Ahhh, point scored. You're exactly right; every one of my teachers in college went out of their way to tell the class "Don't use Wikipedia! It is not a reliable source!" It really is more reliable than they would give credit for. And now Wikipedia is doing the same thing to VGChartz, saying we aren't reliable when in fact the numbers here are probably more accurate than most.

Okay, I am sorry, but the fact that college professors NEED to tell people not to use Wikipedia as a source is sad (note: my profs do it too). In High School (heck, even in middle school) my teachers drilled into me that encyclopedias (in general, not just wiki) are a good STARTING point for reasearch. They are not research in and of themselves and should not be used in any sort of academic writing (unless, i guess, you are citing something incidental to your main thesis... but even then I would just eliminate the info before i would cite an encyclopedia).

The problem with Wikipedia for many is not that it is more inaccurate than normal encyclopedias (hint: it's not statistically, and although i need to run now I will try to edit this with a source in like an hour (if i remember)). The problem with Wikipedia is that it is an ENCYCLOPEDIA and they are not to be used in an academic setting.

That said, I do use Wikipedia in my research. I will go to the article on whatever topic i am writing about and read *every* source. If any of them have relevant information, I cite them. If they don't, I don't use them. In addition to this I do Academic Journal searches (

At least it was something kind of relevant to the site and not some random article that was reposted in the forum.

 Wiki is in fact an encylopedia but the problem is that it isn't moderated (for the most part) so anyone can enter what they choose.  How do you know that person who entered the information isn't just wrong?  How do you know that it isn't just their opinion or take on a subject?  That's why professor's will tell you don't use a Wiki and I completely agree with them.  That being said, a Wiki can be a good place to *start* looking but only to point you in the right direction to other credible sources.   

I think Wikipedia will call us a reliable source as soon as the word about VGchartz spreads out more.

Well VG is starting to get pretty big every week the sales are posted on N4G.com and a few sites use VG as a source for sales so it wont take much longer for VG to be seen has the a reliable possiblely the most reliable source for sales.

So if a "not reliable" source calls you "not reliable", does that then make you reliable?

Pretty much.

 I agree with you on this one, twesterm. The problem teachers said they had with Wikipedia was that it could be edited by anyone, certainly not because it's an encyclopedia. I don't recall ever being told than an encyclopedia was a poor source (I may have been asked to limit the number of encyclopedias cited for a few assignments, though).

Still, Wikipedia has to have some sort of restrictions, because the information has always seemed to check out, and I don't know how the site could function if people were able to sabotage it with garbage (or accidentally, through stupidity), without any way of restricting or controlling that.

Well think about the Wikipedia thing this way. For every jerk who wants to sabotage an article on a certain topic, there's probably at least 10 people who know the topic and see the article and think, "well that's wrong, I should probably correct it." As a history student, I know that there are a lot of historians who like Wikipedia and watch the articles that pertain to topics that they have expertise in. I can only assume that scholars in other fields do the same.