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Comment by karaterobot | Hacker News Reader

I was in library school around this time (a couple years later, actually), and I remember that Wikipedia was a hot topic: can it be trusted, and why is the answer "no"?

Bucking that trend somewhat, I was in the cautiously optimistic camp. By that time it was already more useful to me than the Encyclopedia Britannica, and getting better all the time. The trajectory was clear.

It seems like, of all the exciting things from the early web, Wikipedia has been one of the only things that actually panned out the way it was intended. It didn't get commercialized, but it didn't go broke either. It didn't become a cesspool, or try to consume all of my attention. It just does the thing it's supposed to do. If there was a fire on the internet, and I could only save one website, it would be you Wikipedia.

View on HN

A few months ago Tyler Cowen had Jimmy Wales on the Conversations with Tyler podcast[0].

He spends some time talking about why he thinks Wikipedia turned out the way it did and avoid some of the potential traps you pointed out.

Really enjoyed listening to it and made me think a lot of about structure of organizations.

[0] https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/jimmy-wales/

In a similar way, an interview with departing CEO Katherine Maher on the Why Is This Happening? podcast.

https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9wb2RjYXN0ZmVlZHM...

It still can't be trusted for articles related to politics, specially if you're reading it in a language different from English.

Can you post some examples?

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Site-wi...

You also have the same problems of history revisionism for the far left as well.

You can't trust wiki when it pertains to politics.

citation needed

There’s an ongoing war in Europe since 2014, between Russia and Ukraine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russo-Ukrainian_War The fact is well-established, the article has more than 600 sources.

Russian Wikipedia doesn’t have such article. They only have “military conflict in eastern Ukraine” https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%92%D0%BE%D0%BE%D1%80%D1%83... That article does not list Russia on the right panel under “belligerents” section. Many sections simply tell official Russian version. When it does tell some bits of truth it uses wordings like “allegedly” and “according to Ukrainian side”. The “casualties and losses” section only contains losses on Ukrainian side.

You don't think that 600 Ukrainian and western sources only tell one side of the story though? I went down the list. All the Russian sources are actually Ukrainian (in Russian language). Just because you disagree with a perspective doesn't mean it should be censored.

Look at the "reactions in Russia" section. There is not a single positive sentiment expressed there about the situation in Crimea. I guarantee you that this is not representative of the the public opinion in Russia (whether or not you agree with it). All citations are from opposition people nobody has ever heard of. Not a single one from the official media? That's neutral? Really?

If all the people in Crimea are victims and are controlled by evil bad Russia, how come Ukraine turned off their water supply? The one they didn't build. Don't they want those poor oppressed souls to come back into the fold? Where's that reference in the article?

And in the interest of keeping an open mind: here come the downvotes! The people clicking that arrow probably think of themselves as very open minded too.

> You don't think that 600 Ukrainian and western sources only tell one side of the story though?

These sources aren’t exclusively western, e.g. Al Jazeera is based in Qatar.

Another thing, I have some sources outside of the Internets. I personally know a few people who fought the war, and many civilians who fled the war. Their stories match these 600 sources of the English version of Wikipedia.

I know some people who fled the war as well, to Russia. Not liking war doesn't necessarily mean supporting handing Ukraine over to the USA. This part is completely lost in the "Russia bad" narrative though.

I'm not sure what your anecdotes have to do with the matter being discussed. Regardless of the fact if you support the war, the truth remains that the war is happening between Ukraine and Russia. For Russian wikipedia to conceal that fact is censorship.

"the truth remains that the war is happening between Ukraine and Russia."

Interesting point to illustrate, why wikipedia's articles are not as good as the scientific ones. Because don't you think, this truth is a matter of perspective?

Because to my understanding, a real war between Ukraine and Russia would look a bit different and would have been over long ago.

There are definitely strong elements of a civil war, despite russias covert and open engagement. And with the US and EU involvment on the pro west Ukrainian side - it is complicated geopolitics. Hard to find simple truths there, when all involved sides are engaged with disinformation and propaganda.

I'm not sure what you mean by a "real war". Is it just because there aren't fighter jets and nukes involved that makes it a fake war?

If there are Russian soldiers firing guns and occupying Ukrainian territory then it's not a "matter of perspective"; it's an act of war.

Apparently, we have very different political positions. But that should not be relevant. Wikipedia’s declared goal is not about politics. It’s about preserving knowledge about notable enough subjects.

Russians have started the war, and have been fighting the war from the very beginning in March 2012. That’s not a controversial theory, but a well-established fact with verifiable references all over the internets.

Yet Russian version of Wikipedia seems unaware.

> supporting handing Ukraine over to the USA

That's up for Ukrainians to decide, not Russia.

It continues to surprise me how many people don't seem to recognize the basic right of self-determination – ranging from the status of Ukraine to Scotland to Puerto Rico – from all sorts of different ideologies. e.g. non-Puerto Ricans argueing in favour of statehood well before it was clear the population actually wanted it (only since Nov 2020 is there a referendum with a small majority in favour of it).

I upvoted your first comment because I felt that you were making a valid if controversial point.

But the concept of "handing over" Ukraine really underlines why the rest of the world views Russia as such a threat to world peace.

Ukrainians should decide their own future. It's not Russia's to hand over nor is it America's to take. Sometimes you hear quotes by high ranking Russian military officials and it feels like there is this persistent belief that NATO somehow "stole" Eastern Europe from Russia when the reality was that Eastern Europe fled to NATO to deter Russia after several brutal decades in the Soviet sphere of influence.

Certainly the concept of some countries being good and others being bad is outdated. The West has engaged in more than it's share of evil. But that doesn't justify moral relativism in international affairs. Nor does it allow one country to attempt annexation of another against its will.

So, hypothetically, let's say Canada decided to elect a Communist government tomorrow. Do you honestly think the USA would let Canadians decide their fate?

A contrived comparison as nothing close to this happened in Ukraine.

Yeah, Ukrainians only elected a hostile (to Russia) government that would threaten the viability of a major gas pipeline to Europe. These exports are basically the only real means of income for Russia. At the same time Russia would lose access to the Black Sea. Like it or not, a military's job is the preservation of the well-being of their country. If they had allowed this to happen they'd have been asleep at the switch.

Also, it's funny how all the countries suddenly wanting to change things up government-wise just happen to be on the path of major gas pipelines from Russia. Georgia, Ukraine, Belarus, Armenia. A coincidence, that. Environmentalists also spoke up about the dangers of undersea pipelines with perfect timing (see Nort Stream 2).

