airman said:
Which we have already deduced that this article has factual errors.
Wikipedia Reliability
- Thread starter Triton
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Which we have already deduced that this article has factual errors.
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Any Wikipedia article (and quite a few books too, actually) ought to be considered as work in progress.
The advantage of Wikipedia is that mistakes can be fixed, as opposed to a book or a magazine article. The drawback is that the mistakes keep living their own lives on a plethora of mirror sites all over the planet.
The advantage of Wikipedia is that mistakes can be fixed, as opposed to a book or a magazine article. The drawback is that the mistakes keep living their own lives on a plethora of mirror sites all over the planet.
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In principle, yes. In reality, its almost impossible to correct anything wrong on Wikipedia unless you publish the info in a book first, so it can only be at best a compilation of second hand knowledge. I'm pretty sure if John Fozard was alive to edit the Hawker P.1121 page his edits would just get reverted.
Now that many published sources get their facts from Wikipedia, you get crazy situations like where the Sukhoi T-50 specs from Wikipedia were quoted by poor researchers for news organisations, then the Wikipedia article updated to include a link to the news organisation's story as the new "source" of the said specs.
Now that many published sources get their facts from Wikipedia, you get crazy situations like where the Sukhoi T-50 specs from Wikipedia were quoted by poor researchers for news organisations, then the Wikipedia article updated to include a link to the news organisation's story as the new "source" of the said specs.
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Want a good example of Wikipedia's "reliability"??
Check out this page on the U.S.A.A.C.'s Engineering Division XCO-6... and see what engine it is supposed to have used... :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engineering_Division_XCO-6
Check out this page on the U.S.A.A.C.'s Engineering Division XCO-6... and see what engine it is supposed to have used... :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engineering_Division_XCO-6
