Is Wikipedia Reliable?

In “Can Wikipedia Ever Make the Grade?” by Brock Read the author discusses how Wikipedia one of the newest and hottest ways on the internet to get information is not all its cracked up to be. The main problem he brings up is that anyone can add material to the encyclopedia's entries without having to show any proof of expertise. However after he assumed another name and posted random and obviously false information on several topics he realized that Wikipedia’s editors were doing their jobs well. Less than three hours after he posted the false information the information was taken down and he was asked by the editors to stop posting false information. Though some professors critique it because the site does not show them favor and the editing process does not seem very turn key, Read’s experiment shows that though the information can be posted by anyone, the editors are doing a good job of filtering out he junk and making the site a much more useable and reliable site to go to for legitimate information. Read even goes through and grades how the site provides information for “Brave New World” based on links provided and reliability of information, and it does quite well. Read’s experiment proved the experts and the scholars wrong by proving that the editing process that Wikipedia uses does in fact work. You still have to be careful about using information from the site however you could log on and get that false information in the short time between false addition and editing. So simply double check the information you are provided with there and you will be fine using Wikipedia as a source of information today.