User talk:Reportinggrl91

Hi I'm a senior in high school and I'm reporting about Wikipedia. In doing so, I had to make this account and mess with 2 pages (so sorry!), but this is to provide evidence to prove that Wikipedia IS in fact credible! If you know anything that can attribute to my findings, please let me know the details! It would mean so much to me!

Welcome!

Hello, Reportinggrl91, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are some pages that you might find helpful:

The five pillars of Wikipedia
Tutorial
How to edit a page and How to develop articles
How to create your first article (using the Article Wizard if you wish)
Manual of Style

I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your messages on discussion pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically insert your username and the date. If you need help, check out Wikipedia:Questions, ask me on my talk page, or ask your question on this page and then place {{helpme}} before the question. Again, welcome! JohnCD (talk) 10:32, 5 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Credibility of Wikipedia[edit]

Hi. I am a fairly experienced "Wikipedian" and would be happy to answer any questions - ask them below, and I will reply here. As a start:

Reliable source is a technical term in Wikipedia, meaning a source that can be trusted because it has some degree of fact-checking and editorial control. So a news report in the London Times is a reliable source; Myspace is not, because anyone can post anything there. In that sense, Wikipedia is not a reliable source because, despite all the effort put into combating vandalism, the article you are reading may have been vandalised a moment before. However it is, in practice, a useful source - I have both Encarta and Encyclopedia Britannica on CD-ROM, but in three years have not bothered to mount them on my present computer because I find Wikipedia adequate for my looking-things-up needs. One reason for that is that, on the more important and useful articles, the anti-vandal efforts just about manage to keep up; another is that the better articles (not a very large proportion of the total of over 3,000,000, but including the more important and useful ones) are properly referenced with links to their reliable sources, so that if you want to check on a particular fact you can go back to the source it is quoted from.

Regards, JohnCD (talk) 10:32, 5 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Further on credibility[edit]

You should set up your account preferences with an option to send you e-mail, as your user talk page is not really up for this. I'd be glad to discuss this with you via e-mail, although I will second everything said above this post by the prior editor. --Orange Mike | Talk 14:34, 5 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

You can also e-mail me at the link on my userpage (left column, near "User contributions" and such). --Orange Mike | Talk 05:10, 7 January 2010 (UTC) (reporter's son)[reply]