Most espouse the claim that they appreciate science, but I think really people appreciate James Bond gadgets and call that science.
The only people I know who have complained to me about Wikipedia are all contrarians (some of which I would call "Contrarian idiots", since the play on the green day song just popped into my head) who have so far been basically unable to substantiate any concrete argument, either structural or regarding more than the minutiae of a given article.
It's also worth noting that in recent years we've had a lot of very controversial and more importantly novel geopolitical and domestic "lore" being formed, and I think people make a fundamental mistake in expecting wikipedia to be as confident as it is for the new as it is for the old or perhaps merely mature.
I once deleted a little section of an article because it was some stereotype with zero foundation, and the only source cited was a random little book written in the 1910s presenting racial stereotypes as the truth. I deleted just one sentence from a long article, and cited the reason being that there's zero truth to the statement and the only basis was some 100 year old book. I tracked down the original book on Google Books and it was a throwaway statement passed as mere hearsay. No other reference exists to the concept in English or the language of the target country.
Within a couple hours, it was back up, and stated that the incorrect stereotype is still true, and most popularly known from the 1910s.
Absolutely bizarre.
I admire the project but ultimately at this point it’s not very useful.
Basically, as soon as you have read the primary sources, you realize how crap wikipedia is in your field. And i infer that, for the other fields, wikipedia is similar crap, except that i don't notice it yet due to my lack of knowledge.
I think their largest mistake was accepting journalistic works as reference.
When i wrote an MBR/VBR for some real mode x86 stuff, i initially relied but on the wikipedia and osdev pages for FAT and the bios/bootlader stuff. This is how i learned the hard way how unreliable it is. Details are left out, the scope of validity for information is rarely specified, vague "many implementations" phrases that do not give any hints whether a certain behavior needs to be emulated or not.
I ended up discarding both wikipedia and the osdev wiki and using the IBM PS/2 reference manual, as well as some details from the MS PnP specification.
I had similar issues with the wikipedia explanation of the german Hl- and Ks-Signal systems for train safety, as well as articles related to intel peripheral controllers and serial ports. Often they are just not deep and detailed enough to answer my questions.
[tl;dr] It feels like reading a pop-sci article when you actually need the original paper.
"If i have to edit it to make it accurate, why should i rely on wikipedia in the first place?"
And there we have it, the entitlement with no expectation of giving anything back. It's for other people too. You're not the only person who uses wiki, you just haven't realised it yet.
Read the primary sources! They are the source of truth, there is no need to rely on wikipedia editors or journalists to rephrase it correctly, which they are often unable to.
Just bypass wikipedia. Your implication that its something that the world requires is not correct.
[citation needed]
I would not be surprised if a lot of the people carrying forward the “Wikipedia is uneditable” meme have not even tried to edit Wikipedia at this point.
I suspect people complaining about reverted edits follow the same pattern as people leaving negative reviews online: people tend to be vocal when unhappy, and people that haven’t had problems aren’t motivated to do the opposite.
That said, I've never tried to create an article - maybe that's where the real battleground is?
Edits can be done by asking rather than doing, a small edit was made after I asked for some clarity in the lattices article. WFM as they say.
Edit: link to my question on lattices which got a small clarification done in the main article, with little fuss <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Lattice_(order)#⊤_and_⊥,_...>
Am I surprised people don’t realize that this will always be true regardless of the medium, because humans are involved.
https://groups.google.com/g/comp.os.linux/c/5Rcys5xYuJc/m/Dp...
No, it's a non-example.
Digitizing with OCR is nice - but someone still needs to write the story. Piece together the different news clippings.
In one case - it was a soccer team - Bethlehem Steel, which one of my great great something or others played for. They won a bunch of championships, there's a whole story, but nobody had really compiled it into a usable work. When Bethlehem Steel the name got resurrected as a feeder club for the Phila Union, they called HIM for the info - It was kind of fun watching my dad go onto an AM radio broadcast!
Another, he's currently interested in is a fairly important but not well known artist who did a lot of work in the midwest from the area we are from. He is currently writing up the story, interviewing family, etc. I guess he'll have to publish a news story in order for it to be real!
Looking at that artist's wikipedia page though - it does appear that most of his citations are directly to news clippings... like
Fayetteville Democrat, 23 January 1935, p. 1.
Kansas City Times, 23 May 1936, p. 18.
Kinda cool
The epistemological basis for the "no original research" rule seems to be because Wikipedia is not a suitable vehicle for synthesis or analysis: it is written by anonymous editors with varying degrees of expertise in the subject area. They are not assumed to be competent to conduct such analysis. They are only assumed competent to find secondary sources that make such analysis and cite them.
The rule also has some pragmatism about it. If such analysis was allowed, it would have to be performed on Wikipedia with its reasoning clearly articulated and developed. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, it shouldn't be cluttered by such reasoning.
The appropriate place for analysis and synthesis of this kind are peer reviewed journal articles or other secondary sources where the author's expertise or authority to speak to a point, and their reasoning, is made plain. A reader should, at least in theory, be able to check the source and verify as such.
It is also not seen as acceptable for editors, who lack accountability for what they post, to offer such analysis. A news report is expected to have some degree of accountability, to put the relevant statement into context and to consider competing views. A Linux kernel mailing list post does not do this.
That said, in my experience, a blind eye is turned to uncontroversial analysis.
I'm not convinced of the characterisation as a legal fiction, either. There is a logical justification for this position, as stated, in detail, in my reply. A freely editable encyclopedia isn't the place for contentious analysis.