Editing Incubator escapee wiki:Help desk/Archive 4 (section)

== Accuracy and Veracity ==

I have just stumbled across Wikipedia, sorry, but that's the truth.  Question: How is the accuracy and veracity of Wikipedia articles determined?

:See [[Wikipedia:Replies to common objections]], as well as [[Wikipedia:Why Wikipedia is so great]].  Basically, the fact that anyone can edit any page means that errors are fixed very quickly, and the scrutiny that takes place on [[Special:Recent Changes|the recent pages page]] weeds out vandalism. Best, [[User:Meelar|[[User:Meelar|Meelar]] [[User talk:Meelar|(talk)]]]] 01:02, 14 Jul 2004 (UTC)
:There are two answers, neither of which is completely correct.  The first is that the accuracy and veracity of Wikipedia articles are ''not'' determined.  There's no guarantee that a given article has been fact-checked by anyone, and at any given time there are certainly inaccurate articles.  The other answer is that the accuracy and veracity are determined by lots and lots of people like you.  If someone sees an inaccuracy, they correct it, so the more times a page has been viewed, the more people have looked for and possiblly corrected errors in it. [[User:Isomorphic|Isomorphic]] 03:54, 14 Jul 2004 (UTC)

:I'm a new user as well (signed up yesterday in fact).  In my humble opinion, Wikipedia appears to be in some cases more accurate than other published materials.  People often will trust published material, however you will usually find that if you know a topic really well usually at least one thing in the article is either unclear, misleading, or plain wrong.  This is the greatness of Wikipedia.  many people can continuosly write and edit articles, further refining articles, correcting eachothers mistakes, etc. --[[User:DivisionByZero|DivisionByZero]] 07:39, Jul 14, 2004 (UTC)