SHEFFIELD: Conservatives miss Wikipedia's threat

The key to the use of Wikipedia as with any internet source is to have at least two other sources to confirm the data and not the top two on a query list. The search engine can be modified to provide a biased search. Wikipedia is a valuable tool, it provides a background, not a reference. When people use it for backward chaining, they have already reached their conclusions and they are looking only for information that supports it. At this point wikipedia becomes a simulacrum, a simulation of reality but not reality because of the information that is left out. Global warming or climate change or whatever they call it today is the perfect example. Real science has been shouted down in lieu of consensus science and that information only exists on the internet and not in wikipedia.

Once again, those with time on their hands are the most activist. With my engineering job designing MRAP vehicles, I can't compete with the disheveled slacker with time and a sour spleen.

As a college student,we were generally not allowed to cite Wikipedia as a source in any of our writing BECAUSE anyone could edit the content. Unfortunately, some folks will believe anything they read, regardless of the source.

Yes, its leftist bias is wholly pervasive and intractable. I submit that a more productive use of our time would be to spend it on conservapedia and build that up into a viable alternative.

The preceding commnents make little sense. Just because WP is not considered a credible source by some college professors doesn't mean that it isn't considered a credible source by millions of search engine users. And, considering the huge number of links to WP - and the fact that they may appear at the top of search results due to hand-editing - it's going to be extremely difficult for an alternative to get to the same position for key phrases. Instead of crawling into one's shell, let me suggest working to bring balance back to WP at the same time as working to discredit them and let the average search engine user know that they can't be trusted. There are some examples of bias here with more to come: http://wikipediabias.com/