And so you have a country whose power structure is literally facing an existential threat. Now, maybe you think that Russian power structure really is better off disappearing into the sunset (and I may even agree with you). But to think it'll do so without a fight is naive.

This thing is bigger than Ukraine. This is a well-orchestrated multi-year operation to change the balance of power in Europe and potentially force a regime change in Russia. Ukrainians have their dreams and admirable spirit, but I think when the dust settles they will be disappointed to find themselves to have been used as pawns in a much bigger game.

The British elected a hostile (to the EU) government. I have yet to see French or German tanks roll in to British territory.

It's their country. It's their right to decide whether they want to have gas pipelines there. That this is an existential threat to Russia is kind of a problem of their own making and, quite frankly, not Ukraine's problem. Don't bully 42 million people because you can't solve your own problems.

You do realize what you're advocating for is that Ukraine should be a Russian puppet state?

This went way off topic, and apparently one cannot make devil's advocate arguments on this site (or anywhere) without getting branded the devil.

My opinion is that there is no such thing as 100% self determination, whether for people or for groups of them called countries. We are social creatures and there is no way for us to exist without connections, social norms, etc. A group leaving one sphere of influence will necessarily fall into another one. Puppet or not is a matter of degree of control.

Ukraine's fight for independence is 90% financed by the USA (NPR's number, not mine). Is that really independent? I guess it is for the people already within the US sphere of influence: to them the story is "they are leaving the baddies and we are helping them do it".

To be within the US sphere of influence is self-defined as being free. Is it? Depends on who's making up the definitions I suppose. And now we are back on topic: there's probably no way to write a completely neutral article on a topic like this conflict. The sides can't even agree on what the phrases mean!

> Ukraine's fight for independence is 90% financed by the USA (NPR's number, not mine)

I have personally donated thousands of dollars to help Ukraine's fight for independence, and I know people who donated more than me. Just because someone in Ukraine received USD from abroad does not mean USA's financing.

> there's probably no way to write a completely neutral article on a topic like this conflict

In this case, Russians even deny the topic.

In your comments your position is evil but at least somewhat reasonable. You admit there's a war between Russia and Ukraine, and explain how Russian government is stupid enough to think that's a good idea. Despite I don't share that political position I would like to see that info in Wikipedia, it's interesting and relevant.

But Wikipedia's position (which happens to match the official Russian propaganda) is that Russia ain't involved, and Ukraine is fighting a civil war against local rebels. For 7 years and counting.

I'm from the EU/NATO side of this. It does help to understand how the other side in a conflict thinks! It helps to establish context.

From Russia's perspective NATO has been progressively taking over countries that were previously part of Russia's safety buffer.

Ukraine entering talks to join the NATO sphere of influence was one step too far for them. Russia has a major naval base at Sevastopol that threatened to "fall into NATO hands." From their own strategic viewpoint they could never allow this to happen without a fight!

And of course, everyone is the good guy in their own story.

Al Jazeera is is not just based in Qatar, it is Qatari state media.

At least officially, the situation is similar to that of the BBC. Both AJ and the BBC are government funded, but both have editorial independence of their local government. Both have been accused of bias in favor of their funding governments.

You can not discuss these things without taking into account the nature of the respective governments. Under an authoritarian regime, one should at least be skeptical of the concept of a government funded news organization with editorial independence.

You might find this interesting:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5iWJVXaFTxo

Not saying that Al-Jazeera is unbiased at all and the differing content on the Arabic and English channels does seem to be quite concerning. That being said, the guy behind Nas Daily is paid by the UAE government not only for tourism work (sponsored videos) but also as an instructor for a government run/funded media academy [1]. The UAE obviously has a bone to pick with Al-Jazeera and Qatar. Nas Daily itself has some received some criticism about their coverage of Israel, see [2]. While the accusation that he is an official part of Israeli propaganda seems a bit unfounded, there does seem to be more to the story than what meets the eye.

[1] https://newmediaacademy.ae/ar-digital-creator/#pll_switcher

[2] https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/nas-daily-israel-palestin...

Interesting. I’ve only seen a few of Nas’ videos (which I liked, despite the slightly exhausting delivery). I didn’t know he worked for the UAE government, and I agree that should be kept in mind.

EDIT: The criticism in [2] is objection by the antisemitic BDS movement to NAS’ refusal to demonize Israel and his attempts to bring people together and promote peace and mutual understanding. It is embarrassing to their narrative when Palestinians like NAS point out that the Palestinians who stayed in Israel after its founding became full members of its society, served in its parliament, and that there is no “apartheid”.

The wikipedia article on NIAC - the National Iranian American Council, which seems to be an Iran state-sponsored organization, is guarded by their members. Luckily Wikipedia is fairly good at pointing it out in this instance:

> A major contributor to this article appears to have a close connection with its subject. It may require cleanup to comply with Wikipedia's content policies, particularly neutral point of view. Please discuss further on the talk page. (June 2018) (Learn how and when to remove this template message)

But going to the talk page shows they still control the page and content on it.

> Dear User Wikidave2009, since June 2017 the well-sourced March 2017 revelations and implications section has been created five times in this page by three different editors like Wiki726, Ours18 and myself, you have deleted it every single time without providing any credible reference to discredit that the sources cited in that section. Your claim that these sources are "fringe" and "dubious" is not wellfounded. Michael Rubin is a leading expert on Iran at the AEI, Darren Tromblay is a veteran intelligence analyst and both the Small Wars Journal and Commentary Magazine are solid and reliable sources. I do realize that you are very dedicated to guarding the NIAC page, however, you're forcing your opinion on this page without any regard for other editors who disagree with you. Please STOP removing content that you don't like, and perhaps find a way to deal with this conflict of interest that is obvious. Alwaysf (talk) 05:29, 17 January 2018 (UTC)

That section is not on the main page. You can see it in the history: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=National_Iranian_...

1. This isn't a political example, but big parts of Scottish Wikipedia were basically written by one teenager, who took English texts and wrote them with Scottish accent. He did not use real Scottish language, but rather some strange version of English.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/aug/26/shock-an-aw-...

Either nobody reads the relatively small Scottish Wikipedia, or (more likely) everyone who complained about it got banned by said admin. And since nobody really reviews bans (why cant the Wikimedia Foundation have someone for it?), then you are generally out of luck.

2A. There was a Wikipedia administrator who created 80 000 pages and redirects related to breasts. Also seemed to have some obsession over some low key political woman.

https://www.reddit.com/r/HobbyDrama/comments/dk17c9/wikipedi...

