Wikipedia

Everybody knows Wikipedia, but not everybody thinks that it's "safe" to use. Because everybody can write and edit any post on wikipedia some people fear that the information might not be true. There are several arguments for that.
1:The person who wrote it might actually not know what he's writing about. 2: Someone wanted to write their own personal opinion about something like how the earth was made or maybe write badly about a "famous" person. 3: They intentionally wrote something they knew was wrong, also known as Wiki-vandalism.
The first argument is for me not really a problem. There are so many people who knows so much about so many different things that I think it would be corrected almost right away. The second, asuming that it's no a direct lie, only requires some basic understanding on how to see if a person is uttering a personal opinion. The third however is a little more difficult. In cases where people edit a post, making it "untrue", I guess the answer to the first argument would apply. If they just plainly make something up, like inventing a city, I don't think it would affect me since I use it to find information on a, for me, known subject which make it hard to be "fiction" as described before.
One of the obvious reasons for using wikipedia over some "old" encyclopedia is that wikipedia is often updated minutes after the change has occured where as the old ones takes a longer time to get up-to-date. That is why some people argue that wikipedia is more "safe" to use when wanting relevant information.
Some people complain about wikipedia being filled with "useless" information about "indifferent" things. I however think that that is the main force of wikipedia. It contains information about anything that somebody found important enough to write about. That is something you won't find in the professional encyclopedias.
Here's a little video by Collegehumor about the topic: