Updated June 19th, 2023 Sorry, your browser doesn’t support embedded videos. But that doesn’t mean you can’t watch it! You can download Small Is Beautiful #23 directly, and watch it with your favourite video player. Small Is Beautiful (Oct, 2022): What is the Small Web and why do we need it? Today, I want to introduce you to a concept – and a vision for the future of our species in the digital and networked age – that I’ve spoken about for a while but never specifically written about:
Wikipedia is not an “actual, reliable source”.
Why not? It has been more reliable than most anything else for more than a decade.
What is a reliable online source for you?
Wikipedia is not itself a source. It’s a way to get a summary of a topic and to get the actual sources
True but that is its strength and makes it a defacto source.
The references provided to back the statements in the articles are its real raison d’être.
Combine that with its editing practices, and we have the reason it has maintained its reasonably good quality for so long.
It is not always the answer, but it is the best place to start looking for the answer.