Wikipedia

For anyone seeking free information on the Internet, the source that usually comes up first is Wikipedia. Since anyone can add to Wikipedia (anyone outside the Gulf, which is mostly blocked from adding or editing), the quality is variable.

There are only about five things that I know enough about to check the Wikipedia entry, and one was wrong.

The problem with a reference source in which, after checking, one verifies that even one entry is incomplete or incorrect is that one subsequently cannot trust any of the other entries without external verification.

So I was very dismayed when I looked up the history of the Chinese Merchant Marine in the fourteenth century, and found that the Wikipedia entry was just a lot of junk.