What is more sad in this case, is that every other admin knew very well that thousands of such pages were created, but nobody did anything. This is the usual situation when the clique will never go against one of their own.

It took them an incredible amount of time to do anything with that rogue admin and at the end I think he wasn't even removed from his role and banned, he simply stepped down on his own.

2B. Compare the rogue admin described in point 2A (who created 80 thousand articles and redirects related to breasts) with the typical experience of a new wikipedia user, whose article will be probably speedy deleted immediately after creation. There is a big group of admins who try to speed delete everything - because by default they treat every new user as human trash and every new article as not encyclopedic.

I dont have any statistics,but I assume that after the new article is deleted, most new users will simply give up, because the alternative is to fight versus the admin clique through various "committees" (full of said admins). This time is wasted, because instead of improving the article you go through a trial of tears.

2C. Also very possible is that every edit by a new user is reverted by default. The new user cannot revert it back - since this is an "edit war". I dont feel like searching for examples, but there are admins who have literal counters that show how many things they reverted - and they pride themselves of it.

This basically means thousands of users pushed away of trying to improve wikipedia, just because some sad asshole sits and reverts everything to paddle his stats.

Other admins dont do anything about it, because it is incredibly hard to remove an admin / if they removed that guy, then someone else could go after them.

The Wikimedia foundation simply does not care at all. They just need those millions for various expensive "projects", lunches and so on. A very similar thing happened with Firefox, where the Mozilla foundation is interested in everything, but not their core product.

If you are a new Wikipedia user a very typical situation is that if you create a new article, some admin will "improve" it (generally making it worse) and you cannot revert those changes, or you get banned by the said admin. On some smaller Wikipedia the admins knew each other very well, so they ask their friend to ban you.

I am aware that I dont provide any examples for those + I sound like a "frustrated person".

If you dont believe me, you can make a second account and see how it looks for someone new (using two accounts is against Wikipedia terms of service btw).

Perhaps a good way would be to randomize admin names, so those assholes get banned by their own friends, or reverted by own friends, who like to revert everything.

3. Regarding examples of "fresh" political cases having a lot of problems. You can check the page of Aimee Channelor and constant edit wars related to that person

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Aimee_Challenor

That's the person involved in the reddit scandal in 2021.

If you feel like a detective, you can also try to figure out who are the people who constantly guard and edit the said article.

Btw. I guess I also have to add a disclaimer that I never had anything to do with article from point 3.

Everyone I know who has tried to contribute to Wikipedia would concur with your comments here. I myself dipped my little toe tentatively into the Wikipedia swamp a couple of times, and can confirm everything you say. It’s a toxic presence on the web, a cesspool of plagiarism and insular politics masquerading as political neutrality. It sucks the energy out of the web of creative, individual voices that should be the ideal, and substitutes crowdsourced mush that reads as exactly what it is: something written by a committee.

> by default they treat every new user as human trash and every new article as not encyclopedic

Maybe setting a high bar to new edits is not a bad idea. Wikipedia is old, it should settle at least on some of the topics.

Nice that you talk about edits (or new articles?) that you have not seen. Spoken like a true Wikipedist: be hostile to anyone who is outside of the clique and dares to criticize it.

The hostile speed deletions and reverts applied to new users are never happen admins, or members of the clique - even if the quality of things they add is very, very low.

I even wrote above that there are ways to fight it: for example by randomizing the names of users who made the edits. Although Im quite sure that Wikipedia is full of sad people, who will spend a lot of time and effort to still be able to bypass such a system.

What is even more sad, is that in this particular discussions, you have 3 different users who wrote that it happened to them... just look to other replies to the top comment.

Ten years ago I wrote a bunch of articles in a niche of my interest. One in particular was very complex, I spent a whole month doing research for it, posted citations for everything. When I came back a few years later it was unrecognizable. Now it barely has anything of what I wrote in it. So I know how it is to see your work trashed and how difficult the 'pro' editors can be. That's why I don't write there anymore, it's like writing on sand.

Even so Wikipedia is still one of my top 3 sites. I'm doing NLP and I see the Wikipedia corpus used in hundreds of papers. It's useful in many ways.

> Maybe setting a high bar to new edits is not a bad idea.

I agree about this. If you're worried that your edit might get reverted, the trick is to argue for it on the talk page first, wait for any objections to be raised there, then if no one objects, make the edit marking it as "per talk". At that point, it will be very hard for them to just revert, and if they do so without addressing your comments they're breaking Wikipedia policy themselves.

This is a little unwiki though. If you fear your edit will be reverted, don't worry, it's still in edit history. Make a [1] Bold edit, wait for it to be reverted, then discuss.

The trick of it is that there are very high odds that the actual reverter will enter discussion with you; which means you're talking with exactly the right person on exactly the right topic at exactly the right time. O:-)

You can then proceed to figure out what (either of you [2]) are doing wrong, and get something on the page that works.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:BOLD,_revert,_discus...

[2] Analogous to unit testing, where the bug could be in the test or in the main program; the problem here could lie with the BOLD editor or with the Reverter, or even both! If you assume good faith[3] and talk it out together, you can go far.

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Assume_good_faith

> This is a little unwiki though.

Of course it is, but it's way less unwiki than the alternative (revert wars and wiki blocks)! Being 'BOLD' works very well when you expect your edit to stick; if you have reason to think someone will revert your edit, it's just way better to proactively show good faith by arguing for your edit on the talk page.

It is entirely possible to be bold without revert warring. And the one of the best times to be bold is -in fact- when you do not expect your edit to stick. (see references, above.)

Be BOLD, but don't be reckless! Do show good faith, Do also follow all the other policies and guidelines, Do be respectful of others; Do also put a comment on the talk page; Don't start an edit war, and then you definitely won't get blocked!

Wikipedia policies and guidelines are not an optional, pick the ones you like kind of affair. When used together they document optimal processes found over years of experience.

When you follow optimal process and act in a decisive, clear and respectful manner, you'll find that you and your other co-editors can edit more rapidly, effectively and amicably, and you'll even get into less trouble along the way.

Setting a high bar to new edits increases the cycle time to deal with edits in general. If we look at control theory for analogies, and take a feedback controller (say PID) you'll see that short cycle times often lead to quicker convergence and higher accuracy; even with very crude control; while long cycle times even with very fine control will lead to much less satisfactory results.

Analogously thus with a wiki. One of the things that make a wiki (hawaiian for "quick") work is that it (potentially) has very short feedback loops when editing.

