Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by snthd | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

snthd

For those who don't know, the Daily Mail is considered "generally unreliable" by Wikipedia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Per...

View on HN

Yes, but it has easily the best homepage design of any news site on the Internet.

I dare you to scroll to the bottom without clicking on something!

The Daily Mail is considered and described by many using much more colorful language than simply "unreliable". Especially in the UK.

That said, is the Daily Mail article factually wrong? How many purchasers of iphones end up buying a new charger and power cable?

That's ironic. Considered "generally unreliable" by a source that could itself be aptly described as "generally unreliable."

It's probably true, but at this point Wikipedia is also considered "generally unreliable" for politically controversial subjects

> For those who don't know, the Daily Mail is considered "generally unreliable" by Wikipedia.

This is kind of like two pathological liars arguing over who's the bigger liar. Wikipedia is not all that reliable itself. It has a well-known political bias and junk gets through all the time. See the recent debacle over the Scots language page.

For those who don't know, much of Wikipedia should be considered "generally unreliable" by the public.

Looking for information on Wikipedia is like asking a bunch of strangers at a bus stop and then going with the loudest voices with the most free time.

Wikipedia being unreliable does not make the Daily Mail reliable though. In the US, the Mail has carved out a niche as a benign entertainment site - in the UK it is a tedious, dangerous rag that is effectively OAN in print form.

> Wikipedia being unreliable does not make the Daily Mail reliable though

Perhaps, but Wikipedia's unreliability means that it is not in a position to meaningfully comment on reliability of other sites.

Unreliability insofar as Wikipedia is concerned means it’s articles are of varying quality. That’s a fact somewhat inherent in its design.

Why do you feel like that prevents their moderation teams from being arbiters of source quality? That page’s findings are not public-editable, for the record.

> Why do you feel like that prevents their moderation teams from being arbiters of source quality?

The same reason I don't feel like Fox News or Breitbart provides a reliable view of the news, political bias.

A lot has been written about wikipedia's political bias. I don't care to rehash the entire debate, but let's start with the fact that one of the original creators believes it has a problem with bias: https://larrysanger.org/2020/05/wikipedia-is-badly-biased/

Is that the end-all be-all? Probably not, but it's reasonably concerning.

But it was used as an authority figure when their editors and government are quite controversial.

On average it's as good or better than printed encyclopedias. We don't go around saying Britannica was a big book of lies but it unknowingly published many inaccuracies and urban legends. They did an honest effort, and we know what the results of that look like statistically these days.

This has not been true since at least 2005: https://www.nature.com/articles/438900a

Now someone will say Nature is unreliable and we need to wait for findings to replicated in more applicable domain-specific journals…

All the people at the bus stop will also largely agree that the Daily Mail is unreliable, so I can't find fault in your argument ;)

I've found english wikipedia to be quite reliable actually, especially for scientific knowledge. It's an excellent source of references too.

It's quite literally saved me in school too. Once I had to present my work in class and my classmates wrote a few things in the slides they didn't fully understand. Of course my PhD professor zeroed in on that. She was asking them question after question and nobody was answering. She asked me and I answered correctly because I had spent days reading about bacterial gene transfer on wikipedia out of curiosity.

I actually hated that subject until I discovered how awesome it is thanks to wikipedia. She would make us memorize seemingly endless factoids about all kinds of micro-organisms. I hated every second of it and nearly failed that class. Then I started reading about this stuff on wikipedia and everything changed.

Memorizing those factoids builds the base for appreciating the really cool stuff. It's like a language class: you learn a bunch of vocab words so that you can read amazing literature or visit far-off places.

Science classes are really bad about motivating this. I don't think I would have made it through the intro-class grind if I hadn't worked in a lab first. Language classes offer an interesting parallel, in that you can either have the old school "learn these 250 flashcards" or more enjoyable short stories that build up to something.

On wikipedia I learned a lot more facts and it didn't even feel like memorization. I still remember the feeling.

I started with the general bacteria article on wikipedia. I was having trouble absorbing this knowledge and didn't know what to do, so I just randomly searched it on wikipedia and started reading. I didn't even expect anything but I got hooked on it. I especially remember reading about bacterial flagella and the little molecular engines that power them. Then I learned about how it could have somehow evolved into the type 3 secretion system, an almost literal needle some bacteria have that they can use to inject toxins into cells. Totally awesome, and it's just one of many bacterial virulence factors I had been mindlessly memorizing. I just kept following links and reading everything, the microbiology articles are so detailed. My attitude to this class completely changed, I was filled with curiosity once again. I was happy to go to the lab and experiment with our cultures.

Due to wikipedia I learned even more than what I needed for my class. I started discovering all sorts of cool stuff I had no idea even existed in nature. My favorite example is the article about cnidocytes, explosive cells that deliver stings. They have an organelle that stores large amounts of calcium ions. When triggered, the ions are released and the massive osmotic gradient causes a rapid influx of water into the cell, increasing volume and applying absurd amounts of acceleration to the stinger which is ejected outside and into the target on a nano- to microsecond time scale.

That analogy only works if you also ask the strangers at a bus stop for sources. Like wikipedia, some won't give them to you, others might give you the daily mail, and others might give you reputable peer reviewed research.

Then which one would you trust?

AFAIK, wikipedia doesn't reference itself as a reliable source for obvious reasons.

Which is why it's remarkable that the quality of Wikipedia is so high.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com