Wikipedia is notorious for having unreliable information. But it seems like most of the info is verifiable, and very little is marked in red. Pages are also usually decently written and almost always offer quick and effective summaries on a huge array of topics.
Does Wikipedia employ fact-checkers and editors? What is the process of a page being written and finalized?
In: Technology
They’re written by anyone that wants to write them. There is no approval stamp by an single editor person. Approvals are done by page admins that are volunteers, not wiki staff. Anyone can be a volunteer admin on any topic.
The unreliability of Wikipedia is greatly exaggerated. Tests have been made against Encyclopedia Britannica, where they compared a large bunch of articles with the help of some experts. They had the same number of mistakes, but the testers noted that the wikipedia articles were much more detailed and had more content. If you ever find yourself in doubt, check the talk page and the sources.
So, how does it work?
Well, the idea is that most edits will be benevolent, so if someone does a malovelent edit, it’ll soon be fixed, and the general motion will be in the direction of higher quality. To help do this, a wiki saves a history of each edit, so that a bad edit can easily be backed out of. A bad editor can be banned, if need be.
The staff/volonteers who manage the site aren’t actually editing the content as such, they are more there to make sure form factors, such as language, sources, wiki format and so on is OK, and to make judgement calls on bad edits.
So, the ELI5. It’s like in society. More people build houses than the number of people who blow houses up. Staff/volonteers enforce building codes.
>and very little is marked in red.
A red link in Wikipedia means that the article does not yet exist; someone put that link there in hope that someone will write it someday (making a reasonable assumption about the title of that future article).
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