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Long-Term Wikipedia Vandalism Exposed
Daveydweeb writes, "The accuracy of Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia, came into question again when a long-standing article on 'NPA personality theory' was confirmed to be a hoax. Not only had the article survived at Wikipedia for the better part of a year, but it had even been listed as a 'Good Article,' supposedly placing it in the top 0.2-0.3% of all Wikipedia articles — despite being almost entirely written by the creator of the theory himself."
as it is simply "flat out wrongness."
The vast bulk of the page was written by User:ABenis. You can still view that user's contributions here.
The Rise and Fall of Online Community
I was curious, so i figure some of you will probably be too.
e n.wikipedia.org/wiki/NPA_personality_theory+NPA+pe rsonality+theory&hl=en&gl=us&ct=clnk&cd=1&lr=lang_ en&client=firefox-a
http://72.14.203.104/search?q=cache:UZxn8h7HkXcJ:
Anyway, I've ranted here which is not what I really wanted, but my point is simple: Wikipedia is a good starting point, but should never ever be used as a cited source. Find the information you discover in Wikipedia in another source and use that. And, because you should be a good wikipedia user, put that source into the article.
Good post. I'd like to elaborate on one important reason for this.
One of Wikipedia's policies is that no Wikipedia articles should contain any original research. And so any ideas or information that you find in Wikipedia really ought to be attributed to the original discoverers or researchers (not to Wikipedia), and references should be given to the appropriate published works (again, not to Wikipedia).
This is separate from other well-known problems with citations of Wikipedia articles: the article may be inaccurate, the text may be changed at any time (if you don't hardlink a particular revision), and the article may be deleted or retitled without a redirect.