Criteria for evaluating reliability The reliability of Wikipedia articles can be measured by the following criteria:. The section on the left is the normal, undamaged version; and on the right is the vandalized, damaged version. • Accuracy of information provided within articles • Appropriateness of the images provided with the article • Appropriateness of the style and focus of the articles • Susceptibility to, and exclusion and removal of, false information • Comprehensiveness, scope and coverage within articles and in the range of articles • Identification of reputable
third-party sources as
citations • Verifiability of statements by respected sources
Comparative studies On October 24, 2005, the British newspaper,
The Guardian, published a story entitled "Can you trust Wikipedia?" in which a panel of experts were asked to review seven entries related to their fields, giving each article reviewed a number designation from 0 to 10. Most of these reviewed articles received marks between 5 and 8. The most common critiques were poor prose, or ease-of-reading issues (three mentions), omissions or inaccuracies, often small but including key omissions in some articles (three mentions), and poor balance, with less important areas being given more attention and vice versa (one mention). The most common praises were factually sound and correct, no glaring inaccuracies (four mentions), and much useful information, including well-selected links, making it possible to "access much information quickly" (three mentions). In December 2005, the journal
Nature published results of an attempted blind study seeking reviewer evaluations of the accuracy of a small subset of articles from Wikipedia and
Encyclopædia Britannica. The non-peer-reviewed study was based on
Natures selection of 42 articles on scientific topics, including biographies of well-known scientists. Factual errors, omissions or misleading statements found in the sampled articles was 162 for Wikipedia and 123 for
Britannica (4:3). For serious errors, such as misinterpretations of important concepts, 4 were found in Wikipedia, and 4 in
Britannica (1:1). The study concluded that "Wikipedia comes close to
Britannica in terms of the accuracy of its science entries", Based on this additional information,
Encyclopædia Britannica denied the validity of the
Nature study, stating that it was "fatally flawed". Among
Britannicas criticisms were that excerpts rather than the full texts of some of their articles were used, that some of the extracts were compilations that included articles written for the youth version, that
Nature did not check the factual assertions of its reviewers, and that many points the reviewers labeled as errors were differences of editorial opinion.
Britannica further stated that "While the heading proclaimed that 'Wikipedia comes close to
Britannica in terms of the accuracy of its science entries,' the numbers buried deep in the body of the article said precisely the opposite: Wikipedia in fact had a third more inaccuracies than
Britannica. (As we demonstrate below, 's research grossly exaggerated 's inaccuracies, so we cite this figure only to point out the slanted way in which the numbers were presented.)"
Nature acknowledged the compiled nature of some of the
Britannica extracts, but denied that this invalidated the conclusions of the study.
Encyclopædia Britannica also argued that a breakdown of the errors indicated that the mistakes in Wikipedia were more often the inclusion of incorrect facts, while the mistakes in
Britannica were "errors of omission", making "
Britannica far more accurate than
Wikipedia, according to the figures". stating that any errors on the part of its reviewers were not biased in favor of either encyclopedia, that in some cases it used excerpts of articles from both encyclopedias, and that
Britannica did not share particular concerns with
Nature before publishing its "open letter" rebuttal. The point-for-point disagreement between these two parties that addressed the compilation/text excerpting and very small sample size issues—argued to bias the outcome in favor of Wikipedia, versus a comprehensive, full article, large sample size study favoring the quality-controlled format of
Britannica—have been echoed in online discussions, including of articles citing the
Nature study, e.g., where a "flawed study design" for manual selection of articles/article portions, the lack of study "statistical power" in its comparing 40 articles from over 100,000
Britannica and over 1 million English Wikipedia articles, and the absence of any study statistical analyses (e.g., reported
confidence intervals for study results) has also been noted. Science communicator
Jonathan Jarry said in 2024 that the study was historically important, and had been cited in almost every science paper on Wikipedia's reliability since then, but that research of this kind will only provide a "snapshot" and quickly become unreliable. In June 2006,
Roy Rosenzweig, a professor specializing in American history, published a comparison of the Wikipedia biographies of 25 Americans to the corresponding biographies found on Encarta and
