What does wikipedia.org do?

See What Wikipedia is Not for Wikipedia's own official take on itself.

What does wikipedia.org do?
To my mind, as a former librarian, one thing that Wikipedia does not do is present authoritative information.

Certainly any given fact found in Wikipedia may well be accurate, but then again, it may not. Many experts contribute to Wikipedia, but there is no way to tell how correct any given entry may be, since you don't have to be an expert to contribute. Erroneous statements can easily be corrected by another contributor, but verifying in some other source is a seriously sensible thing to do.

"Trust but verify"!

tomkitten, Wikipedia is okay for what it does. If anybody has better information, they can always present their side of the facts. It's a self-correcting system of information that's easy to access for most people.

I found most information on Wikipedia to be about as factual as one can find considering what we "pay" for it.

Wikipedia is useful for finding details which can be independently verified. I have yet to find any factual errors in their articles on history, and i've noticed that these articles are very careful to point out controversial assertions.