One reason wikipedia is often slower than it can be is because very many people have the "slow but fine" intuition; but less people have/(or used to have) experience with the "coarse but fast correction" regime, and thus lack the intuition that comes with that.

[citation needed]

1. This is an issue the Wikimedia foundation has been dealing with and working to solve: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Large_s...

2A. The general rule with the Wikipedia is that, if you can make a redirect to something, it’s usually good to do so, even if the redirect uses a term which is not politically correct. Considering the source of the complaint comes from Reddit, Reddit is not a particularly reliable source about matters like this.

2B. As a strict inclusionist sometimes Wikipedia editor, I agree 100% with the general gist that the Wikipedia makes adding new articles too hard. That said, I have with some effort been able to make a new article stay in the Wikipedia fairly recently (late 2019): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ValhallaDSP

It did get tagged for deletion — https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=ValhallaDSP&type=... — but the editor who put the tag removed it when I pointed out the subject has been extensively referenced by the music press — https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=ValhallaDSP&type=...

2C. Please provide evidence; e.g. diffs where you tried to edit something and all of your edits were reverted. [Citation needed] and all that.

3. The current version https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aimee_Challenor — this version: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Aimee_Challenor&o... — has the Reddit scandal and other scandals prominently described in the lead section. Please let us know how the article is not neutral.

1. Wikimedia foundation is doing literally nothing. It is painfully obvious that they should hire people who would sit all day and review actions of admins (their bans, reverts, edit wars.. yes admins participate in them too, but nobody does anything about it). Obviously we end up with a question "who watches the watchmen", but this could be made all public too.

For example Wikipedia has a role called CheckUser - what is a person that has special access rights to check IP addresses of all other users. This is mainly used to see if a person doesn't use multiple sock puppet accounts to make various types of abuse (e.g. vote manipulation).

I know a local Wikipedia, where the CheckUser literally refuses to check if admins don't have sock puppet accounts. This means that the admins can literally make any sock puppet they want and always win any vote, including future votes for a new CheckUser.

What can you do about it? Nothing.

Can you write about this to Wikimedia Foundation? Nope. There even isnt any official way to contact them. They basically let local Wikipedia branches run themselves.

2A. You write a lot of text to defend literal garbage. That admin added 80 THOUSAND incredibly low effort redirects related to woman breasts.

"Titty tumors", "Segmental removal of the titties", "Constructions of the booby", "Hypoplastic tits", "Atrophy of the titties"...

Please explain to me how this is any good?

If a new user made such garbage, it would be speed deleted and the user IP banned immediately.

2B. So basically an experienced Wikipedia user still got their article speed deleted, had to fight to get it back.. and then somehow what I wrote is wrong. So to sum up, if you dont like the facts, you ignore the facts? I realy dont understand what is your point here.

3. Again, you seem to miss the point. Someone asked for an example of a political article that was problematic. So I provided an article. You can look at the edit history to see that there were literal wars about everything there.

Also in case of articles about living people, politicians etc. it is often quite clear that said politicians or their aides are the ones who are tasked with guarding the article, editing it.

> Please let us know how the article is not neutral.

Do you represent Wikipedia or Wikipedia foundation in any way?

You did not provide one link nor citation in your entire 400-word rant.

Hey, please explain to me why "Constructions of the booby", or "Atrophy of the titties" are things that should be on Wikipedia? I guess you cannot defend this, so you just change the subject. Or maybe you are a sexist, who thinks that this is ok.

Why do you demand citations when Wikipedia is discussed? For any other topic, you dont demand them, or dont use them.

I guess you are just some common troll, probably a Wikipedia admin. Joke's on me, since I even bothered to reply.

Those articles aren’t on the Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Log/delet... — https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Log/delet... (Edit: The references show that they were on the Wikipedia, but were deleted in 2015, i.e. before #MeToo. Also, the offending admin was topic banned: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators%27_no... )

I am demanding citations because you’re making contentious accusations based on half-truths.

This will be my last reply to you; I do not think a productive conversation is possible at this point.

It is clear from when he originally brought it up that those articles had been, eventually, removed. Indeed, part of his point (and a relevant issue, I believe) was to ask why this took so long. Since this must be clear to you, it seems that your comment is disingenuous.

I agree, the Wikipedia process is very slow, and often times a lot of discussion happens before something is finally done. That’s a natural consequence of a process where consensus, reliable sourcing, and a desire to be neutral and accurate determines what is acceptable and not acceptable.

I much prefer the process to what Reddit does, which is, in many subreddits, to quickly ban anyone who goes against the group think of a given subreddit, even if the subreddit is wrong.

In Wikipedia, as a rule of thumb, is that the truth does win out, even if it takes a while to get there. As one example, while Tara Reade’s now-discredited accusation [1] against Joe Biden was all over numerous subreddits and presented as objective fact, [2] the Wikipedia was taking a slower, more measured approach to reporting the accusations which ultimately ended up being far more accurate than what Reddit was doing at the time. [3]

As another case, a lot of noise was made over how horrible the Wikipedia was because Clarice Phelps didn’t have a Wikipedia article. She has one today. [4]

[1] This probably needs a citation. How about https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/what-74-former-biden-s... or, yeah, since it’s so heavily sourced https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Biden_sexual_assault_alleg...

[2] For example, https://old.reddit.com/r/WayOfTheBern/comments/it5n91/multip...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Joe_Biden/Archive_10#Tara...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarice_Phelps

[5] Wikipedia has a hard time with allowing articles about cool open source projects and languages. I agree this is really annoying, since it means I have to dig through GitHub, forums like this one, or (for fonts) Google Fonts to find high quality open source programs or content.

[6] Adding footnotes without a reference to the footnote is an old alt.sysadmin.recovery tradition

You sidestepped the point about disingenuously pointing out that the articles that the original commenter was very clear had been already taken down, were not there.

Do you think that being better than Reddit is a high bar?

I do not think I side steped the issue. Of the three issues the OP originally brought up, he only stated that one of those issues were resolved by the Wikipedia (and he quoted Reddit instead of a more direct source, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators%27_no... or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators%27_no... or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators%27_no... ).

While the post was quite heated and it’s hard to separate facts from expressions of anger, to me he strongly implied the other two haven’t been dealt with or resolved, while, in fact, all the issues are resolved or are being discussed, in Wikipedia’s typical style of discussing things to death (I remember when discussing whether to host pro-pedophile advocacy was a thing on Wikipedia, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Pedophile_movement/Archiv... )

I brought up Reddit because the OP brought up Reddit; I agree they are horribly inaccurate, and if something I read on Reddit makes me angry, I check other sources to make sure I’m not getting worked up over a lie.

