meyer, and the West Virginia Senator Robert Byrd, who died on June 28, 2010, have been vandalized in this way.


title: Reliability of Wikipedia

text: In June 2007, an anonymous Wikipedia contributor became involved in the Chris Benoit double murder and suicide because of an unverified piece of information he added to the "Chris Benoit" English Wikipedia article. This information regarding Benoit's wife's death was added fourteen hours before police discovered the bodies of Benoit and his family. Police detectives seized computer equipment from the man held responsible for the postings, but believed he was uninvolved and did not press charges. The IP address from which the edit was made was traced to earlier instances of Wikipedia vandalism. The contributor apologized on Wikinews, saying: "I will never vandalize anything on Wikipedia or post wrongful information. I will never post anything here again unless it is pure fact ... ."


title: Reliability of Wikipedia

text: On August 29, 2008, shortly after the first round draw was completed for UEFA Europa League football cup, an edit was made to the article for the football club AC Omonia, apparently by users of the website B3ta.


title: Reliability of Wikipedia

text: On September 18, 2008, David Anderson, a British journalist writing for the "Daily Mirror", quoted this in his match preview ahead of Omonia's game with Manchester City, which appeared in the web and print versions of the "Mirror" and the nickname was quoted in subsequent editions on September 19.


title: Reliability of Wikipedia

text: In May 2009, University College Dublin sociology student Shane Fitzgerald added an incorrect quote to the article on the recently deceased composer Maurice Jarre. Fitzgerald wanted to demonstrate the potential dangers of news reporters' reliance on the internet for information. Although Fitzgerald's edits were removed three times from the Wikipedia article for , they were nevertheless copied into obituary columns in newspapers worldwide. Fitzgerald believes that if he had not come forward his quote would have remained in history as fact.


title: Reliability of Wikipedia

text: The death of Norman Wisdom in October 2010 led several major newspapers to repeat the false claim, drawn from Wikipedia, that he was the author of the lyrics of the Second World War song "(There'll Be Bluebirds Over) The White Cliffs of Dover".


title: Reliability of Wikipedia

text: After the 2010 FIFA World Cup, FIFA president Sepp Blatter was presented with the Order of the Companions of Oliver Reginald Tambo. The citation, however, read: "The Order of the Companions of OR Tambo in Gold—awarded to Joseph Sepp Bellend Blatter (1936–) for his exceptional contribution to the field of football and support for the hosting of the Fifa World Cup on the African continent," after the name on his Wikipedia entry was vandalized.


title: Reliability of Wikipedia

text: In October 2012, the Asian Football Confederation official website published an article about the United Arab Emirates national football team's bid to qualify for the 2015 AFC Asian Cup, in which the team's nickname was stated to be the "Sand Monkeys". This was the indirect result of vandalism of the Wikipedia article on the team, and the AFC was forced to apologise for what was perceived as a racist slur.


title: Reliability of Wikipedia

text: In December 2012, an article titled "Bicholim conflict" was deleted after standing since 2007. It talked about a war that took place in India between the years 1640 and 1641, but was later confirmed to be completely fictitious. The hoax article had won Wikipedia's "Good Article" award, a status conferred on fewer than 1 percent of articles on the site, a few months after its creation in 2007, and held that status for five years.


title: Reliability of Wikipedia

text: In March 2013, it was discovered that both Wikipedia and IMDb had for three-and-a-half years contained articles on a fictitious Russian filmmaker named Yuri Gadyukin. False information had been planted in both sites as part of a viral promotion campaign for an upcoming film.


title: Reliability of Wikipedia

text: In May 2014, "The New Yorker" reported that a 17-year-old student had added an invented nickname to the Wikipedia article on the coati in 2008, saying coatis were also known as "Brazilian aardvarks". The taxonomically false information, inserted as a private joke, lasted for six years in Wikipedia and over this time came to be propagated by hundreds of websites, several newspapers (one of which was later cited as a source in Wikipedia) and even books published by university presses. It was only removed from Wikipedia after publication of the "New Yorker" article, in which the student explained how the joke had come about.


title: Reliability of Wikipedia

text: In March 2015, it became known that an article on Wikipedia entitled "Jar'Edo Wens", purportedly about an Australian aboriginal deity of that name, was a hoax. The article had survived for more than nine years before being deleted, making it one of the longest-lived documented hoax articles in Wikipedia's history. The article spawned mentions of the fake god on numerous other websites as well as in a book titled "Atheism and the Case Against Christ".


title: Reliability of Wikipedia

text: In August 2019, a discredited theory was removed from the article Warsaw concentration camp, over 10 years after it was debunked in mainstream scholarly literature. The article was first drafted in August 2004 by an established editor who presented as fact a fringe theory that the camp contained gas chambers in which 200,000 non-Jews perished. With the misinformation presented as fact for 15 years, media sources dubbed it as "Wikipedia's longest-standing hoax."


title: Reliability of Wikipedia

text: In June 2022, it was discovered that an editor known as Zhemao () had created over 200 articles on the Chinese Wikipedia about fabricated events in medieval Russian history. Dubbed the Zhemao hoaxes, the hoax articles combined research and fantasy, creating an alternate history centered around a "Kashin silver mine" and political ties between "princes of Tver" and "dukes of Moscow".


title: Reliability of Wikipedia

text: In August 2022, Wikipedia criticism site Wikipediocracy published an interview with a hoaxer who ten years prior had added a hoax to Wikipedia, claiming that an "Alan MacMasters" had invented the electric toaster. The false information was widely reproduced online as well as in newspapers and books subsequently cited in Wikipedia.


title: Reliability of Wikipedia

text: While Wikipedia policy requires articles to have a neutral point of view, there have been attempts to place a spin on articles. In January 2006 several staffers of members of the U.S. House of Representatives attempted to cleanse their respective bosses' biographies on Wikipedia, and to insert negative remarks on political opponents. References to a campaign promise by Martin Meehan to surrender his seat in 2000 were deleted, and negative comments were inserted into the articles on U.S. Senator Bill Frist and Eric Cantor, a congressman from Virginia. Numerous other changes were made from an IP address which is assigned to the House of Representatives. In an interview, Jimmy Wales remarked that the changes were "not cool."


title: Reliability of Wikipedia

text: On August 31, 2008, "The New York Times" ran an article detailing the edits made to the biography of Sarah Palin in the wake of her nomination as running mate of John McCain. During the 24 hours before the McCain campaign announcement, 30 edits, many of them flattering details, were made to the article by Wikipedia single-purpose user identity Young Trigg. This person later acknowledged working on the McCain campaign, and having several Wikipedia user accounts.


title: Reliability of Wikipedia

text: Larry Delay and Pablo Bachelet write that from their perspective, some articles dealing with Latin American history and groups (such as the Sandinistas and Cuba) lack political neutrality and are written from a sympathetic Marxist perspective which treats socialist dictatorships favorably at the expense of alternate positions.