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Comment by bragr | Hacker News Reader

There's a reason wikipedia classifies IMDB as an unreliable source. Apparently Michael Madsen has a real problem with people adding him to films in production in an effort to get financing.

https://www.cinemablend.com/new/Why-Michael-Madsen-Hates-IMD...

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I was an extra in an indie film because a friend asked me to help out. Lo and behold - I now have an IMDB page - presumably the film producer added me.

Fast forward a year and now there are 5 films credited to my name. I had nothing to do with 4 of them. I am unclear how and why this is happening.

Huh. Are the other movies from the same studio? Maybe they reused footage with you.

That's a good point. I'll have to check. Thanks.

Sounds like a great conversational icebreaker if you ever talk to an agent!

I've had 2 LinkedIn accounts since the early days.

There was a brief time that my 2nd account showed as endorsing my other one. Despite me never doing such a thing.

Probably a bug but I know I've heard lots of similar stories and I'm always sus of just automated engagement in any social media curated or created site. Including imdb.

Its 1 thing when its bots, its another when its real accounts.

That’s hilarious. Wikipedia classifies IMDB as unreliable because...anyone can edit its pages.

..without public edit history, active moderators and useful watch tools.

Wikipedia allows anyone to audit edits and raise issues if things are fishy. IMDb allows edits but the history is only visible to admins.

IMDb is crowdsourced and accepts user data submissions. https://help.imdb.com/article/contribution/contribution-info...

External users are not part of it. It's a "curated" model. IMDb clearly stakes their reputation on accuracy and comprehensive coverage. IMDb's TOS ensures that you relinquish all copyright claims and grant them an exclusive license to your content. IMDb won't cite their sources nor attribute contributors. They own and control everything on the site. Their rates for abuse and misinformation are unpublished. IMDb is an opaque, black box.

Wikipedia has a similar model for protecting articles known as "Pending Changes". Anyone can submit an edit to the article, but the revisions and new data is held back from the "front page" publication until approved by someone with the proper user rights. Almost anyone in good standing can obtain those rights, and it's 100% transparent. Every edit is reviewable by anyone with Internet access, every edit is attributed and licensed under CC-BY-SA. The servers, editors, and bots track and tag vandalism and other forms of abuse with public records. Verifiability is mandatory.

Me and my gang of companion editors, who have a long edit history going many years back (100% deleting content) shall revert your audits and reject your issues. There are 10 of us! You have no further questions. If you continue being disruptive you will be banned.

Are you talking about here, imdb, or maybe Wikipedia?

I don't know if this is tongue-in-cheek, but it is very accurate.

Wikipedia is not considered reliable either:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability#Wikipe...

> Content from a Wikipedia article is not considered reliable unless it is backed up by citing reliable sources. Confirm that these sources support the content, then use them directly.

But, unlike IMDB, it's (supposed to be) verifiable.

IMDB is just as verifiable as Wikipedia.

It cites its sources. In fact, all it is a list of citations.

Except you can use obscure dead tree books as sources and no one will take the effort to check whether the book indeed says so. Use a book obscure enough -- especially in a non-English language -- and it becomes almost impossible to execute said check.

It depend so. The amount of trust I want to give. By citing an obscure book I can judge the fact "hm, that book sounds obscure, why isn't there some other source?" and then decide how much weight I give to it.

And if I don't have the book at hand I can identify the person who added the citation and can see what other edits they did to judge their domain knowledge.

No one does this. And Wikipedia myths spread to other media until it's hard to pinpoint where it started.

Sometimes referred to as citogenesis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circular_reporting#Circular_re...

There is a list of known incidents: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_citogenesis_...

But in case they do you can ask your other well established sleeper account for a book reference then reply a few days later with a: This is what I found posting. Then when asked you can point to yourself and say I've asked him. Do a conversation with yourself weighting how a book is hard to validate vs how important the information is to the article.

According to Wikipedia Elon Musk is the founder of Tesla. That's how reliable Wikipedia is

Where did you read that? I highly doubt that such a change will get approved.

"The company was incorporated as Tesla Motors, Inc. on July 1, 2003, by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning.[13]"

No, it doesn't.

