Science Is Shaped by Wikipedia: Evidence from a Randomized Control Trial

It matches my experience.

I can update pages about some topics (e.g. backup, tape drives, backup products) and nothing gets deleted or changed. But there are others where everything I update gets reverted with a comment like "reverted good faith edit from ____"

From that short description I'm pretty sure it's related to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Biographies_of_livin...

In short, Wikipedia tries to discourage writing about yourself, which also applies to doing so through a representative.

Apparently editors identifying as a woman get rolled back far more often then men. This issue also effects some pages more than others. Corporate pages are often maintained by marketing companies that will monitor for changes that they perceive to be negative for their client. On the other hand changes to more technical topic tend to go unchallenged.

Happens an awful lot with "off message" edits that run counter to the political bias of the general Wiki editor demographic.

There are three major reasons why those get deleted.

1: Intent matters and advocacy is not permitted on Wikipedia. A lot of people don't like this rule or think it can be ignored if they don't demand payment for it.

2: You can't editing Wikipedia to bring awareness of something while at the same time fulfill the notability requirements. The top 50 academics are important for their fields, and can also be completely unknown for the rest of the world. As an example, people in sport, music and cinema are much more common to have an Wikipedia article about them then academics. This does not mean academics are less important to society, but it does reflect notability.

3: As others has marked, writing a article about yourself or by a representative is heavily discouraged. This runs in the same vein as advocacy.

> For something to be accepted now it needs to be like something written by a professional writer [...]

Actually it is mostly selected by person rather than content or style. Mostly evidenced by the fact that accepted edits are mostly done by the same people. This is at least true for the German Wikipedia, but I have no doubt that the English one isn't any different.

> I would sometimes just type in my notes from some university classes

The time is ripe for something like Knol to be re-introduced.

Even before Knol, we had something like this, and they were called personal websites. People would use them to document their passions (or anything, really) and you could find them on Google. People are probably so addicted to centralization and services, though, and Google's approach to ranking so overwhelmingly works against that style now, that it's probably unworkable to argue for relying on that again.

OP (and others in this thread) might not want to reveal their IP address or their Wikipedia username.

It’s been tried, more or less:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizendium

However, quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

I'm me 3 on that citation. I'd love to read more on this and see what happened.

That is the exact idea behind Abstract Wikipedia (https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Wikipedia), the idea of which is to automatically generate prose from structured data in Wikidata (https://www.wikidata.org). You can already do a lot of cool stuff with Wikidata today

> Now that we have GPT-3 like technology, it wouldn't be hard to generate generally readable prose from a database of statements

Which database of statements is this?

More, it might be easy to generate readable text, but accurate, correct text is a wholly different matter.

that article is SEVERELY biased to the right.

> Or to take an up-to-the-minute issue, the LGBT adoption article includes several talking points in favor of LGBT adoption rights, but omits any arguments against.

What if we replace LGBT "rights" with Jewish Rights during the Holocaust.

It'd go something like: just because "liberals" think Jews deserve to live, and we should all have equal rights, that maybe we should also have a fair "view" or balanced "insight" into Hitler's side of the argument, so people can choose for themselves whether they want to be racist or genocidal or not. Tolerance isn't for everyone, we should be tolerant of those not tolerant of anybody who isn't white, no? SMH.

It's an encyclopedia, facts should matter, if you're peeved that liberal facts are often more true or accurate than those based on crapola like the bible or oil-industry-endorsed climate change studies, or Presidential decrees that Bleach cures Covid-19, then honestly you should probably just stick to your facebook echo chambers, and please stay away from public platforms and politics in general.

I saw a meme once about the right trolling itself where they basically said -- GUYS stop showing statistics and studies they're all against us. Yes, they are, not because they're fabricated but because the conservative worldview is extremely warped and often just insane.

I mean 86% of flat-earthers are conservative. The majority of people who believe in bigfoot, also conservative. Only 32% of conservatives believe in evolution and there's probably a HUGE percent that believe the world was created 8k years ago by God (factually impossible).

Sure, Wikipedia should strive for FACTUAL neutrality, but not when facts are from a dogmatic source like the bible, it could still show those "facts" as it were as an "opinion" by Christian Seminologists, for example, however the majority of historians and archaelogists find flaws see: <insert page> etc...