I believe you did. In rvba’s item 2A, he is clear that the issue was addressed, after “an incredible amount of time”. Your reply provides the information that the articles no longer exist on the platform, as if it were a refutation of rvba’s point. This is what I am calling disingenuous, and I think my characterization is warranted.

EDIT: But perhaps I am wrong or confused. Wouldn’t be the first time. In that case, please clarify what, exactly, was the purpose of your citations that began “Those articles aren’t on the Wikipedia:”.

Thank you for the discussion. I have edited my parent posts to better clarify my position. For the record, I am no fan of Wikipedia’s “Deletionist” movement, and didn’t edit there for years because I did not approve of their wide spread deletions.

I was, when pointing out the articles are not on the Wikipedia, answering the direct question “please explain to me why "Constructions of the b—by", or "Atrophy of the ti—ies" are things that should be on Wikipedia?” (I have gone to the bother of bowdlerizing the cuss words) where the answer is “they haven’t been on the Wikipedia since 2015”.

That poster was being, to say the least, quite disingenuous asking me that question: They were making a direct personal insult against me, and they were stating that I advocated a position that I do not advocate. In other words, they were asking me a “are you still beating your wife?” type of question, and they worded their question as if those redirects are still on the Wikipedia.

Indeed, a point you missed they never stated the redirects went away.

Let’s look at what they actually said: >>>What is more sad in this case, is that every other admin knew very well that thousands of such pages were created, but nobody did anything. This is the usual situation when the clique will never go against one of their own.

It took them an incredible amount of time to do anything with that rogue admin and at the end I think he wasn't even removed from his role and banned, he simply stepped down on his own.<<<

Did this poster state the pages were removed? No, they did not. The poster only stated they they “[did] anything” with the admin, inaccurately stated he wasn’t banned (he was topic banned, which is a pretty serious punishment on the Wikipedia), and the OP never said what happened with the redirects.

A reasonable person reading what the OP wrote would not be given the impression the redirects were removed.

Now, back to me: I merely stated that the Wikipedia is a little more loose about redirects than about articles (“if you can make a redirect to something, it’s usually good to do so, even if the redirect uses a term which is not politically correct”); I agree that the particular redirects the OP incorrectly accused me of supporting go beyond the pale, and are examples of why I said “usually good” and not always good. The Wikipedia community agrees they went beyond the pale: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators%27_no...

It would be like if someone asked me “Why is it that pro-pedophile advocacy should be on the Wikipedia?”; it is in no way “disingenuous” to answer “that hasn’t been on the Wikipedia since 2007”, even if they previously pointed out that the Wikipedia did “something” about pedophilia a while ago, and even if I previously said that Wikipedia errs on the side of supporting free speech.

Personally, I think it’s pretty disingenuous to defend someone who was flaming me so hard, @dang had to intervene, and to incorrectly imply they OP said something they never actually said when falsely claiming I was being “disingenuous”. But that’s just my opinion.

It seems that we interpret language in radically different ways. This last comment of yours brings that home, as I find your analysis of the poster’s statements wildly off the mark. If you had simply disagreed with my interpretation initially when I said “Since this must be clear to you”, I could have retracted my characterization and we’d have been done. As it is, I must acknowledge that what seemed obvious to me might not be obvious to you, and, therefore, it is possible you were not being intentionally disingenuous. I’m sorry if my inferences wounded you; I should have taken more care in considering alternative possible, even if unlikely, readings.

I wonder how many people have been to the scary devil monastery, or still know what it is.

Yeah, I used to love that place. Alas, the last time I was there, I got in a bad flame war which left a sour taste in my mouth. These days, the place is (mostly) dead, although they did have a nice eulogy for Brian Kantor (who actually killfiled me because of said flame war)

[1] It seems to have picked up some during the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020

You crossed badly into flamewar and personal attack in this thread. We've had to warn you about this kind of thing before. We ban accounts that do it repeatedly, so please stop and don't do it again.

You can make your substantive points without any of that, and it's also in your interests to do so!

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

The reason it can't be trusted is methodology used to create articles: weight based statements using reliable sources. The concept does not work with politics. You can't take the top 10 news sites, sum up how often a certain statement is made, and then derive the truth.

When you have two polarizing sides, the extremist that are the most popular view might not even be close to reality or even the majority opinion. With two narratives that define their own "good" side and a "bad" side, the messy truth might not be found in news articles but rather in hindsight a few decades later (or fringe analysts that is struggling to survive).

Political topics do however get fairly good coverage by citing reliable sources of what kind of narratives have been made, and except for correct weighting, might give some clues about the truth.

Whether or not we can fully trust Wikipedia is one thing, and it is true that truth should not just be a result of frequency counting.

I'd say Wikipedia, like the scientific process, works in the limit; any snapshot may contain errors, but there's a process for weeding out errors that leads to conversion towards the right direction, if not always in a strictly monotonic fashion.

There are countries in which things said on Wikipedia are not permissible to be viewed, or where it is banned in whole. I prefer to live in a place where you can view everything (e.g, [1,2]) and make up your mind for yourself, weighing the evidence.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20110512173914/http://seattletim...

[2] https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%85%AD%E5%9B%9B%E4%BA%8B%E4...

[3] https://www.history.com/news/who-was-the-tank-man-of-tiananm...

Is that about Wikipedia, or more about politics in general?

Another way to put it: is there another source you'd trust more? I'm only familiar with English-language Wikipedia, but from what I've seen, NPOV and other standards mean that the battling factions of editors tend to produce something that does a better job of portraying multiple points of view than most other sources.

I'm sure there are folks here who would disagree but I'd generally trust mainstream global news sources like The Economist, New York Times, and Wall Street Journal. (Which is not to say they don't get stories or even whole narratives wrong.)

Agreed. They certainly have their biases, but they are at least correct about the facts they state almost all the time, and when they have factual inaccuracies, they seem to be rare, honest mistakes. Better than a lot of sources of information related to politics, that are full of intentionally incorrect facts.

I was interviewed for a fairly trivial story in the WSJ based on something I wrote on Twitter a while back. Total nothingburger comment and, from a 30 minute conversation, total nothingburger quote. But the amount of back and forth, confirming quote and associated details, etc. was incredible. Most pubs would have just quoted the tweet.

(That said, I've also been interviewed for a breaking news story and that's simply run.)

