Is Wikipedia reliable?

[Annie Moose]

A secondary challenge: Let's suppose I want to learn about a particular topic. Let's say I just read this fascinating book that was set during the time of the Moorish Empire, and I'd like to learn more about that time period. Where would you suggest I go for this?

A quick Google turns up the obligatory Wikipedia article, a very basic definition from TheFreeDictionary (which I wouldn't expect to be any more reliable than Wikipedia), a slow-loading PDF of a scan of some old book, a list of quotes about the Moors, an article on the Senhaja group (descendants of the Berbers, apparently) in Africa, and three links about the book "History of the Moorish Empire", another old book. Two of the links about that book are full text of it, the third goes to Amazon's page for the third volume of it. That's... really not that great for learning on your own, especially if you only have a passing interest in something.

So maybe Google isn't the best place to go, but then where else should I go? I genuinely don't know where else to go for this sort of knowledge. I live in Michigan, that means I have access to MelCat. I also attend a public university. Between both of these, I probably have access to quite a few scholarly journals. But which one should I look at? I did a general search and turned up... well, not a whole lot. A lot of unrelated books (about modern Syria and Spain, for example. And Candide for some reason.) and no really good resources that could give me an introduction to the Moorish Empire. And it took me quite a while to even get that far. In the same time that I did all of that, I could have gone directly to Wikipedia (or any other encyclopedia, although Wikipedia tends to be a lot easier to get through than, say, Encyclopedia Britannica, which doesn't actually have an article on the Moorish Empire and requires an expensive subscription anyway) and learned a great deal more information.

You see what I meant by "overview" now? If you're not looking for specific details, just an introduction to a topic, Wikipedia is perfect. If you're then interested enough to keep going, you can look at other sources.

EDIT: By the way, I broke my cardinal rule of never vandalizing Wikipedia and timed how long it took for a reversion after changing the eggshell article to say eggshells are green. (couldn't do the Abe Lincoln or egg ones because their pages are semi-protected precisely to stop that sort of thing from happening) It took under a minute. People do watch recent changes, and they watch them doubly closely if they're from an anonymous editor. (you can debate the fairness of that with Wikipedia editors all day!) There's an entire group that focuses on that, the Recent Changes Patrol. There's also the New Page Patrol that looks out for new pages that are purely vandalism and tags them for deletion. Blatant vandalism is not going to last long. Subtle errors... yeah, that might have a better chance of slipping by. But again, people get very devoted to "their" set of articles and watch out for changes to them.