American National Biography Online. He wrote that Wikipedia is "surprisingly accurate in reporting names, dates, and events in U.S. history" and described some of the errors as "widely held but inaccurate beliefs". However, he stated that Wikipedia often fails to distinguish important from trivial details, and does not provide the best references. He also complained about Wikipedia's lack of "persuasive analysis and interpretations, and clear and engaging prose". A web-based survey conducted from December 2005 to May 2006 by Larry Press, a professor of Information Systems at
California State University at Dominguez Hills, assessed the "accuracy and completeness of Wikipedia articles". Fifty people accepted an invitation to assess an article. Of the fifty, seventy-six percent (76%) agreed or strongly agreed that the Wikipedia article was accurate, and forty-six percent (46%) agreed or strongly agreed that it was complete. Eighteen people compared the article they reviewed to the article on the same topic in the
Encyclopædia Britannica. Opinions on accuracy were almost equal between the two encyclopedias (6 favoring
Britannica, 7 favoring Wikipedia, 5 stating they were equal), and eleven of the eighteen (61%) found Wikipedia somewhat or substantially more complete, compared to seven of the eighteen (39%) for
Britannica. The survey did not attempt a random selection of the participants, and it is not clear how the participants were invited. The German computing magazine ''
c't performed a comparison of Brockhaus Multimedial, Microsoft Encarta, and the German Wikipedia in October 2004: Experts evaluated 66 articles in various fields. In overall score, Wikipedia was rated 3.6 out of 5 points (B-). A second test by c't'' in February 2007 used 150 search terms, of which 56 were closely evaluated, to compare four digital encyclopedias:
Bertelsmann Enzyklopädie 2007, Brockhaus Multimedial premium 2007, Encarta 2007 Enzyklopädie and Wikipedia. It concluded: "We did not find more errors in the texts of the free encyclopedia than in those of its commercial competitors." Viewing Wikipedia as fitting the economists' definition of a perfectly competitive marketplace of ideas, George Bragues (
University of Guelph-Humber), examined Wikipedia's articles on seven top Western philosophers:
Aristotle,
Plato,
Immanuel Kant,
René Descartes,
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel,
Thomas Aquinas, and
John Locke. Wikipedia's articles were compared to a consensus list of themes culled from four reference works in philosophy. Bragues found that, on average, Wikipedia's articles only covered 52% of consensus themes. No errors were found, though there were significant omissions.
PC Pro magazine (August 2007) asked experts to compare four articles (a small
sample) in their scientific fields between Wikipedia,
Britannica and Encarta. In each case Wikipedia was described as "largely sound", "well handled", "performs well", "good for the bare facts" and "broadly accurate". One article had "a marked deterioration towards the end" while another had "clearer and more elegant" writing, a third was assessed as less well written but better detailed than its competitors, and a fourth was "of more benefit to the serious student than its Encarta or Britannica equivalents". No serious errors were noted in Wikipedia articles, whereas serious errors were noted in one Encarta and one
Britannica article. In October 2007, the Australian magazine
PC Authority published a feature article on the accuracy of Wikipedia. The article compared Wikipedia's content to other popular online encyclopedias, namely
Britannica and
Encarta. The magazine asked experts to evaluate articles pertaining to their field. A total of four articles were reviewed by three experts. Wikipedia was comparable to the other encyclopedias, topping the chemistry category. In December 2007, German magazine
Stern published the results of a comparison between the German Wikipedia and the online version of the 15-volume edition of
Brockhaus Enzyklopädie. The test was commissioned to a research institute (Cologne-based
WIND GmbH), whose analysts assessed 50 articles from each encyclopedia (covering politics, business, sports, science, culture, entertainment, geography, medicine, history and religion) on four criteria (accuracy, completeness, timeliness and clarity), and judged Wikipedia articles to be more accurate on the average (1.6 on a scale from 1 to 6 versus 2.3 for
Brockhaus, with 1 as the best and 6 as the worst). Wikipedia's coverage was also found to be more complete and up to date; however,
Brockhaus was judged to be more clearly written, while several Wikipedia articles were criticized as being too complicated for non-experts, and many as too lengthy. In its April 2008 issue, British computing magazine
PC Plus compared the English Wikipedia with the DVD editions of
World Book Encyclopedia and
Encyclopædia Britannica, assessing for each the coverage of a series of random subjects. It concluded, "The quality of content is good in all three cases" and advised Wikipedia users "Be aware that erroneous edits do occur, and check anything that seems outlandish with a second source. But the vast majority of Wikipedia is filled with valuable and accurate information." A 2008 paper in
Reference Services Review compared nine Wikipedia entries on historical topics to their counterparts in
Encyclopædia Britannica,
The Dictionary of American History and
