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Comment by mhh__ | Hacker News Reader

I actually have the opposite opinion in that I think Wikipedia has done a good job (albeit versus a benchmark of real zeroes) handling itself in the so-called post-truth age.

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.

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Nah. Wikipedia is generally good, but the whole problem of people protecting their little corner of it as if it's their own personal project is very true.

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.

It’s extremely good for science and maths where there’s little room for argument or interpretation. History, or current events tend to be Abysmal. Literature tends to be underrepresented and the arts in general are not well-curated, either in completeness or in finding ways to display the work or discuss it.

I admire the project but ultimately at this point it’s not very useful.

No its not... as soon as i learn deeper into a topic, i more and more encounter situations where wikipedia just plain diverges from the textbook knowledge and references some half-assed journalistic work as source for it.

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.

Another "wikipedia is shite but I'm not going to give any examples and I'm going to ignore the fact I could have edited it to make it better but didn't" post.

If i have to edit it to make it accurate, why should i rely on wikipedia in the first place?

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.

You are confused about wiki, it's encyclopaedic articles and an overview, a good jumping off point (that's what the references at the bottom of the page are for, does this help https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_boot_record#References), not the sum of all human knowledge

"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.

My recommendation for other people:

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.

Hmmm...

[citation needed]

Except you practically can't edit it unless it's some really fringe topic.

Counterpoint: I fact checked and corrected an article - the original article author misread the cited source and claimed statistics that were plausible but incorrect. In the process I improved the readability of the paragraph I touched up. My change was never reverted, and it was within the last year on a page related to slavery and human trafficking - so not exactly fringe, and subject to lots of eyeballs.

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.

Why are ignoring this whole thread, full of testomies to the fact that you can't, actually, edit any of it? May be this view isn't true, but in context of this conversation intellectual honestly requires at least to acknowledge, if not meaningfully challenge it.

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.

I have made many minor edits across many articles over the years, and never had a single one reverted directly. Some have been swallowed up during later re-writes and that's fine too. The thing is with Wikipedia, is a) register for an account, and b) start with very small edits.

That said, I've never tried to create an article - maybe that's where the real battleground is?

Perhaps link to a few such testimonies? I can see eg. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31057311> where people are explaining why an edit might not have been accepted for good reason. Make a case instead of complaining you're so hard done by.

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_⊥,_...>

Ahh, the good old Gell-Mann Amnesia

How is something that’s extremely good at science and math documentation not very useful? Do you mean it’s not useful to historians/artists?

The sleight of hand is to be Truth about science and math, then pretend you're Truth about everything else based on that. Pretty useful if you can pull it off. What could you do with that?

This is the kind of argument I was referring to. Anything specific you're referring to?

“History, or current events tend to be Abysmal. ”

Am I surprised people don’t realize that this will always be true regardless of the medium, because humans are involved.

A common problem with math and some other science topics is that they often seem to be written by people who are overly fond of using the equation editor and are also often written in a very formalistic way that can be quite inscrutable to anyone who isn't already familiar with the topic.

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