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Comment by DenverCoder99 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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).

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