American National Biography Online. The paper found that Wikipedia's entries had an overall accuracy rate of 80 percent, whereas the other encyclopedias had an accuracy rate of 95 to 96 percent. A 2010 study assessed the extent to which Wikipedia pages about the history of countries conformed to the site's policy of verifiability. It found that, in contradiction of this policy, many claims in these articles were not supported by citations, and that many of those that were, sourced to popular media and government websites rather than to academic journal articles. In April 2011, a study was published by Adam Brown of
Brigham Young University in the journal
PS Political Science & Politics which examined "thousands of Wikipedia articles about candidates, elections, and officeholders". The study found that while the information in these articles tended to be accurate, the articles examined contained many errors of omission. A 2012 study co-authored by
Shane Greenstein examined a decade of Wikipedia articles on United States politics and found that the more contributors there were to a given article, the more neutral it tended to be, in line with a narrow interpretation of
Linus's law. Reavley et al. (2012) compared the quality of articles on select
mental health topics on Wikipedia with corresponding articles in
Encyclopædia Britannica and a psychiatry textbook. They asked experts to rate article content with regard to accuracy, up-to-dateness, breadth of coverage, referencing and readability. Wikipedia scored highest on all criteria except readability, and the authors concluded that Wikipedia is as good as or better than
Britannica and a standard textbook. A 2014 study in the
Journal of the American Pharmacists Association examined 19 Wikipedia articles about
herbal supplements, and concluded that all of these articles contained information about their "therapeutic uses and adverse effects", but also concluded that "several lacked information on drug interactions, pregnancy, and contraindications". The study's authors therefore recommended that patients not rely solely on Wikipedia as a source for information about the herbal supplements in question. Another study published in 2014 in
PLOS ONE found that Wikipedia's information about
pharmacology was 99.7% accurate when compared to a pharmacology textbook, and that the completeness of such information on Wikipedia was 83.8%. The study also determined that completeness of these Wikipedia articles was lowest (68%) in the category "pharmacokinetics" and highest (91.3%) in the category "indication". The authors concluded that "Wikipedia is an accurate and comprehensive source of drug-related information for undergraduate medical education".
Expert opinion Librarians' views In a 2004 interview with
The Guardian, self-described information specialist and Internet consultant Philip Bradley said that he would not use Wikipedia and was "not aware of a single librarian who would". He then explained that "the main problem is the lack of authority. With printed publications, the publishers have to ensure that their data are reliable, as their livelihood depends on it. But with something like this, all that goes out the window." In 2005, the library at
Trent University in
Ontario stated Wikipedia had many articles that are "long and comprehensive", but that there is "a lot of room for misinformation and bias [and] a lot of variability in both the quality and depth of articles". It adds that Wikipedia has advantages and limitations, that it has "excellent coverage of technical topics" and articles are "often added quickly and, as a result, coverage of current events is quite good", comparing this to traditional sources which are unable to achieve this task. It concludes that, depending upon the need, one should think critically and assess the appropriateness of one's sources, "whether you are looking for fact or opinion, how in-depth you want to be as you explore a topic, the importance of reliability and accuracy, and the importance of timely or recent information", and adds that Wikipedia can be used in any event as a "starting point". A 2006 review of Wikipedia by
Library Journal, using a panel of librarians, "the toughest critics of reference materials, whatever their format", asked "long standing reviewers" to evaluate three areas of Wikipedia (popular culture, current affairs, and science), and concluded: "While there are still reasons to proceed with caution when using a resource that takes pride in limited professional management, many encouraging signs suggest that (at least for now) Wikipedia may be granted the librarian's seal of approval". A reviewer who "decided to explore controversial historical and current events, hoping to find glaring abuses" said, "I was pleased by Wikipedia's objective presentation of controversial subjects" but that "as with much information floating around in cyberspace, a healthy degree of skepticism and skill at winnowing fact from opinion are required". Other reviewers noted that there is "much variation" but "good content abounds". In 2007,
Michael Gorman, former president of the
American Library Association (ALA) stated in an
Encyclopædia Britannica blog that "A professor who encourages the use of Wikipedia is the intellectual equivalent of a dietician who recommends a steady diet of Big Macs with everything".
