Draft:Essay; Wikipedia is not a reliable source

Submission declined on 11 December 2023 by Sohom Datta (talk).

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Declined by Sohom Datta 5 months ago. Last edited by Sohom Datta 5 months ago. Reviewer: Inform author.

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Wikipedia is a disappointing source that leads people to use incorrect info or opinions in professional situations. It is mostly used for pranks and hoaxes and has more cons than pros. Even a professor got away with adding incorrect information to an article before being called out by Reddit. Wikipedia is unreliable and amateur.

Wikipedia is used for stunts and deceptions. Someone added something about a zombie uprising in an article about the Roman Emperor known as Caligula. “Wikipedia editors unearthed a cleaver hoax perpetrated on the web’s gullible netizens, sending the mighty “Bicholim Conflict” back to where it originated: non-existence.” This is a line from the article An Imaginary War, A Wikipedia Hoax. The article also tells us that the said Wikipedia article was up for at least five years. This shows us that Wikipedia is unreliable and anyone can say anything they want to without consequence. In the article, How I Accidentally Started a Wikipedia Hoax about Amelia Bedelia by EJ Dickson. EJ tells about how, as a college student in her sophomore year, she wrote a Wikipedia hoax about the fictional character Amelia Bedelia. EJ wrote this without even knowing anything about the character, or the author, Peggy Perish.

Wikipedia has more cons than pros. In the article Is Wikipedia A Good Source?, the University of Dayton tells about Wikipedia’s pros and cons. It lists four cons and two pros. Its pros are; “Basic information on virtually any topic” and “Notes and references encourage readers to go deeper”. While its cons contain the following; “Systemic and gender bias”, “Citation requirements can exclude important sources”, “Not all cited sources are open-access”, and “Articles change frequently”. We know Wikipedia is a horrible website, based on what people say about it. The following titles are the names of a few articles I found that drive that point home. “The Wikipedia Ouroboros: The online encyclopedia chews up and spits out bad facts, and its own policies are letting it happen.”. There are also “Reasons to Avoid Wikipedia”(I couldn't find the original article) and “After a half-decade, massive Wikipedia hoax finally exposed”. There is also a line from the essay, Why Wikipedia is Not So Great that I would like to include, because it points out one of Wikipedia’s biggest problems: “There have been documented problems caused by open, anonymous gatherings of people on Wikipedia, such as the writing of vitriol (noted in 2003) or wiki-gangs (noted in July 2005). Another problem is that anyone can edit articles at any time, so people can vandalize articles, as long as they have an account.”

Even a Professor got away with fabricating information on Wikipedia. As said in the article How the Professor Who Fooled Wikipedia Got Caught by Reddit, “Four years ago, students created a Wikipedia page detailing the exploits of Edward Owens, successfully fooling Wikipedia's community of editors. This year, though, one group of students made the mistake of launching their hoax on Reddit. What they learned in the process provides a valuable lesson for anyone who turns to the Internet for information. You might be thinking, “Well Wikipedia helps people start thought processes and conversations regarding information they may not have known before”. While, yes, that is true, Wikipedia is still extremely unreliable and can start up harmful arguments, just because someone saw something on Wikipedia that they thought was true, and now they refuse to believe it's not. Wikipedia is free to use and available to almost everyone to use, but that is one of the reasons why it's unreliable. People take advantage of the fact that its free and use it to make hoaxes that can be completely incorrect, but they still write it because no one can stop them. Who's gonna know if something is true or not?

This shows that Wikipedia is erratic and unpredictable. I predict that in the future, Wikipedia will be made to have more strict guidelines for when people wish to edit the information on articles. If not, they should look into doing that. Wikipedia needs a new system for letting people edit it. We can all agree that more reliability in the world wide Wikipedia would be refreshing.