Confederate Railroads on Wikipedia

   Ever since the inception of Wikipedia, there has been debate about the value of an encyclopedia without editors. The theory is that the large number of participants would be self-correcting, so errors would be expunged as each person corrected the errors he saw. But Wikipedia says that they do not want experts writing their articles since they would become too detailed and not appropriate for an encyclopedia. They want generalists to write the articles and specialists to improve them. Their rules even prevent using original documents -- only "peer reviewed" books are allowed as references.
   Unfortunately, until the correction process has run its course, a Wikipedia article is full of errors and users have no way of knowing that the information they are presented is inaccurate -- sometimes in major ways. Also, unfortunately, the specialist on a subject is not given an easy way to contact the primary author of an article to suggest changes and corrections.
   An example is the Confederate railroads in the American Civil War article. Almost every statement is wrong or leads the user to an inaccurate conclusion. The one photograph is incorrectly labeled and not one of the references is a high-quality, post 1950 study of the Confederate railroads. (The only thing good about the article is the external link is to my site.) As far as the self-correcting mechanism working, the record of editorial changes shows an interest in minor matters and no effort made to improve the article.
   A second example is the List of railroads of the Confederate States of America article. It is clear that the unknown author copied my list of railroads and has used it without attribution or link to my site. Unfortunately, the list was imperfectly copied and is not being updated as my research adds and removes names from the list.
   A third example is the Jackson's operations against the B&O Railroad (1861) article. The unknown author, clearly having not researched my site, totally misstates whose idea the removal of locomotives and cars to the Southern railroads was. He quotes from an 1898 article that is absolutely full of errors and thus induces those errors into his own article. Finally, he gives credence to a historian who says the whole event never took place and never mentions the dozens of confirming original, period documents that confirm that it did take place (see Jackson and the Locomotive Haul).
   So, two questions remain. First, is it "safe" to use Wikipedia articles? I never do for anything that I want to be sure is correct. Second, why don't I correct all these errors? I don't have time to get all the results of my research posted and made available to you; I definitely do not have the time to learn their software and rewrite other people's articles. If one of you wants to do the correcting, I'll be happy to work with you.

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