The way Wikipedia generates its content though is susceptible to particular problems that traditional sources did not have. Multiple people—all differing in age

The way Wikipedia generates its content though is susceptible to particular problems that traditional sources did not have. Multiple people—all differing in age (from 7 to 100+), educational status and subject matter knowledge—all editing the same article, often without reading all the parts of it that the others have written. The amount of scrutiny individual Wikipedia articles receive differs vastly–the article on a top politician or a top science topic like a major planet will have hundreds of eagle-eyed watchers, while more obscure articles like the one discussed here may not be watched at all, and then anything goes. (This article for example had two different birth dates for six years, and then someone made them consistent—both wrong!) Here are some more examples of the sorts of errors that are specific to a crowd-sourced work like Wikipedia: https://www.theregister.com/2017/01/16/wikipedia_16_birthday_fails/ https://www.theregister.com/2017/01/16/wikipedia_16_birthday... Few if any of these—like intentional hoaxes and undetected vandalism or a completely ignorant writer merely pretending to know a topic, by copying another text and then changing the name of one chemical substance in it to make it sound like the text was written about this substance—could or would have occurred in the traditional process of writing a reference work. Traditional works have different problems, of course—instant obsolescence being one of them—and even the biggest ones have a far smaller scope than Wikipedia. But readers should bear in mind just how the Wikipedia sausage is made. Many seem to somehow believe that the Wikipedia process is, in terms of the results it produces, just like an orderly process with a professional writer and editors and fact checkers that try to verify everything before publication. That is not how crowdsourcing works.