"It was started in 2003 by Martin Eberhard, Dylan Stott, and Elon Musk (who also co-founded PayPal and SpaceX and is the CEO of SpaceX)." [1]

[1] https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla%2c_Inc%2e

1) 'simple' wikipedia isn't 'main' wikipedia - same as any other language wikipedias. 2) You can edit and fix mistakes if you see that as a mistake.

1) Nobody said anything about qualifying what wikipedia is. However, this is wikipedia, as one can see by looking at the domain in the url, wikipedia.org. Even so, there are many pages that cover tesla at wikipedia.org. Besides, if you just google for, "What companies has Elon Musk founded?" without quotes you will get a google listing of companies founded by Elon Musk. The very first of those is Tesla!

2) That was the point of the parent's comment! There are many pages at wikipedia that contain conflicting information.

Okay, fair point about the second part - my mistake indeed.

But I have to push back about the first part. The throwawayaug8 did say "According to Wikipedia Elon Musk is the founder of Tesla. That's how reliable Wikipedia is" - which I understood as a claim that "Wikipedia is unreliable". Then marak830 claimed that such claim is wrong and IncRnd claimed that the original claim is true because 'Simple' Wikipedia has an article with such text.

But I just have to disagree here - I believe that the 'main' Wikipedia is mostly or more accurate than any other Wikipedia - be it 'simple' or 'lithuanian' (https://lt.wikipedia.org/).

I believe that it's unfair to judge the main wikipedia project by using it's smaller 'translation' branches - the main one has hundreds of thousands of contributtors, and smaller wikipedias have way less.

In a same way I wouldn't say that whole javascript is bad because there are some bad frameworks that are based on it.

But I don't know, I am not an expert, I'm just a random wikipedia user :shrug_emoji:

PayPal was launched by a Tiel owned company that also bought another company that Musk didn't start, zip2. Musk became CEO of PayPal, and was fired a month later for incompetence.

Elon Musk is legally "a founder" of Tesla, but that's different from having founded Tesla, and that difference doesn't say anything about Wikipedia's credibility.

A bit of topic. Does anyone know, why the english Wikipedia site about the JFK movie does not talk about what was fiction, what was true in the movie and what is unknow? On the german page about the movie, they have a lot about it.

I understand there are differences in languages. But in this case, in english, the most important information is missing. So it's just a movie, all fiction?!?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/JFK_(film)

> So it's just a movie, all fiction?!?

Well, yes.

I've seen several movies based on real events that have a section about the level of similarity to actual events

The german site has it too. That's why I was wondering.

Examples off the top of my head:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argo_(2012_film)#Historical_in...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/12_Years_a_Slave_(film)#Histor...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spotlight_(film)#Historical_ac...

In general you can sometimes get insight from the "Talk" section for these kinds of questions.

In this case, there was a "historical inaccuracies" section which was removed due to sourcing concerns. Not sure how well it holds up to what is (/was was the time) up on the German one.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:JFK_(film)/Archive_1#Qu...

Sometimes it can be up to chance or culture, sometimes editorial differences.

EDIT: Come to think of it, in this case maybe the German Wikipedia just has misproportionate coverage and activity for its speaker-base (this would certainly fit with my preconception)? I recall reacting to pages on topics from other countries where I'd be surprised to find it covered in German and not the native language,

Such a throwback to high school and every teacher talking about not trusting Wikipedia

An important lesson, that many seem to have either forgotten or never absorbed.

Ironically, Wikipedia is an unreliable source. I’ve given up making fixes

Different parts of Wikipedia are completely taken over by interest groups. Try making any factual change, they immediately revert and claim you are a vandal.

[citation needed]

Just kidding. But I do wonder - what parts are you talking about? Like some specific languages? Or topics?

This is such a well known phenomenon I feel it falls under the "sky is blue" exception. However, here's a good example: a specific group of contributors active on pages about composers really don't like infoboxes. Despite being clear (to me) across most topics and languages that there's strong consensus on the use of infoboxes, they will not allow them on any composer's biography. Seriously pick out some random composers [1] and there's a conspicuous lack of them. If you are an unlucky editor, who stumbles upon one of these pages and think an infobox would be an easy, helpful contribution, well prepare to be bitten by a highly active, coordinated group and have your changes reverted. This has been going on for over a decade and blow up to the top levels of dispute resolution several times. [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_composers_by_name

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Com...

Dang, I honestly had no idea this was so open! Thank you!

Oh my god that's exhausting

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