Something wiki this way comes

The site itself acknowledges that unreliable information can be posted but says that there are so many Wikipedians reading and monitoring contributions that any errors are usually corrected pretty quickly (we had to correct a minor error on the entry one of our readers created for Computeractive).

Wikipedia’s motto is: ‘Given enough eyeballs, all errors are shallow’, but be wary of specialist topics where few users would recognise mistakes. Recently added content may also be dubious – when we looked up the entry on Kate Moss we were surprised to read that she had a degree in mathematics from Cambridge University. When we looked again a few minutes later, her scholarly achievements had been erased.

Incidents like this may seem funny or trivial, but critics have warned that websites like Wikipedia can be very harmful if abused because they are so popular, particularly when entries refer to the actions of politicians, people in the public eye and companies. Wiki fans point out that Wikimedia is a work of reference and all such works are open to question.

The respected scientific journal Nature recently compared the number of inaccuracies in selected articles from Wikipedia and the Encyclopaedia Britannica. They found 162 errors in Wikipedia and 123 in Britannica. Many saw it as a hollow victory, as the study showed that no encyclopaedias – printed or online – are infallible, although the publishers of Britannica argued that Nature’s report was flawed.

So where does this leave the fact-hunting consumer? As a rule, Wikipedia is great as a starting point but don’t take information from a single source as gospel; double-check it against other sources. We think the true beauty of Wikipedia is that it can take you off at tangents that you would never have thought of because of the ease with which links in the text can be clicked.

Take a stroll through a Wikipedia article and click on some of the links. We set off from the entry on the classic satirist and wit Peter Cook and followed links to the actor Kenneth Williams, who Cook wrote for. The Carry On star’s biography led us to London King’s Cross, where Williams was born.

Wikipedia points out that this is thought to be the site of a major carry-on between the Romans and the Iceni tribe, whose queen, Boudicca, may be buried beneath platform 9 of King’s Cross station. The next link we chose took us, bizarrely, to something called Alvin and the Chipmunks. Not all Wiki strolls are that unusual, and you’ll usually find plenty of information on the subject you’re interested in.

See our Workshop about creating new entries and editing Wikipedia pages