Information Today (March 2006) cites librarian Nancy O'Neill (principal librarian for Reference Services at the Santa Monica Public Library System) as saying that "there is a good deal of skepticism about Wikipedia in the library community" but that "she also admits cheerfully that Wikipedia makes a good starting place for a search. You get terminology, names, and a feel for the subject."
PC Pro (August 2007) cites the head of the European and American Collection at the
British Library, Stephen Bury, as stating "Wikipedia is potentially a good thing—it provides a speedier response to new events, and to new evidence on old items". The article concludes: "For [Bury], the problem isn't so much the reliability of Wikipedia's content so much as the way in which it's used." "It's already become the first port of call for the researcher", Bury says, before noting that this is "not necessarily problematic except when they go no further". According to Bury, the trick to using Wikipedia is to understand that "just because it's in an encyclopedia (free, web or printed) doesn't mean it's true. Ask for evidence ... and contribute." discussed the Wikipedia approach, process and outcome in depth, commenting for example that in controversial topics, "what is most remarkable is that the two sides actually engaged each other and negotiated a version of the article that both can more or less live with". The author comments that: Shi
et al. extended this analysis in discussing "The wisdom of polarized crowds" in 2017 based on
content analysis of all edits to English Wikipedia articles relating to politics, social issues and science from its start to December 1, 2016. This included almost 233,000 articles representing approximately 5 percent of the English Wikipedia. They wrote: "Political speech [at least in the United States] has become markedly more polarized in recent years ... . [D]espite early promise of the world-wide-web to democratize access to diverse information, increased media choice and social networking platforms ... [create] echo chambers that ... degrade the quality of individual decisions, ... discount identity-incongruent opinions, stimulate and reinforce polarizing information ... foment conflict and even make communication counter-productive. Nevertheless, a large literature documents the largely positive effect that social differences can exert on the collaborative production of information, goods and services. Research demonstrates that individuals from socially distinct groups embody diverse cognitive resources and perspectives that, when cooperatively combined ... outperform those from homogeneous groups." They translated edit histories of millions of Wikipedia editors into a 7-point political identification scale and compared that with Wikipedia's
six-level article quality score (stub, start, C, B, good, featured) assigned via a machine learning algorithm. They found that "articles attracting more attention tend to have more balanced engagement ... [and] higher polarization is associated with higher quality."
Academia Early years of Wikipedia (2000–2019) Academics also criticized Wikipedia for its perceived failure as a reliable source and because Wikipedia editors may have no expertise, competence, or credentials in the topics on which they contribute. Adrian Riskin, a mathematician in
Whittier College commented that while highly technical articles may be written by mathematicians for mathematicians, the more general maths topics, such as the article on
polynomials, are written in a very amateurish fashion with a number of obvious mistakes. Because Wikipedia cannot be considered a reliable source, the use of Wikipedia is not accepted in many schools and universities in writing a formal paper, and some educational institutions have banned it as a primary source while others have limited its use to only a pointer to external sources. The criticism of not being a reliable source, however, may not only apply to Wikipedia but to encyclopedias in general—some university
lecturers are not impressed when students cite print-based encyclopedias in assigned work. However, it seems that instructors have underestimated the use of Wikipedia in academia because of these concerns. Researchers and academics contend that while Wikipedia may not be used as a 100 percent accurate source for final papers, it is a valuable jumping off point for research that can lead to many possibilities if approached critically. What may be missing in academia is the emphasis on
critical analysis in regards to the use of Wikipedia in secondary and higher education. According to Polk, Johnston and Evers, academics should not dismiss Wikipedia entirely (there are fewer inaccuracies than there are errors of omission) but rather begin to support it, and teach the use of Wikipedia as an education tool in tandem with critical thinking skills that will allow students to filter the information found on the online encyclopedia and help them critically analyze their findings. An empirical study conducted in 2006 by a Business School lecturer in Information Systems at the
University of Nottingham, the subject of a review on the technical website
Ars Technica, involving 55 academics asked to review specific Wikipedia articles that either were in their expert field (group 1) or chosen at random (group 2), concluded that: "The experts found Wikipedia's articles to be more credible than the non-experts. This suggests that the accuracy of Wikipedia is high. However, the results should not be seen as support for Wikipedia as a totally reliable resource as, according to the experts, 13 percent of the articles contain mistakes (10% of the experts reported factual errors of an unspecified degree, 3% of them reported spelling errors)." The Gould Library at
