Re:Wikipedia by their own policies... (Score 2, Insightful)

Once again, I think you missed the point of my post. Your talk about primary and secondary sources made no sense in the context you wanted to use them. Primary sources are not inherantly better than secondary sources. Often times they are a lot worse. In fact, the whole trial based metaphor breaks down completely here. Since the Wikipedia's articals can't simply be judged on the organization's credibility, a reader needs to look at each and every artical and make a judgement about its reliability. This means looking at the citations made by the authors and perhaps looking at the talk pages as well. Some pages on the Wikipedia are very credible while others have little to no credibility. (Wikipedia attempts to mark pages which aren't credible as needing sources cited, but obviously this will only catch a portion.) Useing the wikipedia correctly requires critical thinking skills and a willingness to put some effort into. Once again, something that a person should already be doing when they gather information from just about any source. Blindly accepting information from any authority isn't acceptable.