Quality, Not Quantity

How accurate is Wikipedia content? Pretty accurate, actually. A study by the scientific journal Nature shows that Wikipedia content is nearly as accurate as Britannica's, with only one more error per article. In fact, by the time the study was published, the Wikipedia errors were corrected, while Britannica will have to wait for its next print run. Britannica has since disputed the results of the study, but Nature has made a reply, a key point in which was that the reviewers did not know where the material they were reviewing came from, Wikipedia or Britannica, so whatever mistakes Britannica alleges they made will have affected Wikipedia's error count as well as Britannica's.
The problem is that people who criticise Wikipedia's fundamental concept for a lack of reliability make a crucial false assumption. They look at Wikipedia and say, "Eight million people typing gibberish on their laptops - how accurate can it be?" But Wikipedians generally don't type gibberish into Wikipedia. They contribute meaningful and sometimes excellent content in good faith, all the while cooperating with fellow editors working towards the common goal of making sure the Wikipedia of tomorrow is better than that of today. A 2002 study by IBM showed that Wikipedia vandalism is generally removed within five minutes, and even though Wikipedia has grown considerably since that year and there is no published data corroborating that expectation, vandalism on high-profile pages (which are viewed the most, after all) can be reverted within seconds. Vandals can blank the page and replace it with random characters only to find that after they click "save page" and their computer has finished its agonisingly slow load the vandalism is gone and the article is back to normal. The very openness that opens Wikipedia to bad-faith edits also ensures these are fixed quickly, while offering lots of benefits besides.