Is Wikipedia reliable?

[Lizzy F.]

(06-10-2011 10:53 AM)leaving Wrote:  Not all professional articles are free, but a lot are. Anything so far that I've read from APA has been free, although if I paid for a membership I could access more articles. But I can still access some. I've found plenty of sociological articles for free, too. These are my areas of study for school and I get a lot of reliable information from professionals without paying for any of it.

You haven't proved me wrong. Quoting your own research in ONE FIELD with ONE SOURCE doesn't disprove my point that most professionally written articles are not free.

Using this as "proof" that lots of articles are free is like saying that "It's true for me in my field, so it must be true for everyone".

Quote:While encyclopedias aren't supposed to be exhaustive, it would be nice if they gave more than a paragraph or two of information, so that we could actually find out enough about a subject to call it a "general overview".

That's not their function. They're supposed to give the bare basics.

Do you think it's wrong to have just the bare basics? Do you think that people should read thorough overviews for every topic that they want to look up?

Do you demand this with dictionaries? Do you read the exhaustive history of the word, the various forms in neighboring languages, examples of it's use through history, and the various way it's spelled in America versus the Commonwealth? Or do you use the one with it's current definition, language origin, and examples?