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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". [71]
In Wikipedia, the main mechanism to avoid both is to, rather than removing only statements proven wrong, remove any challenged statements where no policy-compliant source is provided as a basis. So Wikipedia:Verifiability is a major help towards the accuracy goal, but does not alone guarantee it.
Wikipedia addresses this concern with internal, continuous review of new edits. Encyclopedia editors also examine accuracy in the entry Reliability of Wikipedia, compiling the results of international third-party assessments across various disciplines. The consensus: the encyclopedia is as accurate as other encyclopedias.
However, although Wikipedia articles are tertiary sources, Wikipedia employs no systematic mechanism for fact-checking or accuracy. Thus, Wikipedia articles (and Wikipedia mirrors) in themselves are not reliable sources for any purpose (except as sources on themselves per WP:SELFSOURCE). Primary sources are often difficult to use appropriately.
Wikipedia is not a reliable source for citations elsewhere on Wikipedia, or as a source for copying or translating content. As a user-generated source , it can be edited by anyone at any time, and any information it contains at a particular time could be vandalism , a work in progress , or simply incorrect.
These may cite an article, guideline, discussion, statistic, or other content from Wikipedia (or a sister project) to support a statement about Wikipedia. Wikipedia or the sister project is a primary source in this case and may be used following the policy for primary sources .
Despite all the hype about Wikipedia's accuracy, neutrality, and author credentials, underlying the controversy around Wikipedia is the tradition of peer review sources. Peer review journals are regarded as scholarly and authoritative despite their shortcomings because they rely on experts to verify that every detail is correct.
Wikipedia has a reputation for cultivating a culture of fact-checking among its editors. [16] Wikipedia's fact-checking process depends on the activity of its volunteer community of contributors, who numbered 200,000 as of 2018. [1] The development of fact-checking practices is ongoing in the Wikipedia editing community. [6]