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Comment by renewiltord | Hacker News Reader

My cousin was a student at a lab where a sketchy grad student doctored results too. She was majorly sketched out by the whole thing and that the PI supported the whole op. It was very painful and set her back a bit but she managed to switch to a different lab and do proper work, defend her thesis, graduate, and get far away from those people. Now we just shake our head in disbelief at them but at that point it was fairly existential. It's not easy to switch labs after some time there and people will sort of distrust you and everything.

My impression is that some large number of 'results' are fake results. I can't even imagine in non-hard sciences what the fakery is when the hard sciences have this stuff.

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Attention and effort will go to “well-presented fake”.

Marie Curie believed that radioactivity might have been caused by ghosts or the paranormal because of such things.[1] While there may actually be ghosts or other things paranormal, I’d bet that Marie Curie was fooled.

The good part is that Curie’s work persists, and we think we have more understanding about radioactive substances.

I’m not sure whether she had to spend time specifically debunking the ghost-of-radioactivity theory; that just happened because of her work studying radioactive substances and their effects.

[1]- https://www.famousscientists.org/scientists-who-believed-in-...

I find this fascinating. If we allow ourselves to entertain the idea of quantum time paradoxes, could it be that the radioactivity was in fact caused by the ghost of Marie Curie herself? She would have a very strong and obvious reason to haunt the science.

That sounds like self-imposed slavery: every time someone wants radioactivity, Marie Curie's ghost needs to show up and produce it. What with all the nuclear reactors and RTGs on far-flung spacecraft, she's a busy ghost.

Every now and then I go through some of wikipedias sources on certain social topics because I don't trust them at all. The amount of BS I've found in papers, even though I don't eve have any research background at all is impressive.

My favourite was probably this one paper where the author essentially made a reddit-post asking a community about themselves, then cherry-picked (the post is still up, with timestamps and all) a few comments and came to a conclusion that didn't really fit those hand-picked comments.

In conclusion: Wikipedia is a dumpster fire and shouldn't be used for anything other than hard facts like dates and for entertainment.

Did you edit the Wikipedia page or challenge the interpretation in the talk page?

I already spend a lot of time trying to "fix the internet" and just don't have the stamina to also start fixing wikipedia now. I'm also being turned away by the constant stories of edit-wars that tend to happen about certain controversial topics.

Wikipedia itself has descended into the same pathologies you see in 'science' today: a bunch of gatekeepers who, by account of having been there the longest, have set up a moat of rules and 'culture' and such, to the point where newcomers are shut down or drowned out. I'm not saying it's impossible to get in; but only those that sufficiently mould themselves to the existing people and structures will last long enough to become fully accepted. And so the system sustains itself.

What are you even talking about?

I genuinely have no idea. You mind tangibly identifying how Wikipedia has descended into chaos like you say?

They're not the only person to have made an honest effort to improve Wikipedia, only to be met with legalistic hostility and inertia.

I wanted to edit an article about an obscure religious group that included some blatantly wrong statements about the espoused ideology. They had an academic tertiary source making these claims extrapolated from reaearch by the same author that made both plausible claims but also included similar inferences. Being a very obscure group there aren't many other academic sources discussing it. All literature that could disprove these claims comes from non-academics affiliated with the group which are a no-go.

As per Wikipedia rules (which took hours to figure out), there's not much one can do short of getting some impartial or friendly academic to publish a more reasonable article.

Wikipedia is an encyclopaedia. It’s a secondary source that aggregates knowledge from primary sources.

For all the problems wikipedia does have, this isn’t one of them. It’s not their job to second guess published research.

> Wikipedia is an encyclopaedia

An encyclopaedia with rather low standards that many people sadly treat as an absolute source of truth.

You're right that this isn't really a wikipedia problem though. It's a matter of education because an overwhelming majority of the population isn't competent enough to fact-check memes on facebook, let alone wikipedia, and if wikipedia doesn't do it either, then that responsibility is pushed all the way back to the scientists doing the actual research.

This is an incredible lack of redundancy if you consider how important wikipedia has become in shaping public opinion. It's a system where the scientific publication process is the single point of failure and this article clearly shows that it does fail rather often.

So what way is there to make this process safer? There needs to be at least another link in the chain that confirms information, preferably two or three.

> An encyclopaedia with rather low standards

... that somehow manages to have articles on proeminent subjects that are more in depth and factual than any competing encyclopedic endeavor, while, at the same time, far surpassing them by orders of magnitude on breadth for obscure and less academic topics.

Wikipedia is not an encyclopedia in the traditional sense, and can't be judged on the same standards. It is simply in a league of its own, it fails in different ways than traditional editor-controlled projects and is a fantastic repository of human knowledge and educational resource.

Is Wikipedia really as bad as you are claiming? Can you give some examples?

It seems to me like a lot of the articles are accurate, and some of the check marked or featured articles are downright great.

Wikipedia is overall great, though highly politicized in some topics, for science/engineering topics there's actual review by other Wikipedians and sourcing is solid.

Moreover, the talk page always has anything that might be controversial about the article that you might be interested in.

Sure, it will rarely display incorrect data, but it happens less and less as antivandalism bots become smarter.

> Moreover, the talk page always has anything that might be controversial about the article that you might be interested in.

This, plus access to the per-article revision history, ensures a much higher degree of transparency than any other comparable work.

Wikipedia actually aims to use secondary or tertiary sources, because of the likely bias in primary (and to some extent, secondary) sources. Statements of fact shouldn’t be supported only be primary sources (publications), though they may be referenced for the historical context. However, quality control on something as big as Wikipedia is essentially impossible.

Do you mind telling us which paper it was? I have a faint idea which one you mean, because I've read a bunch about reddit, and I would love to know if it's the same one or something else.

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