Posted by Peter H on September 21, 2007 at 10:42:14 from 86.130.136.248 user Peter_H.
In Reply to: Re: existentialism and luggage to RN Rank abbreviations posted by Laurence Monkhouse on September 21, 2007 at 07:00:45:
I have seen errors on subjects about which I knew the real facts in much more learned tomes than Wikipedia
Alas, too true. I think Wikipedia ia a valuable resource, provided you use it with common sense and caution. Mike mentions other websites - in my recent 'naval rank' research I came across some sites with rather skimpy and inaccurate info. But at least online sources can be updated/corrected. Mike also mentions 'books' - they are the last resort in my opinion - books can have errors in them when published, and then they become out of date and there is no way to update them. I worked for many years on an encyclopedia - despite every care etc etc we knew that there were bound to be a few errors in each volume somewhere and many of its contents would soon be out of date. The encyclopedia has now gone online, and this has made a vast improvement.
I value Wikipedia because it is self-correcting, even if this is a bit hit and miss. As Laurence implies, the way to test any info source is to look up a topic which you know a lot about - I too have tried this with Wikipedia and it came through the test pretty well.