Carleton College in
Minnesota has a web page describing the use of Wikipedia in academia. It asserts that "Wikipedia is without question a valuable and informative resource", but that "there is an inherent lack of reliability and stability" to its articles, again drawing attention to similar advantages and limitations as other sources. As with other reviews, it comments that one should assess one's sources and what is desired from them, and that "Wikipedia may be an appropriate resource for some assignments, but not for others." It cited Wikipedia co-founder
Jimmy Wales' view that Wikipedia may not be ideal as a source for all academic uses, and (as with other sources) suggests that at the least, one strength of Wikipedia is that it provides a good starting point for current information on a very wide range of topics. In 2007, the
Chronicle of Higher Education published an article written by
Cathy Davidson, Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies and English at
Duke University, in which she asserts that Wikipedia should be used to teach students about the concepts of reliability and credibility. In 2008,
Hamlet Isakhanli, founder and president of
Khazar University, compared the
Encyclopædia Britannica and English Wikipedia articles on
Azerbaijan and related subjects. His study found that Wikipedia covered the subject much more widely, more accurately and in more detail, though with some lack of balance, and that Wikipedia was the best source for the first approximation. In 2011, Karl Kehm, associate professor of physics at
Washington College, said: "I do encourage [my students] to use [Wikipedia] as one of many launch points for pursuing original source material. The best Wikipedia entries are well researched with extensive citations". Some academic journals do refer to Wikipedia articles, but are not elevating it to the same level as traditional references. For instance, Wikipedia articles have been referenced in "enhanced perspectives" provided on-line in the journal
Science. The first of these perspectives to provide a hyperlink to Wikipedia was "A White Collar Protein Senses Blue Light" in 2002, and dozens of enhanced perspectives have provided such links since then. The publisher of
Science states that these enhanced perspectives "include hypernotes—which link directly to websites of other relevant information available online—beyond the standard bibliographic references".
2020s onwards Sverrir Steinsson investigated factors that influenced the credibility of English Wikipedia in 2023, and found that "Wikipedia transformed from a dubious source of information in its early years to an increasingly reliable one over time." This was due to it becoming "an active fact-checker and anti-fringe", This reinterpretation of NPOV "had meaningful consequences, turning an organization that used to lend credence and false balance to pseudoscience, conspiracy theories, and extremism into a proactive debunker, fact-checker and identifier of fringe discourse."
Journalism and use of Wikipedia in the newsroom In his 2014 book
Virtual Unreality,
Charles Seife, a professor of journalism at
New York University, noted Wikipedia's susceptibility to hoaxes and misinformation, including manipulation by commercial and political organizations "masquerading as common people" making edits to Wikipedia. In conclusion, Seife presented the following advice: In November 2012, judge
Brian Leveson was accused of having forgotten "one of the elementary rules of journalism" when he named a "Brett Straub" as one of the founders of
The Independent newspaper in
his report on the culture, practices and ethics of the British press. The name had been added to the Wikipedia article on
The Independent over a year prior, and turned out to be that of a 25-year-old Californian, whose friend had added his name to a string of Wikipedia pages as a prank. Straub was tracked down by
The Telegraph and commented, "The fact someone, especially a judge, has believed something on Wikipedia is kind of shocking. My friend went on and edited a bunch of Wikipedia pages and put my name there. [...] I knew my friend had done it but I didn't know how to change them back and I thought someone would. At one point I was the creator of Coca-Cola or something. You know how easy it is to change Wikipedia. Every time he came across a red linked name he put my name in its place." A 2016
BBC article by Ciaran McCauley similarly noted that "plenty of mischievous, made-up information has found its way" on to Wikipedia and that "many of these fake facts have fallen through the cracks and been taken as gospel by everyone from university academics to major newspapers and broadcasters." The
Daily Mail—itself banned as a source on Wikipedia in 2017 because of its perceived unreliability—has publicly stated that it "banned all its journalists from using Wikipedia as a sole source in 2014 because of its unreliability".
Slate said in 2022 that "Screenshots of vandalized Wikipedia articles, even when reverted within minutes, often have a much longer afterlife in news reports and on social media, creating the public impression that the platform is more vulnerable to abuse than it actually is."