Most articles I've ever read have been pretty darn good, I haven't seen much in way of not-neutral, but then I think neutrality doesn't mean allowing bigots free reign either.

> It takes stances on wedge issues by the sole fact that it eliminates any sources its editors do not agree with.||

> > The global warming and MMR vaccine articles are examples; I hardly need to dive into these pages, since it is quite enough to say that they endorse definite positions that scientific minorities reject.

I do not think either of these are examples of bias in Wikipedia. Especially for the MMR article, I am aware of no scientific minority that would take issue with the article. Both articles mention the existence of controversy about the topics. I think it would be hard to provide any unbiased information about actual wedge topics if this counts as biased.

I am not going to make any claim that Wikipedia is not biased, but I do not think it is possible for any encyclopedia to be unbiased to Larry Sanger's ideals without being decidedly leaning to the right.

I'm not sure what happened to Larry Sanger; he went off the rails someplace. :-/ I seem to recall it was fairly hard to get hold of him even back in 2005-ish.

At any rate, en.wikipedia is a bit funny. Many language versions of Wikipedia are particular to just one country, or at best/worst a couple of countries. They also tend to have biases associated with those countries and cultures.

The English Wikipedia, on the other hand, is edited by people around the world. So the intrinsic bias (or lack thereof) is at world-scale.

Since on world-scale looking in the USA is quite conservative these days; looking out you'd expect Americans to feel that the world (and thus the English Wikipedia) has a progressive bias.

According to the paper we're discussing, Wikipedia clearly has a measurable effect on science, so either these researchers did their statistics wrong, or you know something they don't. ;-)

I had really hoped that wikis would have been used more often for science. The wiki process seems to align pretty well with the process of scientific publication and peer review.

Wikipedia didn't go this road, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Lost_functionalities...

But it seems others apparently did! https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/WikiJournal_User_Group

> [2] now redirects to some domain squatter and is blacklisted by my DNS server...

I hope this is temporary, I found Scholarpedia very useful for certain scientific topics where Wikipedia didn't go into quite enough detail.

Concerning the self promotion - I will unfortunately not provide you the link, because that would lead to you learning the name of my Wikipedia account. For your information: I tried to remove the quotes - by making 3 concise sentences. At this time I see that someone already added back - but this time the whole bulk of the text (so again not keeping it short). The bulk of the text is explaining who are the quoted people. It starts with a famous professor from university X, who said Y. Then there are two "randoms" quoted with their full titles and positions (they are not professors, but random PHDs from Y) - who are probably trying to self promote, since they have an opinion on something - that got quoted on Wikipedia.

As for the trend about adding quotes to articles. This partially depends on taste - what each person likes, or dislikes. In my opinion there is a lot of value when an encyclopedia entry is concise synthesis of relevant information - so generally no quotes, just inline text. I dont care that X said this, Y said that, Z said something else - with full quotes. This can be rewritten to be concise with quotes in footnotes. I also dont care about barely relevant stories - that make the articles longer and full of worthless trivia.

Here is an example of some random article that I found some time ago:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground_beetle

[disclaimer: I never edited it, just stumbled upon it]

The article is about ground beetles, yet it has:

1) a "story" consisting of a long quote how Charles Darwin was hit in his eye by a bombardier beetle and it hurt. Multiple sentences of fluff

2) Even later, is an even more nonsensical quote, which sounds like some sort of fan service related to Darwin: "No poet ever felt more delight at seeing his first poem published than I did at seeing in Stephen's Illustrations of British Insects the magic words, "captured by C. Darwin, "

I have nothing against Charles Darwin, but how is his eye story relevant to an article about ground beetles? Shouldnt the article text focus on well... nettles and then simply have a "fun fact" section at the end, that would say: Charles Darwin got once hit in his eye by a beetle?

Unfortunately with the current trend of adding such quotes it is really difficult to remove them. I dont even bother to try - someone will immediately revert this, because such quotes supposedly make the articles more fun (for 12 year olds?).

More and more articles are full of such fluff. I have nothing against having a "fun fact" section, but seriously, quotes inside bulk of articles are such a waste of time.