Wikipedia:Tip of the day/January 5
How to improve Wikipedia's reliability
Since anyone can edit almost any Wikipedia article, it is possible for biased, out of date, or incorrect information to be added to Wikipedia. To improve Wikipedia's reliability, fix these problems by doing the following:
- As often as you can, monitor and check changes made to articles. Your Watchlist, and the Related changes and Recent changes features are useful for this.
- Clean up vandalism and report vandals to Administrator intervention against vandalism (WP:AIV). Many vandalism clean-up tools are available to assist you.
- Fix mistakes:
- Fix typos, and grammatical and spelling errors. Join the Typo Team and learn their methods.
- Fix factual errors. You could also join the Fact and Reference Check Project.
- Fix bias. See Wikipedia:Systemic bias.
- For dubious statements that are not sourced or are likely to be challenged, hunt for references that are reliable, relevant, accurate, objective, and timely. Add citations for these to the article.
- Read the references provided by articles and check them for reliability, relevance, accuracy, objectivity, and timeliness. That is, read the source material cited, and remove irrelevant or unreliable citations.
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