I think the issue is if an article doesn't get enough attention, it's easy for people to slip in blatantly false or misleading information for self interested reasons. I imagine this is worse on non-english wikipedia but it does also happen on English.

So on Wikipedia, you need to always be thinking about whether anyone has a motivation to manipulate the article and checking to see whether they in fact have. You could argue that this is true of everything though, and at least on Wikipedia people are usually pretty clumsy about revealing their biases.

That's exactly it. It's not that every article is unreliable, it's that there is no way to tell. I suppose you can take a look at the edit history and see how sparsely vetted an article is, but some metric like that prominently displayed to portray signal-to-noise would be an improvement.

Well said. The major problem with Wikipedia is that unless a topic is extremely popular, most of the editors interested in working on the topic will have a huge bias toward one particular point of view. They will directly cite advocacy organizations that support their view in the body of the article over neutral sources. Fixing this is basically impossible. "The encyclopedia that anyone can edit" is true in the sense that "anyone can become an editor" which is true in the sense of "anyone can become a millionaire." In reality, reforming a problematic article on Wikipedia would take a major investment into getting an account with the requisite reputation and friends in similar positions of power. Most of us can't be bothered.

The other major problem with Wikipedia is the low quality of many of its writers, at least (again) for topics a little outside mainstream interest. Last time I edited Wikipedia, I discovered an organized editing effort by a professor teaching a course at a community college. I tracked it to the course website, and apparently as a semester long project, students were asked to pick an article and slowly incorporate improvements to it as well as check the quality of other incoming changes.

Now, I've taught classes at a pretty well regarded public university, and having had to grade the writing of incoming students from good high schools, my assessment of the writing skills provided by America's primary education system is Not Great. I can only imagine that the caliber of student coming into a typical community college is even worse. This isn't to trash this particular student or even the class, but to give an idea of who's editing Wikipedia, on a good day.

The article I was reading (which I'd regard as important - I actually found it after seeing statistics it provided quoted by well-known publications) had slowly been turned into complete garbage over the course of a few months by this student. It was barely coherent English. Statistics were misquoted and misinterpreted throughout (everyone citing the Wikipedia article had been misled, as a result). And this was the result of one editor doing a bad job, not even deliberate astroturfing. Suffice it to say, it's very dangerous to take Wikipedia seriously on any subject of importance unless the article about it has been widely reviewed.

Wikipedia is in this uncanny valley of reliability, where it looks impartial when you take a superficial glance, but when you look closer it isn't. This lulls you into false sense of security that allows the occasional lie* through your filters.

* I saw lie, because if you tried to fix the inaccuracy it would not be allowed.

Wikipedia is not a primary source. You wouldn’t describe it as a source or cite it. That people don’t know this is one of Wikipedia’s failings.

Unfortunately, politics is riddled with opinion. No piece on politics is really that trustworthy, regardless of whether it's in an encyclopedia or a tabloid newspaper.

That is because politics is 100% based on ideology. Ideologies are almost never rationally constructed.

What is a statement that might be out of any ideology?

Also note that rationalism is an ideology.

You can't trust it any more or less than any other source.

The circumcision (a euphemism for male genital mutilation) page for example is run and moderated by pro-circumcision people. And you can tell because there's any support for it whatsoever.

It's not Wikipedia's job to be pro or against anything. The topic of circumcision is a topic of debate in the US, which Wikipedia records, and arguments from both proponents and opponents have a place in it.

Does this mean that Wikipedia is, in a way, kind of a "bad" resource? Absolutely. My personal opinion is that circumcision is indefensible, and we can quickly agree on this. But this kind of resource has value too; what if I want to educate myself on the argument that pro-circumcision people use? There's Wikipedia for that!

I was raised very secular; up to my early 20s I didn't really have an opinion on religion in general because I was simply never really exposed to it; I knew it existed of course, but outside of that: idunnoknow.

After I had some Jehovah's Witnesses at my door I decided to educate myself a bit more about this and looked up, among other things, arguments in favour of God's existence on Wikipedia. I thought they were ridiculous and didn't even hold up to the most basic of critical thinking; I couldn't believe this nonsense was really the best they could come up with. I've been atheist ever since.

However, this doesn't mean that these arguments – ridiculous as I might think they are – don't have a place on Wikipedia, and shouldn't be described there.

It's a lot better than traditional encyclopedias on these matters though, as there's revision history and talk pages readily available. Go look up native American history/history of the US in a pre 80s encyclopedia for example.

> If there was a fire on the internet, and I could only save one website, it would be you Wikipedia.

Well said, I concur, and I'm borrowing your quote for my fortunes file.

Yeah. While there are plenty of things to criticize, in general, it works. And a number of different approaches to a crowdsourced encyclopedia, e.g. Google Knol, have clearly not worked. There are big incentives to game anything like this--see also Quora.

Indeed, it's no Yahoo Answers (RIP)

Quora degrades because you're trying to fit a business model into a square hole where it won't fit.

Maybe not every project should be a commercial enterprise.

Quora also degrades because as soon as you have a popular site that individuals can push unfiltered content to, the scammers, spammers, or just people with positions/products to push show up. It's pretty clear that moderation (both community and admins) are a pretty important part of a popular crowdsourced site. (Not that I disagree with your point as well.)

Is quora so bad? I usually use it for little questions before I ask something on stackexchange and it seems to work fine enough...

There's a lot of dross on there. Every now and then a search will lead me to a useful answer but it was a much more interesting site when it started out. More active interesting people and fewer worthless or scammy questions and answers.

And for some reason they seem to actively merge only tangentially-related questions and answers. I often see answers that have nothing to do with the question.

It’s a pretty notorious hideout for cranks, both benign and weird nationalist ones.

They email me a daily digest of maybe a dozen questions and answers they think I might find interesting.

Typically, at least half of them each day are interesting enough that I'll click to read the full question and the full answer that they picked to highlight. Most of the rest are usually decent questions, but I'm just not interested enough to click.

Of those I do click, maybe half of those turn out to be sufficiently interesting that after reading the featured answer I'll click to see the other answers too.

Like many sites based on user provided content, Quora tries to show you what they think you will be interested in, but "interested in" really means what you'll click on.

I see enough stupid stuff (especially stupid political stuff) elsewhere, so don't click on it on Quora. I seem to be consistent enough with this that their algorithms have figured out there is better stuff to show me to get my click.

