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If an anonymous or relatively new user changes a statistic or date by even a little bit, without justifying their edit, they are particularly likely to raise a red flag. If an individual continues to vandalize after being warned, then they may even be blocked from further editing.

keeps a full history of every change to every article

It is for this reason that readers must be particularly diligent in verifying Wikipedia against its external sources, as discussed above. It is also a good idea, if you feel uncomfortable about an article, to check its history for recent "bad-faith" edits. If you find a piece of uncorrected vandalism, you might even decide to help future users by correcting it yourself. That's a great feature of Wikipedia.

Wikipedia can be an excellent starting place for further research.

Students can compare information in Wikipedia with information in other encyclopedias or books in the library. As a general rule, contributors to Wikipedia are encouraged to cite their sources, but, of course, not all do. For the sake of verifiability, it is advisable to cite an article that has listed its sources. Most of our better articles have sections such as "References," "Sources," "Notes," "Further reading," or "External links," which generally contain such information.

The 2008/9 Wikipedia Selection for Schools is a selection of 5,500 articles deemed suitable for school children and has been checked and edited for this audience and protected against editing or vandalism. It contains about the equivalent content to a 20 volume encyclopaedia organized around school curriculum subjects, and is available online and as a free download for use by schools.

Educators can use Wikipedia as a way of teaching students to develop hierarchies of credibility that are essential for navigating and conducting research on the Internet.

And because we will have all this data on how students actually use our materials, there are opportunities for research on learning. We can watch how many attempts students made before they got an exercise right, and if they got it wrong, what they used to try to find a solution. Did they go to the textbook, go back and watch the video, go to the forum and post a question?

Recovery of stranded costs is perhaps the most contentious issue confronting regulators in promoting competition.  Stranded costs (or assets) are costs that have been prudently incurred by utilities to serve their customers but cannot be recovered if the consumers choose other electricity suppliers. One study has estimated current stranded assets at $88 billion, and estimates of projected stranded costs range from $10 billion to $500 billion. In its Order 888, FERC reaffirmed "that the recovery of legitimate, prudent and verifiable stranded costs should be allowed." FERC's directive is grounded in the belief that the recovery of stranded costs "is critical to the successful transition of the electricity industry to a competitive, open-access environment." For this purpose, direct assignment of costs to departing customers was selected as the appropriate method for recovery of stranded costs.

Broad in its coverage:

Neutral: it represents viewpoints fairly and without bias, giving due weight to each.

Illustrated, if possible, by images:[8]

Stable: it does not change significantly from day to day because of an ongoing edit war or content dispute.[7]

fact-checkers of all political stripes are happy to be able to track a fact down to one of these publications since they have reputations for a high degree of accuracy, and issue corrections when they get facts wrong.

a reliable source for facts should have a process in place for encouraging accuracy, verifying facts, and correcting mistakes

researchers and certain classes of professionals have expertise, and their usefulness is defined by that expertise

while we often think researchers are more knowledgeable than professionals, this is not always the case

Reporters, on the other hand, often have no domain expertise

Aim is defined by what the publication, author, or media source is attempting to accomplish

One way to think about aim is to ask what incentives an article or author has to get things right

In general, you want to choose a publication that has strong incentives to get things right, as shown by both authorial intent and business model, reputational incentives, and history