Any student who has researched anything at any time of their lives has been told the same thing: “never trust Wikipedia, anyone could write anything on there”. The site is vilified by parents and teachers alike for its alleged unreliability, but is Wikipedia truly the misinformation bogeyman that we have been told it is?

Now more than ever, I find myself coming to Wikipedia’s defence. However, it would be wrong to present it as flawless; ironically enough, the site actually has a page detailing its many controversies and failures to uphold neutrality — one of its ‘five pillars’.

The page is a detailed and surprisingly entertaining read. From staff of eventual US President Joe Biden to journalists, celebrities, and even regular citizens, it seems countless people have attempted to edit Wikipedia pages either in their favour: to further their own agenda, or even as a form of character assassination against their nemeses.

While these tales of online turf wars are certainly amusing, some of Wikipedia’s fumbles are far less so. In 2023, Wikipedia pages had been edited as part of a “systematic” campaign that sought to minimise the role of Polish society in the Holocaust, as well as blame Jewish people for their own persecution. Likewise, in 2007, Turkish professor Taner Akcam was detained by authorities at a Montreal airport. Their reasoning was grounded in a print-out of his Wikipedia page, where he had been falsely labelled a dangerous terrorist in an act of online vandalism.

However, does the blame for these incidents lie solely with Wikipedia, or is there a deeper issue at play with our own critical thinking?

Far bigger organisations have made far worse blunders than Wikipedia, from The Sun’s slanderous coverage of the Hillsborough tragedy to our own government’s fabricated claims of WMDs to justify the Iraq War. It seems absurd that Wikipedia of all organisations holds itself most accountable where misinformation is concerned.

Because while a page outlining your own shortcomings may seem like a hilarious own-goal, Wikipedia’s honesty on this front is actually a credit to its dependability. It even offers full transparency on when a page was edited and by whom, allowing the reader to assess the source of the information given for themselves.

The issue, of course, is that not everyone uses the site in this way — most people simply want pre-digested information which is instant and accessible. And where people once turned to Wikipedia for this, a more sinister source of misinformation has taken its place.

Google’s AI summaries are notoriously unreliable. Incorrect dates and statistics are regularly pulled from Facebook and Reddit (its second and fourth most-cited sources which are, ironically, heavily restricted by Wikipedia).

Yet, many now trust it blindly as a source of information: no thanks to Google forcing it upon browser users as the very first search result for quite literally anything. Unlike Wikipedia, AI cannot be held accountable — there are no human fact-checkers and sources are not scrutinised as they should be. Truth comes at the cost of convenience and critical thought.

This is the root of the issue. People want convenience; nobody wants to dig through textbooks and reports when they can just ask ChatGPT or Gemini or skim a Wikipedia page. But this blind faith in flawed sources of information can, as we have seen above, cause real harm.

The “don’t trust Wikipedia” mantra is a band-aid solution for a far more complex issue. Because, in reality, using Wikipedia or (as much as I personally despise it) AI as a launching point for research is fine: but it is always important to go beyond the comfortable, easy answer, to be critical of your sources, and to always do your own research.