Wikipedia turns 10 !

On the 15th of January, 2011,Wikipedia celebrated its 10th Anniversary. *applauds*.
Has Wikipedia changed the web content? Is it the best source to look at? These are questions which might have to be left unanswered for now.
No one is questioning the amount of work Wikipedia is reducing for us. We all agree that without Wikipedia many of our projects might be incomplete or even spent more time Googling to find an answer or just let go of the question thinking -it may not exist on the web. Wikipedia has certainly proved to be a very good source for information. Saying that I certainly believe specific information may have to be checked twice with a secondary source. 
Now when you think about the content on Wikipedia. Is it exclusive to Wikipedia ? NO! Then why do so many people flock to Wikipedia? It is mainly because of the reputation it has built over the years and the back-links too help just in-case you need to look through a topic completely. Since the User generated content is again read and edited by more users you can assume it to be reliable. 

When we are searching for past facts or information about famous people/organisation ,half of the time we end up at pages of Wikipedia. The information on these Wikipedia pages I talk about have lots of citations and back links. Who wrote these pages? It is a generous user(usually like you and me ) who puts in his time to type out such huge paragraphs of info :). Hence if you notice carefully ,sometimes, the tone of the writer will give an opinion about the article topic. Worst case being a User-writer noting wrong information about the topic. This is surely undesirable. Wikipedia has its share of controversies regarding such incidents where users have for fun made wrong notes and ended up on the wrong side of law. 

Of course for famous topics will end up having a large number of supervising because every reader is a supervisor. However, for relatively less known pages might end up being victims to such frauds(if I can say so). Wikipedia has definitely learnt some lessons through it's 10 years of struggle. Wikipedia now requires more citations and back links to make an article complete else we will see a huge banner asking us to improve the article by quoting back links or any citations. Compared to the early stages of Wikipedia ,at present the pages are a little more reliable but this does not hold good for relatively unknown(or less known) names.

So should you use Wikipedia as a primary source ? for some topics only. What if you cant find it in Wikipedia properly? Check Q&A sites like Ask, Quora and Yahoo Answers. Still can't find an answer? Try googling or any search engine you prefer. Still cant find the answer? like some people say - You are screwed =) .

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