Science and medicine Science and medicine are areas where accuracy is of high importance and
peer review is the norm. While some of Wikipedia's content has passed a form of peer review, most has not. A 2008 study examined 80 Wikipedia drug entries. The researchers found few factual errors in this set of articles, but determined that these articles were often missing important information, like
contraindications and
drug interactions. One of the researchers noted that "If people went and used this as a sole or authoritative source without contacting a health professional...those are the types of negative impacts that can occur." The researchers also compared Wikipedia to
Medscape Drug Reference (MDR), by looking for answers to 80 different questions covering eight categories of drug information, including adverse drug events, dosages, and mechanism of action. They have determined that MDR provided answers to 82.5 percent of the questions, while Wikipedia could only answer 40 percent, and that answers were less likely to be complete for Wikipedia as well. None of the answers from Wikipedia were determined factually inaccurate, while they found four inaccurate answers in MDR. But the researchers found 48 errors of omission in the Wikipedia entries, compared to 14 for MDR. The lead investigator concluded: "I think that these errors of omission can be just as dangerous [as inaccuracies]", and he pointed out that drug company representatives have been caught deleting information from Wikipedia entries that make their drugs look unsafe. A 2009 survey asked US toxicologists how accurately they rated the portrayal of health risks of chemicals in different media sources. It was based on the answers of 937 members of the
Society of Toxicology and found that these experts regarded Wikipedia's reliability in this area as far higher than that of all traditional news media: In 2010, researchers compared information about 10 types of cancer on Wikipedia to similar data from the
National Cancer Institute's Physician Data Query and concluded "the Wiki resource had similar accuracy and depth to the professionally edited database" and that "sub-analysis comparing common to uncommon cancers demonstrated no difference between the two", but that ease of readability was an issue. A study in 2011 came to the result that categories most frequently absent in Wikipedia's drug articles are those of drug interactions and medication use in breastfeeding. Other categories with incomplete coverage were descriptions of off-label indications, contraindications and precautions, adverse drug events and dosing. In a U.S. study in 2014, 10 researchers examined 10 Wikipedia health articles of the most costly medical conditions in the United States and found that 90% of the entries contained errors and statements that contradicted latest medical research. However, according to Stevie Benton of Wikimedia UK the sample size used in the research may have been too small to be considered representative. Only part of the data was made public, and for two statements that were released for other researchers to examine, the claim that Wikipedia's statements were contradictory to the peer-reviewed literature was called into question. However, more open studies, published in 2017 and 2020, concluded, that Wikipedia provided less accurate medical information than paid-access online encyclopedias. A 2014 study published in
PLOS One looked at the quality of Wikipedia articles on
pharmacology, comparing articles from English and German Wikipedia with academic textbooks. This analysis revealed that the accuracy of the drug information on Wikipedia was 99.7%, while the completeness of this information was estimated at 83.8%. It conclude that "the collaborative and
participatory design of Wikipedia does generate high quality information on pharmacology that is suitable for undergraduate medical education". Jarry said in 2024 that evaluating Wikipedia's reliability on medicine or any subject is challenging and that researchers "have to pick a sample and hope it is representative," saying also that "Wikipedia, overall, has no business being this good." The Supreme Court of India in its judgment in
Commr. of Customs, Bangalore vs. ACER India Pvt. (Citation 2007(12)SCALE581) held that "We have referred to Wikipedia, as the learned Counsel for the parties relied thereupon. It is an online encyclopaedia and information can be entered therein by any person and as such it may not be authentic."
Editors of Encyclopædia Britannica In a 2004 piece called "The Faith-Based Encyclopedia",
Robert McHenry, a former editor-in-chief of
Encyclopædia Britannica, stated that Wikipedia errs in billing itself as an encyclopedia, because that word implies a level of authority and accountability that he believes cannot be possessed by an openly editable reference. McHenry argued that "the typical user doesn't know how conventional encyclopedias achieve reliability, only that they do".
Tools for testing the reliability of articles While experienced editors can view the article history and discussion page, for normal users it is not so easy to check whether information from Wikipedia is reliable. University projects from California, Switzerland and Germany try to improve that by methods of formal analysis and data mining.
Wiki-Watch from Germany, which was inspired by the
WikiBu from
Switzerland, shows an evaluation up to five-stars for every English or German article in Wikipedia. Part of this rating is the tool
WikiTrust which shows the trustworthiness of single text parts of Wikipedia articles by white (trustworthy) or orange (not trustworthy) markings. == Information loop ==