I don't think it's a tangent at all, thanks for writing up such an in-depth response! I didn't mean for my comment to suggest that doctors are bad at their jobs or that they should simply diagnose better. I'm well aware (well, to the extent a layman could be) of the difficulties involved in diagnosing, and I can appreciate why doctors need so much intensive training to be able to do it well. I took issue with the BBC's article because I think it really misses the point about what Wikipedia is for and why it's important.

Any doctor's opinion is only as good as the amount of time they dedicated to examining the patient and how current their knowledge is. Even after decades of practice and training, a doctor remains just one person with all the potential failures that come with that. So I think it's dangerous for people to think in terms of "trust your doctor" when a better attitude might be "give your doctor's opinion the weight it deserves given his training."

Rather than discussing the overall accuracy of Wikipedia's content, the article focuses on, in my opinion, a bunk statistic. It measures the percent of articles which have an error. That doesn't really provide a good picture of Wikipedia's trustworthiness overall. The best that can be said for that kind of statistic is that "there are errors, so be cautious." The thing is, the same can be said for any conversation with your doctor, or with really any expert opinion. We need to be cautious with all sources of information, because they are all error-prone to varying degrees.

When we reduce the information source to a single person (ie: "trust your doctor"), the possibility for error is at its highest. It's always better to combine multiple sources of information to create a more complete picture, and that's where I think Wikipedia is immensely valuable. If a patient sees their doctor and really isn't satisfied with the answer they received, or felt like the doctor didn't examine them long enough, or felt like their doctor didn't pay enough attention to a reported symptom, Wikipedia can be a valuable and predominantly accurate resource to help the patient understand their symptoms a little better and make the decision to go get a second opinion. It can also help them know what to look out for in the days/weeks before they decide to see a doctor.

The problem is when people use Wikipedia/WebMD alone and then that becomes their single source of information. That's definitely the worst case scenario, and I wouldn't disagree with the BBC focusing on that. I guess I just took issue with the way it portrayed Wikipedia given the nature of the research and what the statistic was actually measuring.