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Comment by gcp | Hacker News Reader

Reading a Wikipedia article on a subject you're actually very knowledgeable about can be extremely painful.

OTOH, there are some very good parts of Wikipedia. The bits that nobody actually cares about, mostly.

If you want a general article, especially a political one, good luck. But if you're looking for some kind of hardware/software information, or details about a problem or algorithm, it's very good.

That's what the edit button is for. Use it.

I'm not an expert on many things, but I've corrected factual errors where I've seen them. Most of my edits are to link together two pages that were, for whatever reason, not properly associated.

Not as painful as trying to correct it.

There is a major issue here where objectively false facts are presented and defended with a truly awful source and yet its uncorrectable due to the deeply unhinged individuals that present their opinions as fact on Wikipedia and have been promoted to the lofty heights that allow them to constantly undo any change you might try to make.

I long ago stopped contributing to wikipedia, its written by an ever reducing group of people who are not only uncivil but also quite often delusional. The system its designed has excluded normal people.

Some examples? Other than obviously subjective topics like biographies, what are some kinds of subjects that you think are largely in error on WP?

I hear this criticism a lot, and it's usually about something subjective like politics or biographies.

There was one about 6 months ago where there is a article about a books character and there were some facts about this character presented that came from no where with no source. The original author of the book came on to correct the page (being the definitive source on the character) and they could not get the article changed because there wasn't a written source and even when the author did create one it was rejected and the false facts remained.

Was frustrating to read about but it follows issues I have had trying to fix problems in some technology articles as well. Its not just an issue with biographies and politics there is basically a troll behind every false fact on wikipedia with power.

Are you referring to the incident involving author Philip Roth's book "The Human Stain"? The problem there appeared to be that Mr Roth took exception to the Wikipedia article which mentioned published reviews of his book where the review authors felt that a character may have been inspired by a real life person. Mr Roth disagreed with this, but he sought to have mention of the reviews themselves removed from the article purely because he disagreed with their conclusions.

There is little question that an author should easily be able to correct a factual inaccuracies in a Wikipedia article which is related to them or their work, however the rights of an author to suppress mentions of reviews of their work purely because they disagree with them, are a different matter entirely.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Human_Stain#Anatole_Broyar...

My experience is that Wikipedia articles have been very accurate about every subject I consider myself knowledgeable about.

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