Reliable Information for a Reliable Wikipedia

Wikipedia articles are created by writers that find knowledge in other places and bring it to the Wikipedia page for users to read and gain knowledge. It is important that the information is correctly reported and that it is a nonbiased page for people to read to understand topics that they didn’t understand before reading the articles.

The Wikipedia article, Queen’s Building, Wolverhampton, from the Did you Know section tells the transformation of the building going from the carriage entrance to Wolverhampton railway station to part of the city’s existing bus station.  The article uses two references to create its content: The National Heritage List for England and Britain’s Historic Railway Buildings: A Gazetteer of Structures. They site the readings using Wikipedia’s reliable source page. When people edit the site they must site them by using inline citations with numbers and they must add the source to the bibliography at the end of the webpage or it is considered unreliable.  Both the sources that were used to create this Wikipedia article were both properly cited and seemed to be respectable sources.

Both sources are well known throughout England and seem like credibly sources.  The National Heritage List for England is a credible site that discusses the history or places and things around England. It contains archives of important information and is set up in a professional way. The second source, Britain’s Historic Railway Buildings: A Gazetteer of Structures is a book about the history of the railway structures. Since the Queen’s building was once a railway structure it would make complete sense that they would get their Wikipedia information through a source that was quite knowledgeable about that stuff. It isn’t only important for the sources that a Wikipedia page uses to be credible sources but they must also report the information back to the Wikipedia uses correctly or it will defeat the purpose of Wikipedia.

The information from The National Heritage List for England is all reliable and correctly reported information. There is a description paragraph at the end of the page that describes what it looks like and when important features were added onto the building. The Wikipedia mentions that front glass gates replaced iron gates and that an extension was added to each side of the building. Both of those occurred in the 20^th century. The information is from the website and the website’s details match the details that were given in Wikipedia’s Queen’s Building, Woverhampton article. I wasn’t able to check the pages of the other source because I don’t have it with me but since they use page numbers in their bibliography entry it would be hard to believe that they lied about the information because someone could  buy the book and look it up if they really felt like seeing if the facts were correctly reported to the readers.

In my opinion I think facts that came from the sources are reliable and so is the information in the Wikipedia article. The people that posted the information didn't go into great detail probably because they didn't have enough detail. That alone shows they they are only trying to post reliable information that they know to be correct.