Wikipedia is incredible. I find it frustrating when friends say it's unreliable/not to be trusted.
Of course it's not perfect, but I've learned plenty enough from it to be well worth the trade-off
Of course it's not perfect, but I've learned plenty enough from it to be well worth the trade-off
You should point them at some of the studies that show Wikipedia is more accurate than Encyclopedia Brittanica.
https://corporate.britannica.com/britannica_nature_response....
Wikipedia is riddled with far more and far deeper types of errors, I do edit Wikipedia daily but am quite disillusioned with it. Even articles on major topics can include made-up paragraphs that no one notices for years, errors caused by an editor's misunderstanding of what the source is actually saying, and errors that slowly accumulate through various editors' well meaning copy-editing.
It's good for surface level stuff. The apolitical superficial knowledge is where wikipedia excels.
> I find it frustrating when friends say it's unreliable/not to be trusted.
In terms of depth and breadth of knowledge of topics, it is sorely lacking. And it is highly untrustworthy when it comes to anything remotely political/historical/economic/etc - which are ultimately all political.
> Of course it's not perfect, but I've learned plenty enough from it to be well worth the trade-off
Definitely. It has it's uses like everything. But it is extremely flawed.
There are also groups of Wikipedia "editors" who coordinate off-wiki to influence its workings. (Sock-puppeting and meat-puppeting)
Even if we disregarded all the malicious actors, harmful incompetence is rampant on Wikipedia.
And I was just talking about the English Wikipedia here, there are many "small" Wikipedias which are much much worse.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Falun_Gong#James_R._Lewis...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators%27_no...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators%27_no...
This is just an example of the issue of Wikipedia processes being too vulnerable to abuse, in contrast to the rose-tinted glasses view that most HN commenters view Wikipedia.
The obvious reason for this in this case is that people interested in contributing to articles about the Falun Gong are mostly already followers of Falun Gong. Stuff like this is all around Wikipedia. A related issue that I already indicated in another comment here is how most well-meaning contributors very soon learn to keep off certain controversial or well guarded pages, because it's simply not enjoyable to constantly fight over the content. The fact is: resolving disputes takes much time and usually the party with more time on their hands and more "meat-puppets" and allies wins. Also, making enemies from among the "editors" is both unpleasant and inconvenient for possible future efforts on Wikipedia.
One other reason for this is that discussion threads on Wikipedia can become incredibly large and involved very quickly. Typically a comment on Wikipedia will reference "diffs", which are changes elsewhere on Wikipedia (each with their own context and possibly requiring domain knowledge to understand them), or they can reference actual off-Wiki sources (e.g., a published book). Then someone else will respond to that comment with references to other stuff, and soon it is simply not manageable to keep track of everything. Everyone only has a fixed amount of free time and attention span, so very often things which shouldn't be taken at face value are taken at face value. On the other hand, meticulously checking something argued in bad faith expends time that could have been spent elsewhere. Walls of text and deep chains of references will scare a proportion of people outright before even engaging the discussion.
Another reason is that the assumption of good faith on part of the contributors is deeply embedded in Wikipedia. Not assuming good faith is actually forbidden on Wikipedia, and this is enforced. This might sound like a good idea (maybe it even is a good idea, it's hard to say), but in effect it just adds to the complicated minefield of vague rules breaking which can get one sanctioned on WP, but it isn't clear it actually does anything to improve the (low) standards of discourse on Wikipedia.
Apart from the rule that everybody has to assume good faith, the Wikipedia processes themselves are built on the assumption of good faith: the idea with Wikipedia is that everyone can talk out the differences in their opinions to establish "consensus",[N0] but malicious people can be severely disruptive in a discussion without doing anything that would cause them to be punished in any way on Wikipedia. E.g., someone makes a misleading comment (perhaps by taking things out of context, perhaps by exploiting some subtle semantics) and now people have to respond to them, which can take much more effort than it takes to make those comments. And there are accounts which do this all the time.
Another (smaller, perhaps) issue, which is actually fixable with better tech, is that although Wikipedia discussion threads usually logically have a tree structure, in actuality it's all unstructured Wiki-markup. This means that it's possible for the tree structure to become malformed, causing the discussions to become even less readable. Even if everything is structured correctly, it's often difficult to tell where does a comment end without reading it in its entirety, which is again caused by the lack of structure in the comments, every Talk page is just a single blob of Wiki-markup editable by any participant.
Thus, if you want to disrupt Wikipedia, the real way forward is not vandalism, it's arguing in bad faith with inpenetrable walls of text while being "civil". Bonus points for finding comrades to help you in a concerted effort.
Changing anything can be a tremendous effort on Wikipedia, but trying to change something while being opposed by an organized (off-wiki) and vigilant group, especially if they are malicious... I fear the whole project simply does/will not scale because of this. Organized groups will sadly keep their control of some topics/pages, and my fear is this situation will only get worse as Wikipedia's scope increases.
[N0] What consensus actually means on Wikipedia is another issue entirely, and it's often completely abitrary - whoever happens to "close" the Request for Comments (RfC - the process used for "determining consensus" on Wikipedia) can effectively create the "consensus" themselves.
Almost like its trying to be an encyclopedia or something ;)
If you go to wikipedia looking for a university level course in something, im not sure why you would expect that.
As far as quality... its not perfect, but that's still a relative measure. Its generally significantly better than its competition in my experience.
Saying it’s “extremely flawed” is like saying Superman is weak because he’s vulnerable to Kryptonite.
It is still valuable for the scientific topics and I would not call that superficial at all, but you need to be very critical of anything that goes further than that. And actually even for the scientific topics you need to be aware if PR is involved with the article, because then you have to take anything with a grain of salt as well.