I also do not use "sign in with Facebook" or "sign in with Google" there, and am not really active on any social media that exposes user email addresses or that exposes contact lists (or even has contact lists). I don't know if I have any friends who also read Quora, but if I do there is a decent chance that Quora does not know that I do, and so won't be using their interests to try to guess mine.

I don't know why do many others have bad Quora experiences, but for whatever reason it works great for me.

You essentially can't get that big, survive that long, or be so relevant without deserving criticism. Until people are angels, large complex efforts that survive necessarily need to be kind of shitty in one way or another. Linux (and Linus) are in the same boat. The ways that they are shitty have maintained (and are necessary for) the ways that they are great.

People argue the opposite, that things could be better, that the criticisms could be addressed and everything else would continue on, but I'm not so sure. Where is the large, successful organization -- based on money or not -- which has survived into greatness without these kinds of criticisms?

It reminds me of Marxism/Communisms/various utopian ideas. People have big ideas about how things can be "perfect" and all problems can be abolished. Except for a very few, very small exception, when those ideas have been tried, the outcome has been far worse than the problems that were trying to be avoided.

It's one of the huge challenges to mankind, and an underappreciated field of research. If we better understand how to organize ourselves, we can slowly make less shitty systems over time.

That, and before you can make a system work, however shitty it is, you really need to make sure everyone knows how to use it. (hence it's important to educate or on-board people. One of the things en.wikipedia is bad at. )

"There should be a science of discontent. People need hard times and oppression to develop psychic muscles."

Ok maybe a bit off topic, but what I'm getting at is... well I think that a bit of unpleasantness is simply necessary and unavoidable. How, where, and the correct amount are important, but people seem to be overly outraged over every bit of negativity these days.

Human misery has a tendency to adjust itself to whatever circumstances a person finds themselves in which is why you find people in profound poverty imagining if they just had this they would be happy forever and then you go and look at people who actually have it and find that they are just as likely to be completely miserable.

I think shittiness is necessary in places because without it you'll have some people making really bad choices just to make folks happy and others who no matter what will find something to be miserable about.

So it's not about eliminating all the rough spots, but instead intentionally shaping them to be in the right places at the right intensities.

Mmm, it's still best taken with a small pile of salt. If you spend much time editing in any topic area, you will quickly find a few editors with a lot of time on their hands and a particular bone to pick. These people can be exhausting and tend to get their way, so particular biases don't get corrected.

It's still "the world according to people with the most free time (and sometimes strong opinions)". Which mostly works out, but... yeah. Keep that salt handy.

Has it? Wikipedia is primarily edited by an insulated, slowly dying clique of mostly ignorant people who would rather nothing be written at all than a domain expert outsider article.

Meanwhile, the foundation is some sort of self-perpetuating money vacuum expanding at a great rate while expenditures for actually running Wikipedia is stagnant, if anything getting cheaper. It turns out a wishy-washy NGO save the world mission is a lot more exciting than the daily struggle of community building, and with the foundation all these do-gooders don't even have to forgo the competitive salary.

Obviously a bit exaggerated, but there is a lot of truth here.

Can you tell me a couple large, human-made things you do like?

Domesticated animals

The Colossus of Rhodes

Burritos

Computers, computer languages

I could be much worse, corporations could have taken over.

Wikipedia is absolutely in need of disrupting. If that happens, it should be done very thoughtfully.

https://www.wired.com/2007/08/wiki-tracker/

https://web.archive.org/web/20190410141316/old.ycombinator.c... (Item #23)

"Wikipedia is in desperate need of thoughtful disruption"

Thanks for that.

Citations desperately needed. What do you hope to communicate with this tirade ? You're basically saying I spewed out a bunch of things, some of it is true. Figure out which.

Found the Wikipedia admin. These are well known issues:

"Wikipedia is losing editors": https://mashable.com/2013/01/08/wikipedia-losing-editors/?eu...

"Nearly all of Wikipedia is written by just 1 percent of its editors": https://www.vice.com/en/article/7x47bb/wikipedia-editors-eli...

"Wikipedia’s diversity gap echoes around the internet": https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2021/04/04/wikipedias-diver...

"Wikipedia has cancer": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C...

I'm not sure why this is getting downvoted, because even Wikipedia acknowledges the issues with its contributor community.

Years ago I had a friend who worked for Wikimedia Foundation and was very enthusiastic about it. That optimism didn't last for long. He left after a few years citing WF's messaging style of "holding the content hostage" during fundraising drives and the established, exclusive contributor community that, more often than not, would drive away new contributors with snippy responses and arcane editing rules.

Was he at a management position? Otherwise he seems to be poking where it doesn't belong. If a donation banner made him leave, I can't imagine him keeping any job ever.. you realize how little 99% of companies care about ethics (compared to making profit), right?

http://meatballwiki.org/wiki/WikiLifeCycle

Wikipedia seems to somehow be hanging by its fingernails for the last decade or so, despite being somewhere in the 20's on that list.

I guess something was done right. Next time even better?

"wiki cannot be trusted"

"have anything better? how specifically is is it bad or biased compared to alternatives?"

silence

Openstreetmap fits IMHO also into this category. Personally, if I could save one website, I might choose OSM ;)

I love both Wikipedia and OSM, but my own desert island website would be the Internet Archive.

Yeah, it's difficult to remember just how audacious an idea Wikipedia was. Even as an earlyish contributor, I thought it was an impossible dream. It has turned out to be a really great tool.

I always liked the quip: Wikipedia works well in practice, just not in theory.

The moment the question is “which resource can I unreservedly trust”, you’re already duped. Encyclopedias are written and edited by real people, with real agendas, and no collaboration or editorial model will get rid of those.

There’s a difference in “how exactly should I not trust this or that resource” though.

Op said useful, as intended, worthy of saving. Not trusted without reservations. No need to strawman.

He quoted people discussing that very question

AFAIK a large part of why it hasn't yet been corrupted has been the total lack of greed on behalf of founder Jimmy Wales.

Kudos to you, Jimmy (and team). Keep up the great work.

That's basically it. Naked Greed and convincing yourself that monetizing a thing you think you invented but which invariably turns out to be people's attention is always good in and of itself. I've been in or inside lots of wonderful things created as the Internet has evolved, and almost all end up this way.

He's extracted a pretty good life from wikipedia, but nothing compared to your typical SV start-up founder would demand, so I'm totally OK with this.

Oh it's definitely been corrupted: https://larrysanger.org/2020/05/wikipedia-is-badly-biased/

Note the article is written by the same guy who wrote the email in the original post.

