Is Wikipedia reliable?

[Annie Moose]

I cringe at saying this, but for once I have to agree with pasta. While Wikipedia has the potential to be very inaccurate and many articles likely do have serious errors, I don't think it's really all that much worse than other encyclopedias, which either cannot be updated (as they are physical books) or are rarely updated once errors are discovered. As someone who's spent a bit of time helping out around Wikipedia, I can attest to the fact that there's a lot of dedicated, knowledgeable people on there who focus on sets of articles (Wikiprojects), making those specific articles as accurate as possible. High-profile articles, such as biographies or "big" articles on concepts like math or English, also receive a lot of attention. It's smaller, less noticeable articles where you're more likely to run into big errors, because no one's watching them as closely and demanding that there be citations for everything.

Obvious vandalism gets reverted immediately, of course, most often by automated bots. I'm proud to say I've even beaten Cluebot to reverting vandalism a few times! It's the sneaky stuff that isn't always cleaned away.

Of course, you still shouldn't use Wikipedia for more than just a general overview of a topic, same for any tertiary source. That's what the reference list at the end is for, to make finding sources for your English papers easier!