Wikipedia is an encyclopaedia. It’s a secondary source that aggregates knowledge from primary sources.
For all the problems wikipedia does have, this isn’t one of them. It’s not their job to second guess published research.
For all the problems wikipedia does have, this isn’t one of them. It’s not their job to second guess published research.
An encyclopaedia with rather low standards that many people sadly treat as an absolute source of truth.
You're right that this isn't really a wikipedia problem though. It's a matter of education because an overwhelming majority of the population isn't competent enough to fact-check memes on facebook, let alone wikipedia, and if wikipedia doesn't do it either, then that responsibility is pushed all the way back to the scientists doing the actual research.
This is an incredible lack of redundancy if you consider how important wikipedia has become in shaping public opinion. It's a system where the scientific publication process is the single point of failure and this article clearly shows that it does fail rather often.
So what way is there to make this process safer? There needs to be at least another link in the chain that confirms information, preferably two or three.
... that somehow manages to have articles on proeminent subjects that are more in depth and factual than any competing encyclopedic endeavor, while, at the same time, far surpassing them by orders of magnitude on breadth for obscure and less academic topics.
Wikipedia is not an encyclopedia in the traditional sense, and can't be judged on the same standards. It is simply in a league of its own, it fails in different ways than traditional editor-controlled projects and is a fantastic repository of human knowledge and educational resource.
It seems to me like a lot of the articles are accurate, and some of the check marked or featured articles are downright great.
Moreover, the talk page always has anything that might be controversial about the article that you might be interested in.
Sure, it will rarely display incorrect data, but it happens less and less as antivandalism bots become smarter.
This, plus access to the per-article revision history, ensures a much higher degree of transparency than any other comparable work.