Nah, you can’t. It’s still a great resource, but you always gotta read it critically.
The thing is that it is very easy to read Wikipedia critically, since it lists every single source they get info from at the bottom of the page.
And very often it’s dead links or sources that don’t say what the article pretends…
That’s why you don’t use Wikipedia as your primary source, you follow the citations. Of course, if you can’t verify that it’s accurate information, don’t report it, but it can be used as a jump off to find a legitimate source if the information you cant immediately verify is useful.
I feel like news sources used to link to their sources too, but now it seems to be an infinite chain of links to their own articles, never directly taking you to the first hand source of information (unless they are the source).
And here I am fixing missing sources on some wiki articles just yesterday.
The hero we don’t deserve
The thing is, if the place you’re getting your information from doesn’t list it’s sources, you can’t trust it. Whenever I’m researching a thing on the internet and I find an article or a paper, I don’t just stop there, I check where they got their info, then I find that source and read it. I follow it all the way back until I find the primary source.
Like the other day I was writing a paper about a particular court case. In the opinions, as in most cases, they use precedent and cite prior cases. So I found the other cases that referred to the thing I was writing about, and it turns out they were also just using prior cases. I had to go 6 deep before I found them referencing the actual constitution for one of them. On another I found it interesting that the most recent use case was so far removed from what the original one was about and it was could probably be questionable to even use it as precedent if they had used the original instead of another case.
Anyway, the point is, always check sources. If anyone says anything on the internet, assume it’s just their opinion until you check and follow the sources…
Are you familiar with Harlow V Fitzgerald, and the full text of article 1983 including the 16 words that went missing in n 1874 when it was “copied” from the Congressional Record into the Federal Register? I’m not a lawyer, but I do want that decision reviewed, since as the law was written and passed by Congress, Harlow V Fitzgerald should have gone the other way.
Love reading any article then opening the talk tab for the civil war of edits proposed.
Nah.
I edited a page for a new OS update that was coming out. The page was FULL of misinformation, and I cleaned it up, linked official documentation as sources, etc.
My edits were reverted by some butt hurt guy who originally wrote the page full of misinformation, 0 sources, and broken English.
I reverted back to mine.
He reverted back to his.
He spammed my profile page calling me names, and then reported me to Wiki admins. I was told not to revert changes or I would be perma-banned. I explained how the original page was broken English, misinformation, and 0 sources were cited. They straight up told me they did NOT care.
Stopped editing wiki pages, and stopped trusting them. They didn’t care about factual information. They just wanted to enforce their reverting rule.
I’d love their perspective on this and the actual messages sent as this isn’t very useful standalone.
Their profile was banned last time I looked about a year ago. My profile I deleted because it was permanently tainted by that asshole spamming my talk page.
I remember posting about it on Reddit back when it happened a few years ago, and everyone in the comments told me how they’ve had similar experiences. Really just made me weary about trusting Wikipedia. I mean sure, if they get the date of a movie wrong that’s fine, but as for more serious topics, I just can’t really trust it.
Even sources can be garbage. I’ve seen plenty of blog spam cited as sources, which means nothing.
Yep, about a decade ago an expert on a subject was talking about it. He corrected the a page because the info presented with tons of sources all ended up taking their info from a single unreliable source. He had to edit things multiple times, making sure to follow guidelines, basically creating a new section that condensed his work on the subject to explain the controversy and so on… The page was edited back to its previous version every time because he didn’t have enough local reputation and “older sources are more reliable”…
Could you link us the article?
deleted by creator
And what’s your source for that claim you keep making?
what’s the article in question?
deleted by creator
It’s not an uncommon tale about Wikipedia, that’s their biggest known issue with getting new blood into the community, which they’ve acknowledged themselves.
That’s a shame
It’s also a lie.
This is the third insightful comment from you on this thread against him. Are you by any chance, the alt of the user who wrote the original article on Wiki of the OS?
there is a bureaucracy for dealing with the situation you described. the other editor gamed it, but if you were right, a little persistence would have left your edits in place.
Yes, but people shouldn’t have to jump through hoops to help Wikipedia.
you’re right. when transitioning away from reddit, i took the time to understand how to navigate the wikipedia editor bureaucracy. I understood most of it in a week. now i just monitor a few articles in which i have an interest, and add to that list periodically.
i wish it were easier. MY SUGGESTION is to just go ahead and use the talk page instead of the main article as your first place to make an edit. if it’s a good edit, it’s likely someone else will write the edit themselves. if they don’t and you dont see objetions, that will help your edit stand up if there is an edit war.
I didn’t know what to do. I was being threatened with a ban, even after explaining myself and my edits.
At the end of the day the Wikipedia page didn’t matter to me that much. Who cares if people get misinformation about an OS update. I quite literally didn’t get paid enough to deal with that.
It just really changed my perspective on Wikipedia. Unless you look at the history and check out profiles of people who get in edit battles, you really don’t know what’s going on behind the scenes.
