Wiki was getting popular when I was in college over 10 years ago. I recall a history professor telling me not to use Wikipedia as source. I am like, okay, I will just use the source wiki uses, which are pretty solid in my opinion. Wiki came a long way.
this post was submitted on 26 Oct 2023
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Showerthoughts
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Yeah, it's important to remember that wikipedia, itself, isn't a source, it's a summary of different sources. It's a great resource to find sources and get an overview of a topic, though.
Wikipedia does a pretty decent job of eventually being correct, at any given time it can be outrageously inaccurate. Its good to not just use wikipedia entrys and use the sources that are linked there. By using the sources that are cited you are helping to keep wiki trustworthy and helps avoid you using bad information.
It works well to manage the integrity of wiki. I think being able to intuitively navigate between entries by a variety of metrics like edits that have remained unedited the longest/shorest, newest/oldest, etc would be a very good addition to wiki.
Some kind of webarchive of wiki sources would also be amazing so that if the sources disappear or change over time there is a connection to what it was at the time it originally/previously was used as a source on wiki.
And maybe some of this already exists and im just not very good at getting my 4dollars a month worth :P
Wikipedia does a pretty decent job of eventually being correct, at any given time it can be outrageously inaccurate.
Yeah, I agree with this. I work at a high end engineering company, and some engineers have gotten into trouble using things like materials properties that they got from Wikipedia and turned out to be wrong, with unfortunate results. By policy, if we don't know something like that we're supposed to ask our tech library to get us the information, and that's why.
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As long as you verify the source still exists. There are so many dead links on Wikipedia.
Archive.org bots replace dead links with working alternatives a lot nowadays. All the more reason to support that modern museum
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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 here I am fixing missing sources on some wiki articles just yesterday.
Someone has to do the job for everyone else can enjoy it.
Thank you very much for your service my friend.
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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).
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Love reading any article then opening the talk tab for the civil war of edits proposed.
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Wikipedia is an excellent starting point for information - but saying you can absolutely trust it hell no.
Yup, tried to correct something about a motorcycle manufacturer (no road legal model between year A and Z), linked to another Wikipedia article proving what I was saying (road legal modelS in year W to Y, just before Z), the next day the page was back to its previous version. I linked to the article about the road legal model they pretended didn't exist and they just edited the page back to its previous version...
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Wikipedia is the only piece of the internet I would save from apocalipse. Like, seriously.
Yeah, I have Wikipedia saved to a portable hard drive... Just in case
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- 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 source 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.
Edit: ITT - People upset with my analysis, but not willing to provide sources to the articles they disagree with
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.
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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.
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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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Veritas
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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.
Wikipedia is like our dear friend. It gives us general information, good advice, and direction in life, but never gets too deeply in it. The choice is ours to make.
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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.
I hated in high school that teachers always said the internet isn't a good source.
In college I finally realized that websites were poor sources because they change and move, whereas a published book, edition, and page number won't change. But that doesn't mean you can't use the Internet to find a good source - you just need to cite the source itself and not the site.
Everything I've published is published digitally, but the journals still have editions and page numbers. When someone cites my work, they need to cite that information - not the website that may change names or shut down.
So now I'm mostly mad that teachers don't explain why websites shouldn't be cited. It makes good sense in that context.
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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.
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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
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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
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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.
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Elon Musk Offers to Also Ruin Wikipedia https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/elon-musk-wikipedia-twitter-x-encyclopedia-1234861220/
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.
Wikipedia has been dealing with AI and bots since someone made a 2000 census article writer in 2003. Hopefully they are resistant to the rise of Chatbots
my understanding from an English professor is less about its reliability of information, but more its reliability regarding citing sources. you can't cite something that consistently changes
The schools should have used wikipedia as an opportunity to teach media literacy. You don't use wiki as your source, you go to the cited sources and investigate those. Use the cited sources a in your school reports.
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