Wikipedia Reliability

I used to think Wikipedia was “generally unreliable.” That was until I learned about how Wikipedia works. In all the years I’ve been playing around on Wikipedia I’ve never once clicked the “talk” button at the top. This is the key to discovering how accurate the article you’re reading is.

Let’s take the topic I’m currently researching as an example, The Homestead Acts. After a quick Wikipedia search you’ll discover that the Homestead Acts page has a “C” grade! What!? That’s cray cray. What is even crazier is that this article is of “Low Importance.” That means it’s not going to be updated any time soon. If I had the time…which as a teacher hopefully I’ll have…then I would want to look into this topic some more and help improve the page. What is interesting to note first, however, is what the “C” grade means. To do that, simply click on it to find the grading scale.

My article is a C, but a C isn’t horrible per say. It’s definitely something I can use as a start and would want to check out the references to look for more information. A "C" article means, "The article is substantial, but is still missing important content or contains much irrelevant material. The article should have some references to reliable sources, but may still have significant problems or require substantial cleanup." The crème de la crème of articles would be an “FA,” or “Featured Article.” This would be an article you could trust. FA articles have been thoroughly vetted and peer reviewed. In a sense an FA Wikipedia article is more trustworthy than printed media…but I’ll leave that for your own determination.