At the end of the day the Wikipedia page I was trying to edit ended up being corrected by someone else (who completely disregarded all of my effort), but it took a month, and someone else to do it, before the page wasn’t full of misinformation anymore. RIP to anyone who visited that page within that month and never returned, because they were fed 80% misinformation.
the etiquette and process is non-obvious so i think your reaction was totally understandable.
TBH that doesn’t surprise me… I had a minor spat over the existence of a local supermarket, of all the stupid things… Wiki said it had been refused planning permission and never built. I had shopped in there many times, and could link to many articles about the fully built existing supermarket. I gave up after the second revert because it’s just not worth it.
It’s mostly true for articles that do not have large public coverage. Otherwise the number of those who stubbornly fight for the truth will prevail
Pro wrestling wiki pages used to have entrance themes, finishers and signature moves in the wrestler’s page.
One power-mod removed it and it’s gone.
People suck wiki’s cock on the Internet, but it’s a pretty dogshit site and I wish it dies so that a new and better alternative pops up.
I think assuming a better alternative will appear is a bad idea. Most likely some company sees an opening to control the information and monetize it. They can’t really now because Wikipedia is the default, but I don’t doubt someone would try if they see the hold Wikipedia has falter.
It doesn’t need to die for a new alternative to pop up.
I just doubt any alternative will be as good as the one we have now.
There will always be someone there to take its place. Maybe a more transparent and decentralised alternative like how fan-wikis used to be before Fandom bough them.
So your solution to a problem is one that also has an ownership problem??
Tbh those pieces of trivia don’t feel like encyclopedic information in the first place. A reader need not know specific intro songs to have an encyclopedic overview of wrestling, just that intro songs are often used.
A list containing the specific intro songs is vastly more suited for a fandom repository than an encyclopedia.
How dare you trash Wikipedia on Lemmy? Infidel like you should be sent to gulag.
My workplace got a “coronavirus” chat on the corporate chat server. And the known “conspiracy theorist” guy on my team posted a link to some article on some total misinformation mill masquerading as a news source.
I looked up the name of the source on Wikipedia, which said it was a total misinformation mill.
So I linked to the Wikipedia article in the chat.
I work at a fairly big and diverse company, so of course there was more than one conspiracy guy there. It was really surreal watching people who literally think all governments are run by a secret cabal of Democrat extraterrestrial pedophile child-adrenaline junkies attack the trustworthiness of Wikipedia.
Edit: I’d forgotten the name of the “misinformation mill” that originally started that shit storm in the work chat, but I went back and looked it up. It was Project Veritas.
RIP in Piss P. Veritas I hope hell is hot for you on the way down
They still exist. They just do not have James O’Keefe who was shit canned.
99% of people bashing Wikipedia do so because they read that they’re delusional about something.
Source: have read >100 Wikipedia bashings that answered follow-up questions.
Silly question but why is a work chat used for conspiracy theories? It seems like a bad use of company resources
Wikipedia is the only piece of the internet I would save form apocalipse. Like, seriously.
What if you need to remember how to procreate? I hear there are a number of informative videos about how to out there.
IIRC this happens in the show or book of Station Eleven where a kid saves Wikipedia offline on his PS Vita (somehow) and it’s the only version of it out there post-apocalypse.
- With the exception of any article that’s even slightly political.
Even for political content it’s damn good. Every time someone on Lemmy points to an explicit article of bias, it falls into one of 3 categories:
- Slightly unfair bias, but still largely true
- Article is correct, Lemmy cannot provide a reliable source proving otherwise
- Article is incorrect, reliable source found, article amended
The third case happened once in an article about a UN Resolution on North Korea, and it was because the original article was slightly misinterpreted. But yea, basically what I’m trying to say is if a “political article” is “wrong” but you can’t prove it, it’s not the political article that’s wrong but you.
Wikipedia has a claimed positive-bias, in which negative things are often left out of the article. This is more true the lower profile the page is.
And Wikipedia has an overall left-bias, because of the demographic of contributors.
And Wikipedia has an overall left-bias, because of the demographic of contributors.
FROM YOUR LINK
Until 2021, we rated Wikipedia as Center, but changed them to Not Rated because the online encyclopedia does not fit neatly into AllSides’ media bias rating methodologies, which were developed specifically for news sites.
Wikipedia completely slanders people it doesnt like. For example Daniele Ganser who helped to reveal Operation Gladio.
slanders (tells the truth about)
Honestly the aren’t that biased
In general wikipedia is a great source of knowledge that would be very hard to find elsewhere. That said, it can and often is edited by anyone. I’ll never forget a friend sent me a link to file system comparison chart which included ReiserFS and someone added the last column ‘Murders your wife’ to ‘Features’ https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Comparison_of_file_systems&oldid=209063556#Features
Did they at least cite the source for that?
Source: just trust me bro
was it wrong tho?
technically, the filesystem wasn’t implicated beyond the f’d up way his brain was working at the time. smh
And interestingly it’s trustable because it’s got no central authority core that can be corrupted
Except there are defacto central authorities governing certain pages.
Not only that there’s a turf war going on for control of them.
Certain ahem religious organizations monitor a variety of pages and snipe any changes they disagree with. Businesses are doing it too.
