according to http://what-is-what.com/what_is/wikipedia.html
"Wikipedia is a free online encyclopedia. The name is a portmanteau of the Hawaiian word for quick, "wiki", and "encyclopedia". Actively updated in over 100 languages, including constructed languages such as Esperanto, the English language Wikipedia contains over one and a half million articles."
This really shows the scope of wikipedia and how powerful it is today. Almost anything once can think of has an entry, and it is user-generated. meaning we can edit entries and create our own entries on wikipedia. this is great in the sense that it almost evolves daily. It gets updated daily and is really up to date unlike print encyclopedias. But the negative aspect of this is that many people like to vandalize some entries and put totally bs information there to trick people or amuse themselves through this vandalism. This is the case of a lot of user generated content however and wikipedia has some monitoring done and discourages this type of activity but how much can they really monitor or be able to prevent considering the scope of wikipedia. Many of these vandalized entries sit for days or months because they are off the wall or specialised subjects not many people check or have interest in.
The great thing about wikipedia is it has software that quickly reverses editing errors and vandalism once it's spotted. The other thing is although wikipedia may have fact errors and unreliable information, much of the ifnormation is available and hotlinked via url's on the bottom of the entry to more professional or academic web-sites. I would not use wikipedia as a primary source academically but would look at it and read it and use some of those linked sources the entries contain.
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