Anyone can edit Wikipedia. How can it claim to be accurate?
It’s true that anyone can edit Wikipedia, and when it first started in 2001, it wasn’t very comprehensive or broadly useful. But over time, Wikipedia has gotten bigger and more comprehensive and higher-quality. That’s not just our anecdotal experience; it’s been proven by a number of external third-party studies. For example, in April of 2007, Hewlett Packard released a study that found that the longer an article has been around, and the more people who have edited it, the better it gets. HP said that validates the basic premise of Wikipedia – that mass collaboration, over time, will produce high quality material. And in December 2007, the German magazine Stern released a study concluding that the German Wikipedia was more accurate, complete and up-to-date than the longstanding print encyclopedia Brockhaus – the Encyclopedia Britannica of Germany. In general, all the studies we know about conclude that Wikipedia is remarkably high quality – certainly, its quality is comparable with tra