And certain politicians
I haven’t participated in wikipedia enough to see how these turf wars play out. I’ve heard that, unsurprisingly, there are groups that control pages, some opposed and some unopposed. It’s a really interesting thing to me.
I’m afraid of politics, generally speaking. But I bet it would be interesting to be a part of all that.
I think the word you’re looking for is “trustworthy” but yes.
I consider it a separate concept.
yeah, apart from the admins that have absolute authority over everything and can do whatever the hell they want and make up arbitrary rules that disqualify your perfectly valid sources.
that doesn’t happen
There definitely are editors who game the rules. And they are enough of a problem that sometimes rules need to be modified specifically to handle them.
That’s is definitely not true…
I was always told not to quote Wikipedia. They told everyone this because people would constantly quote Wikipedia and then someone would edit it so that the paragraph was now different. It was a right pain even if the information was correct.
What you do is you check Wikipedia’s sources and then quote those sources. Hopefully they’re quoting academic papers and not blog posts because otherwise you’re just kicking the cam down the road.
Wikipedia was useful for me as a grad student because I could look up a topic and there would be a whole lot of citations I could follow. I never used them as a source, but rather as a curated forum of information.
Only problem is that half of them are broken :(
You’d be impressed by how good I was at finding PDFs of original articles on random sites. Turns out that when you go to grad school in the third world and don’t have access to the journals in the same way as you are accustomed, you learn how to do it for yourself.
sci-hub
I’ve been doing exactly the same thing with LLMs recently.
"Tell me about "
“What are the big problems their industry is trying to solve?”
“Who are their biggest competitors?”
“What’s the worst/best thing about them?”Questions like that often give me a great framework to look up specific questions, find relevant articles and get a handle on the sources that are likely to be useful.
I’d definitely be careful about made up stuff, but this sounds like an interesting idea.
Very careful. I never use anything from them directly. I just use them to give me a starting point on what to look for.
For example, if the AI tells me that some company is know for their low latency database, I’ll look around for primary sources on the latency of the database compared to other vendors. I’ll also look for evidence to the contrary.
The Tab “Talk” gives you a lot more to learn on some pages, take a look !
Yet if you ever try to edit a page, the “Talk” tab is filled with the most pretentious protectionist people. You can add helpful context or missing information with sources to the wiki, and it will get deleted simply because you haven’t spent months cozying up to the greaseball who sits on that specific wiki entry as if they possess it.
there is a bureaucratic machine for dealing with this kind of problem
But what do we do if every level of that machine is completely controlled by those people?
it’s not. there are boards on Wikipedia specifically for calling in neutral editors.
Just call then out on it in talk by mentioning why you would add it.
Alternatively make an upgraded English-only wiki alternative with way larger article max sizes so we can finally evolve it past 2005. And start using YouTube links and not (just) a native video player. And start quoting/including entire chapters from relevant books.
When “they used to tell us we couldnt trust Wikipedia” it wasn’t in contrast to random websites; it was in contrast to primary sources.
That’s still true today. Wikipedia is generally less reliable than encyclopedias are https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliability_of_Wikipedia.
The people who tell you not to trust Wikipedia aren’t saying that you shouldn’t use it at all. They’re telling you not to stop there. That’s exactly what they told us about encylopedias too.
If you’re researching a new topic, Wikipedia is a great place for an initial overview. If you actually care about facts, you should double check claims independently. That means following their sources until you get to primary sources. If you’ve ever done this exercise it becomes obvious why you shouldn’t trust Wikipedia. Some sources are dead links, some are not publicly accessible and many aren’t primary sources. In egregious cases the “sources” are just opinion pieces.
Just look in this thread. I’m not talking about writing college papers. I’m talking about the boomers saying you can’t trust anything you read on the internet.
The thing is: in the not to distant future encyclopedias will be a thing of the past.
There is a lot of bias on pages about religion, I find.
Does anyone know if there is a way to see which wiki articles are edited the most? I don’t mean new topics or edits because there’s a lot of new info. I mean potential back-and-forth edits where there is disagreement on facts (or one viewpoint denies a fact, etc.).
If that exists, I’d be curious to know what articles they are (obviously probably religion or politics). On the other side, those articles that have remained unedited for a long time are probably pretty rock solid, assuming they also get traffic.*
*I’m literally thinking out loud here and am sure there are many other factors to consider
Maybe if you keep refreshing this search wiki filtered by talk
Thanks, I think this is effectively the metric I want. Just have to combine it somehow (if possible) with traffic info by page.
Not fully trust, but I trust it more than some listicles and low-quality SEO-boost sites.
When I want to learn something new, I often come to Wikipedia, or Britannica, or YouTube to get to know the subject. And generally, they will recommend me with some valuable reference to dig deeper.
I always trust the streets. People lie. Governments lie. News lies. But the streets. The streets never lie.
I been listening to these streets for years man and there’s one thing I’ve learned: streets ain’t sayin shit
They use what to tell you? Smoke signals? Semaphore?
Hidden messages in advertisements
