Autism spectrum wrongly described in wikipedia

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There is a reason for that. Those articles are edit locked fairly regularly directly due to edit wars. Set so that only certain users can get into them to edit. And that's where the control issues come in. Certain people behind the scenes with the power to do such things, can and do control the content of those articles. Who does so changes from time to time, but it happens. When the articles are put under tighter control, the editing slows down a great deal, but the number of people with editing powers reduced, the content can then become slanted to their points of view.

When they are wide open for anyone to edit, it's a crap shoot what you will find at any given moment. Either way, they are really not reliable.

Sometimes it's best to go to the bottom of a Wikipedia page and check the references for unbroken links first -- the higher the percentage, the more I trust the article. Then I check to see if the available links actually support the page; if they do, then I trust it even more.

Is it just me, or do philosophic, political, and religious articles (PP&R) seem to have more broken links than those related to maths and sciences?

Last edited by Fnord on 20 Nov 2012, 6:47 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I have seen wikipedia used as a source to show what the majority erroneously believes without doing research.

Depending on how serious youd take it you should crosscheck and not only trust. And vice versa you can also find important info from bad impression articles. And understanding and "checking results" even from scientific articles is generally a good habit

I stand corrected! There IS a use for it!



That's pretty much what I do on the rare occasion I do use it. It is a good place to begin research. I'd still prefer to go right to the sources though. Just because they're there at the bottom doesn't mean the article actually reflects the sources. And if I'd have to cross reference anyway, why not just read the sources?



I believe it! I believe it!

For serious research this is all it's good for. For serious research you should be doing a lot of checking and applying your common sense and prior knowledge - you'd be surprised how easy it is to write a research paper. Yes, it's peer reviewed but no, the details are never checked. Research papers are also swayed by people's motivations to make their research look impressive.

However, I also use Wikipedia for fun. I'm not going to remember it all and I don't always care if the information is not 100% accurate. The next, and big, step up would be a highly rated textbook. Papers should only be used for detailed information.

Unfortunately, none of this matters. A lot of people use the news and friends as their only sources.

Untrue. The "study" that declared Wikipedia to be nearly as accurate as Encyclopedia Britannica was based on an informal survey by a group of reporters who used only a few scientific articles as a basis. Also, the study treated all errors as equal - but the ones in Britannica were very small (even called "very minor" by the expert reviewers) and the ones in Wikipedia were big ("this is completely wrong" "I have no idea what this sentence is supposed to mean" kind of errors). Full information here: http://www.roughtype.com/?p=260

Directly from the article: