Re: [Haskell-cafe] Do you trust Wikipedia?

Paul Brown wrote:

On 10/17/07, PR Stanley wrote:

...

Do you trust mathematical materials on Wikipedia?

I trust most of them to not be wrong, but I don't trust them to be right.

Mathematical concepts are bit like binary search -- getting the flavor right isn't that difficult, but being concise, complete, and correct is very difficult even for experts. In non-mathematics books that I've read (econometrics, operations research, etc.), some of the bits of exposition on fundamentals (multi-var calc, stats/probability, etc.) are not wrong but not quite right.

For lay purposes, wikipedia is probably fine, and any resource *that people use* that makes an effort to educate and inform on mathematical concepts deserves some thanks and support.

My $0.02.

I'd probably agree with most of that. I read a fair bit of stuff on Wikipedia. Some articles are really quite interesting, some are far too vague to comprehend, some are just explained badly, and a fair few are near-empty stubs. It's pot luck. Do I trust the material to be "correct"? Well, let me put it this way: If I read something from Wikipedia that's "wrong", what's the worst that could happen? It's not like I'm going to *use* this information for anything important, so... ;-)