Tag Archives: wikipedia

Wikipedia’s dominance of search results (and the increasing degree to which people equate research to putting something into Google) means it often takes some effort to avoid ending up relying directly or indirectly on the accuracy of information contained in it.

There are though some basic points to bear in mind when wondering whether to trust what you’ve found. Here’s the checklist that I use:

The more surprising the information, the less likely it is to be accurate: whether it is a typo, a mistake or a piece of misdirection in the name of humour, the really surprising information is often so surprising because it is actually wrong. (No, Robbie Williams doesn’t make his money by eating domestic pets in pubs in and around Stoke and no, David Beckham was not an 18th century Chinese goalkeeper.)

The people who contribute to Wikipedia are not a representative sample of the world’s population: as of January 2006, for example, less than 50,000 people worldwide had made five or more edits and as of February that year about 615 people had made more than half of all the edits on the site.

That 50,000 is far, far more than the number of people who contribute to traditional encyclopaedias, but it is a very lopsided slice of humanity. Want to know who was the supporting female actor in a US TV show of the 1990s that was axed after four episodes and only shown once in Britain? Wikipedia’s your friend. But – and it is a crude but useful cliche – the less your topic is likely to be of interest to a computer-obsessed Western teenager, the less likely it is to be well covered. You may be pleasantly surprised, but the further you wander from this comfort zone, the more variable the information becomes.

The more controversial the topic, the better the Wikipedia entry is usually: the slightly counter-intuitive point has perhaps been the most surprising discovery for me as I have used Wikipedia over the years.