User blog:Thor2000/Wikipedia as a Research Tool

To this day, I often find it incomprehensive that people think the research on the Wikipedia is infallible. I'm a big fan of mythology; I have fifty-five books on the subject, and every time I go to the used bookstore, I sometimes buy one or two more for my collection. These are books by scholars, professors, historians, experts who have done research in the field, and yet, it boggles the mind when people take research from the Wikipedia that was likely posted by college students picking and choosing what they thought was important to post to the Wikipedia. I find the material on the site often erroneous, frequently incomplete and often badly formatted, and I'm not the only one who feels this way. When I was doing research on the Civil War for my book, I couldn't understand why the material on three pages contradicted each other and I had to go to a history professor on AllExperts.com to figure it out; even he told me the Wikipedia was a bad research tool. Even Scott Wolters of "America Unearthed" has frequently spoken out against the Wikipedia, mentioning he had posted descriptions of historical sites worth visiting in the Southern United States, only to watch as all this information was deleted by a college student in England. Scandal at Wikipedia This only goes to conform my point. The Wikipedia doesn't have proofreaders, it doesn't have a team of scholars confirming the data and it doesn't have anyone policing the site to control the sort of input going into it, and yet, it is constantly being vandalized and edited by people who have their own opinions on what and how things should be posted. Does this sound like a place that should be considered a viable research tool? Should we be taking information from pages created by individuals deciding what's important enough to add and delete what they think isn't important? I don't think so. I prefer going straight to the experts for the research I want rather than getting it filtered by intelligence terrorists.