Curious, what areas do you find are usually flat out wrong?
The math sections seem to be pretty good. A friend found a flaw in a crypto algorithm though.
The math sections seem to be pretty good. A friend found a flaw in a crypto algorithm though.
...but thats on english wiki only. As pole understanding english, I despair for my natives trying to use polish wikipedia, because here politics creep everywhere. I remember what a disaster polish's article on Big Bang was before its ridiculous state was called out and went viral in sceptic circles as being plainly antiscientific. Until then it's contents were more fittingly titled as "philosophical and religious criticisms of Big Bang theory". Remnants of those may be found in Article's discussion which filled with philosophical and religious debate about Big bang.
We have books or research papers, but meta research generally acknowledge that researchers include bias into their work, often linked to the opinion of those that funds the research. Meta research is thus generally a bit better, especially the meta-meta-research papers, through it generally takes a quite political contested topic for that to happen which then further increase the risk of bias by the meta researchers selecting results that favors their side.
My only frustration is that it only aggregates videos on YouTube. If you want to get video news segments from media companies that publish their videos to a proprietary CDN or hosting service, you can't use it with Haystack.
Plenty of philosophy articles are also very poor. For example the page on Deconstruction, though its better than it was ~4 years ago.
At what level, an ELI5 level or the level of people who are actually going to look that stuff up?
They dive into a lot of jargon and rarely attempt to provide any real context that a non-specialist can understand.
I understand that it's hard to do and it also reflects the fact that Wikipedia pages are wildly variable in the audience they're written for.
Try the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy; it's amazing and authoritative, written by the experts. And free (but takes donations!). You'll never look up a philosophy topic in Wikipedia again.
I agree that math/physics sections are pretty good. It's difficult for knowledgeable people to disagree on these matters...
This is a problem for literally every source on Earth, and persists even among the most prestigious newspapers, books, etc.
That's true but practically meaningless. Some sources are dramatically more reliable and accurate than others. I can't completely trust my 4 year old nephew about physics, nor can I completely trust a leading physics text book, but that doesn't make those sources similarly reliable.
What we're discussing here is where Wikipedia falls on that continuum. I agree with the GP; there is so much deception by omission in WP that I don't trust it. For example, I was just looking at (American) football player Peyton Manning's article; it completely omitted a major sexual assault/harassment allegation, one about which there was a court settlement, book, major news coverage, etc.
Anyway, the parent's claim isn't my experience, but now we're just one person on the Internet disagreeing with another.
See eg "Speed of light" for an example of the complications that people get into in writing an article that's readable by the general population, but which is also correct for the 5% of wikipedia editors who have a good grasp on this.
See this thread for an example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13468651
I remember once looking up a very specific topic, just to be sure that I don't misremember a certain simple but crucial core relation. What I found was a page that was so shockingly disorganised that I had to wade through 5 pages of mindbendingly complexified, quasi-obscurantist... drivel... just to extract that central piece of information that really should have been mentioned in the bit above the TOC, or at least easy to find.
So, YMMV.
Anyone know when C2 became a javascriptified dumpster fire? Seems like that's a "Day the Music Died" event that should have a date associated with it.
You still haven't answered the question though; do you submit corrections?
I was never asked a question until now (N.B. the original posters).
> do you submit corrections?
I haven't for years (as in over 5+ years). I'm sure someone will point out it is different now.
Based on this I'm not sure you have edited yourself, despite retorting the parent. First off articles don't have guardians; [0] just because someone disagreed with you, it doesn't mean they disagree with everyone or on every article, you're making a huge generalization. Second, I'm not sure why you see talk page discussion as a bad thing; when two parties disagree on something, they usually discuss and try to reach a consensus. [1] Do you believe you're above that or something?
> Someone else tries making a modification, which again is immediately reverted.
This is called edit warring [2] and shouldn't be done. You shouldn't just try to force your revision in after it has been disagreed with.
All you're doing in your comment is painting up some illusory image to discourage someone from trying to engage the system themselves. How about you let them edit and see for themselves if what you said is true? Based on my experience Wikipedia isn't anything like that at all, in fact most articles aren't watched enough for anyone to care how you tweak them.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Ownership_of_content
Tried coming back and immediately ran into edit wars on a list of fastest production cars, when legions of people were eager to get the Tesla on there on the strength of a press-release of an upcoming release. Rules warring, silent reversion, you name it.
Wikipedia Review (though not without its share of cranks, and now largely dead), shares a pretty good history of the more sordid history of WP.
I understand where you're coming from. I've edited for items such as the citation having nothing to do with the content, and seen it reversed and gone through the same thing. Sometimes something as simple as "show me where I can find this in your citation" brings more than civil discourse -- it brings obvious animosity and is countered with straw man attacks or other logical fallacies. I think people have psychological and emotional needs, and some have a need to feel important, dutiful and powerful. This is where they satisfy that need.
Another problem is I think people in authority--sometimes very smart people--draw conclusions that they haven't properly thought about.