Wikipedia articles related to politics should have warning labels about bias and potential disinformation when linked from google/twitter/facebook. Entrenched activist admins and editors sabotage its ability to self-correct entries towards a neutral point of view.

i would save scihub too.

And wikibooks. I think they're are actually multiple websites, so if I had to decide, it would be web.archive.org. Yes, this would mean nearly all internet sites, but without CGI backends.

If you think it isn’t a cesspool, do t go to the admin’s Noticeboard, and certainly do not change categories.

Yeah I knew it wasn't a legit "cite" but it was a good entrance to rabbit hole from.

If there was a fire on the internet, and I could only save one website, it would be Hamster Dance. But if I could save two the other one would be Wikipedia.

Worth noting that the whole "can it be trusted" mainly revolves around political or otherwise controversial topics. Where entire pages can switch from "freedom fighter helping the world" to "literally Hitler" overnight with news articles/interviews being blacklisted for not being reliable while sourcing random blog-posts. For a good example, check the edit history of the Gamergate page, well known editors even got banned for wanting accuracy rather than pushing narratives.

I have to imagine it’s an order of magnitude better than the old encyclopedias, even for controversial articles.

I‘m guessing you haven‘t used too many „real“ encyclopedias? The quality of writing on those was very high. In terms of readability, understandability, and reliability, I find the average print article to be significantly better than your average Wikipedia article. Their big downsides being, of course, that they were not as exhaustive on any given topic as Wikipedia is (though this actually helped with the understandability), and they were quickly out of date (especially as they were too expensive to replace every few years).

One of the things that traditional encyclopedias (as well as a given book/magazine/etc.) have is a very clear view of the persona that they're writing for. With Wikipedia, this differs considerably from article to article depending upon the topic. With respect to many technical topics, especially in areas like math and physics, Wikipedia articles often dive right into equations and many articles are largely incomprehensible to anyone not already familiar with the subject matter.

And on the flip side, there are other technical topics where large parts of the article are written by people unschooled in the subject citing magazine and news articles which are online rather than the field's core texts which aren't...

This could be considered more of a problem with scientific publishing (in those fields). This is changing though, so you might see wikipedia start to reflect that.

They are available online, not just in print. In fact, I think they've stopped printing them ?

Online: https://britannica.com

As a someone who was born before the internet became popular, I used to love paging through paper encyclopedias.

That said... https://www.nature.com/articles/438900a

Can you elaborate on the Gamergate example? I’m not especially familiar with the editors of Wikipedia nor the narratives involved in the controversy itself.

In the media GG is portrayed as evil to its core, along with mainly being about hating women. Because those sources are deemed reliable, that is how it is portrayed in wikipedia. While in reality it was a reaction to a large swath of people being called misogynist or similar.

In my opinion [1,2] is a better source to get an overview of what actually happened.

I am biased though, in this case.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=STl7-_f4_eA [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=beUt5Ke_DqU

maybe 1% of articles, especially about politics or current events, are perhaps biased but overall it is better than most sources

This is a cool healing mechanism built into the nature of wikipedia; popular, big topics get far more exposure and tend to be more accurate over time. Combined with the visiblity from metadata on edits, the contention and disagreement is far more visible than say, deciding if we should trust the new book on climate change that's on the front page right now.

General rule of thumb is the deeper and more topical you go on wikipedia, the more alert your BS detector needs to be. It's not perfect, but it's once of the best sources we have today.

> General rule of thumb is the deeper and more topical you go on wikipedia, the more alert your BS detector needs to be.

My perception is that the more popular and controversial topics are more likely to attract editors, but also BS. The Mohammad Ali page may attract plenty of BS, intentional or unwitting (lots of people have ideas about Ali); the page on the 1928 Olympic boxing champion probably doesn't attract much of either.

> the more alert your BS detector needs to be

Also, I think the "BS detector" is the most powerful mechanism for spreading mis- and disinformation. People who think they have one are the most prone to being fooled, and I think research shows that. Beyond obvious flaws, unless you already know the correct and complete information (omissions can be just as BS as outright errors), you won't be able to spot errors or omissions.

Think of it this way: Using your BS detector, could you edit your own writing to fool someone else? I think I could easily pass most people's 'BS detectors'. Imagine what someone paid to write BS can do - or just look at the research about massive troll farms and disinformation campaigns.

Finally, the fact is that BS spreads at a magnitude unimagined in human history. Evidently, the BS detectors aren't helping. And if you think you are smarter than everyone else, you are the most vulnerable (also demonstrated by research).

> it's once of the best sources we have today.

IMHO Encyclopedia Britannica is always better where it has coverage (i.e., because I can trust it), as is Google Scholar, authoritative websites by experts, and better journalism. If I want to know about the deer tick, I use a website such as Tree of Life (tolweb.org).

Maybe it's 5%? 20%? Who can say? Also, things are often just plain wrong, through commission and omission, and not biased.

The real fun is on the marginal articles: the politicians so obscure that nobody bothers to edit war over them so that most of the article is written either by their party PR team or somebody with an axe to grind against them (or in the case of one obscure British MP, an editor that was apparently their partner!). The academic theories that are so fringe nobody's even really critiqued them as fringe, and yet because they just about pass notability they get the same prominence as entire schools of academic thought on list pages. The pages where someone makes a joke edit and it doesn't get removed ten minutes later.

Notability is one of the funny things on Wikipedia that doesn't have a great solution given that many people are notable in some community (physical or professional). You can make a case for most of the following being notable: pretty much any elected politician even if they're some county registrar of wills, journalists who may have thousands of bylines, tenured professors with lots of papers. Yet, many of these won't have a lot written about them especially in print publications which can run afoul of verifiability requirements beyond a statement about things that they've done.

> the whole "can it be trusted" mainly revolves around political or otherwise controversial topics

IME it's a question for any Wikipedia page. I remember a mathematics professor reviewing a page in their field, saying it omitted key topics and gave prominence, as major figures, to people the reviewer hadn't heard of.

Also, I've experienced that any minor topic can be controversial or political to someone. For a page I'm almost certain you've never heard of, I saw someone create an article in a newsy blog that that supported their made-up claim and cite it in Wikipedia, then cite Wikipedia in the article, and then give interviews to other websites saying the same thing, creating a web if citations. Even after I tracked it down and fixed it - a lot of work to do for free for a low-traffic Wikipedia page - they waited a month and started again. I ran out of time (and trust).

Unfortunately as science becomes more and more politicized I am starting to see the narrative vs truth debate come to more and more topics than just political controversy

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