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Comment by rtpg | Hacker News Reader

I mean your criticism in the abstract applies to basically any source. The argument is very general and applies to everything out there!

Hell, for contentious articles given you have antagonistic co-authors it’s more likely to be fact checked than in the Wapo “2 Pinocchios” echo chamber.

Words are written by people…

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It's not just that Wikipedia is vulnerable to human error just like anything else, it seems to be driven by activists. Larry Sanger, one of Wikipedia's co-founders, has been trying to warn people that his own creation has been bastardized.

I still use Wikipedia for pure STEM subjects, but beyond that, I wouldn't trust it.

Even for pure STEM subjects, the further you go into esoterica, the less checking there can be on it. I remember one instance, mainly because it added an hour or two to a problem set in grad school.

(Apologies for any errors, as it's been the better part of a decade since then.) Wikipedia gave simplified formulas for the asymptomatic forms of the modified Bessel functions, and each formulas they gave were correct. However, each simplification used a different branch cut, so subtracting two of the asymptomatic forms wouldn't give the correct result. Tracing back that error, and why I was consistently off by a factor of 2*pi took a long time.

Here's a pretty good interview Larry did on Tim Pools show about 7 months ago, outlining just how bad it is. It's a topical show and not 100% focused on Larry though. Tim also outlines how hard it is to correct factually inaccurate information on what people write about him in his wiki entry (stating he created a "blimp" etc). Also goes into the fake, circular references and activists gaming the system.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWQaVx5mGco

I fail to see how this effect would be less pronounced than, say, newspaper editors determining the overall voice of how they cover things.

Im not declaring that Wikipedia is objective, but I don’t honestly believe it’s worse than other sources of info (beyond like… really digging into a primary source of a subject? And even then)

It's not exactly the credibility that's the problem. There are dedicated editors on Wikipedia that are not only removing updates to articles, but are putting up false information, and are hiding behind Section 230 to avoid any repercussions. At the very least, regular news agencies have to issue corrections, or face lawsuits (granted, regular news agencies frequently put out false information and issue corrections only after everyone has already read the article).

The way Wikipedia generates its content though is susceptible to particular problems that traditional sources did not have. Multiple people—all differing in age (from 7 to 100+), educational status and subject matter knowledge—all editing the same article, often without reading all the parts of it that the others have written.

The amount of scrutiny individual Wikipedia articles receive differs vastly–the article on a top politician or a top science topic like a major planet will have hundreds of eagle-eyed watchers, while more obscure articles like the one discussed here may not be watched at all, and then anything goes. (This article for example had two different birth dates for six years, and then someone made them consistent—both wrong!)

Here are some more examples of the sorts of errors that are specific to a crowd-sourced work like Wikipedia:

https://www.theregister.com/2017/01/16/wikipedia_16_birthday...

Few if any of these—like intentional hoaxes and undetected vandalism or a completely ignorant writer merely pretending to know a topic, by copying another text and then changing the name of one chemical substance in it to make it sound like the text was written about this substance—could or would have occurred in the traditional process of writing a reference work.

Traditional works have different problems, of course—instant obsolescence being one of them—and even the biggest ones have a far smaller scope than Wikipedia. But readers should bear in mind just how the Wikipedia sausage is made. Many seem to somehow believe that the Wikipedia process is, in terms of the results it produces, just like an orderly process with a professional writer and editors and fact checkers that try to verify everything before publication. That is not how crowdsourcing works.

Wikipedia avoids original research which in practice severely limits it’s accuracy. At best it’s an imperfect copy of whatever the original source was before adding its own slant and errors.

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