Reliability of Wikipedia

The most common praises were:

Similarly, Britannica's executive editor, Ted Pappas, was quoted in The Guardian as saying:

Jonathan Sidener of The San Diego Union-Tribune wrote that "vandalism and self-serving misinformation [are] common particularly in the political articles".

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".

They also stated that "it is essentially impossible to find a crisp definition of vandalism".

Lih (2004) compared articles before and after they were mentioned in the press, and found that externally referenced articles are of higher quality work.

A 2007 peer-reviewed study that measured the actual number of page views with "damaged" content concluded:

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.

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.

Criticizing the "deletionists", Nicholson Baker then writes:

Yet another criticism about the deletionists is this: "The increasing difficulty of making a successful edit; the exclusion of casual users; slower growth—all are hallmarks of the deletionists approach."

Complaining that his own biography was on the verge of deletion for lack of notability, Timothy Noah argued that:

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.

Information Today's March 2006 article concludes on a similar theme:

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Wikipedia