Is this person right or wrong?

Screenshot from Tumblr

This is someone's opinion with regards to Wikipedia. In as much as a lot of schools have teachers instructing students not to take their answers from Wikipedia, especially from the mid 2000s onward, you have to admit, it does have its good sides.

This opinion has some truth in it, but it also seems to be mixing a real strength of Wikipedia with a serious oversimplification of facts.

Yes, Wikipedia is usually more reliable than most people assume and it's best for non controversial, factual topics. There's constant scrutiny and citation requirements. Also the fact that errors can be corrected quickly by anyone who knows better is a real advantage for an information platform. Speaking in that sense and context alone, it can outperform a lot of textbooks that are outdated, locked into a publishing cycle or written by a small group and never revisited.

But that doesn’t mean that Wikipedia is automatically more reliable than most textbooks across the board. The one who made a comment under that post agreed and even took it to the next level, comparing Wikipedia to chatgpt.

Of course most AI models are still struggling with Hallucinations problems but are still good enough to answer basic questions and factual ones. The most ideal way to use AI is to fact check it if it's related to a sensitive subject or something too important to get one view point. Always understand that what chatgpt tells you is chatgpt's view point. You could either take that without scrutiny or criticism or you could search online.

While you search online, you're just getting other view points from the same topic. The masses can also be wrong, so just because more people said something doesn't make it right.

Reliability on Wikipedia is based on the topic you're searching for. Some articles are extremely well sourced and heavily moderated and there are other topics that are biased and shaped by long running edit wars. Especially politics, current events and cultural topics, these tend to reflect whoever has the time, has the stamina and consensus power to control the page, which is not the same thing as objective truth.

The crowd sourced model of Wikipedia is a strength, but it’s not magic. When you have a large group of people, some with knowledge some with experience and some with both, checking each other, it reduces certain kinds of errors, but it can also reinforce majority views or the accepted narratives.

That limitation is not perculiar to Wikipedia. The textbooks we read and the experts we listen to have their own biases, but it’s still a limitation worth acknowledging.

As an objective opinion, Wikipedia works best as a starting point and a reference hub. You can use it for orientation, definitions, timelines and even for tracking down primary sources. The moment it becomes something you trust uncritically, the same problems people complain about with textbooks or AI immediately start showing up.