Having coined such a simplistic title, I find it necessary to add that it’s implied that I mean for my everyday use.
I wouldn’t want to argue that it’s the best source for researching a government report, nor would I argue against it.
I’ll stick to what I know: Why I think it’s so damn good.
There has been a lot of FUD about whether wikipedia is a bad thing, and how contents on a wiki can’t be trusted because it’s publicly editable.
Even considering those grossly overblown incidents that the press have been reporting, I find wikipedia to be insurmountably more useful than a regular encyclopedia.
I think Wikipedia is the closest thing the population of the earth has to Douglas Adams’ idea of The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy; A perpetually near-real-time updated guide to the world, including all the seedy (and often interesting) things that encyclopedia editors always seem to leave out.
And in a stroke of foresight, Douglas Adams seemed to hit on many of the exact differences between the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy and the Encyclopedia Galactica, that makes wikipedia so much better than Britannica and the other established encyclopedias.
Besides the fact that there is just a mindboggling amount of really high quality articles, that I find to be at least as detailed as their professionally edited counterparts, here are some of the things that wikipedia has, that makes it so much more useful to me than a regular encyclopedia:
Current Events
Current events are updated as stuff happens in the world, and is usually the best source of high quality links to other articles.
Examples:
Slang / acronyms
Acronyms and slang is easy to find in wikipedia.
Examples:
D-list Celebrities
Regular encyclopedias might include som really big celebrities, but to avoid keeping the printed tome from having to be transported in several large building-like structures, they usually exlude anything but really major (I am tempted to say “historical”) celebrities.
Examples:
Cultural/internet memes
Smaller meme-like phenomenons don’t often make the big encyclopedias. I often catch a reference to things like these, and want to know what the reference is about.
Examples:
Censorship (or “standards”, if you will)
And finally, a really major deal in my book, wikipedia has no academic snobbery or standards they feel like they must adhere to.
It simply has information about everything, indiscriminately.
You can usually count on wikipedia for sober, candid and detailed descriptions of the most insane things. It’s like a central repository for “all the things you always wanted to know about sex (or anything else) but were afraid to ask”.
Examples:
Without having checked, I think you would be hard pressed to find any of these articles in many of the highly regarded encyclopedias.
And, again, that is besides having high quality articles on corals, the F16, Sojourner or cats. Or any other topic I can think of off the top of my head.
Often the main articles (for example for corals) will include links to extremely detailed information in the area that go well beyond anything I have ever seen in a regular encyclopedia.
It is an exceptionally high quality, well structured repository of large portions of all human knowledge. Especially considering the way it’s being run.
So while a few academics spout their ill forebodings of how wikipedia threatens to undermine academic integrity and unhinge reality as we know it, I think it’s the single most remarkable thing since the internet itself.
To scoff at the monumental and remarkable thing that is wikipedia, because of a few incidents of abuse of the public-edit functionality is to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Or to write off the benefits of the car because there are automobile accidents. Saying “but public editing is inherently bad” is like saying “moving a box full of people at high speeds is inherently bad” – it might be the property that makes it dangerous, but it’s even more so the property that makes it great and useful.
I think that proclaiming wikipedia as inherently unusable because of this is arrogant, idiotic and narrow minded, and the tendency to make such claims are one of the absolutely least appealing aspects of academia. To just blatantly ignore practical implications and scoff at something because it conflicts with some higher principle.
As for the credibility of wikipedia articles, I would think that if you are hinging your career or reputation on what you are researching, and you are not a complete nitwit, you would want to make use of the sources that wikipedia usually lists at the bottom of the article. When it doesn’t, the article usually carries a warning at the top.