Evidence says Wikipedia is accurate, reliable. When will we take it seriously? | Hacker News Reader

Evidence says Wikipedia is accurate, reliable. When will we take it seriously?

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46 pointsctrlmeta85 comments

Wikipedia is fine for scientific topics. But for history, living persons, and any potential source other controversial it can be very slanted depending on who has ownership of the page. It can be interesting to open the talk tab on a page and get a sense of the kind of bias the page owners have.

Often there's more content on the talk page than the article itself, one example I have on hand: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Ada_Lovelace/Archive_1

Especially true for anything where media has any kind of stake in presenting one view point. Due to how sourcing works on wikipedia.

I volunteered for a while on vandalism watch.

You would not believe the onslaught of vandalism that is occurring continuously, around the clock. It is only through its dedicated volunteers, armed with ever more sophisticated tools that this sea of trouble is kept at bay.

It was an eye opener to me. Nevertheless, surprisingly even, most vandalism is actually very quickly found and corrected. Even those devious small changes are not so easy to slip in, as some think.

I remember when a well-respected doctor (in his field) started questioning the COVID narrative and Wikipedia let people literally erase him from wiki pages he had been on for years. None of the information on him was false, they just didn't want people using his experience and accomplishments to bolster his credibility.

Saying that Wikipedia is "accurate and reliable" is like saying the corporate media is "trustworthy".

Which doctor

Nice double-entendre. Kudos.

I'm guessing this guy: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jay_Bhattacharya

The scary thing is, he's essentially been proven right: China is facing a big issue where the rest of the world has herd immunity, but it's still resorting to draconian lockdowns. Bhattacharya was never a COVID denier, nor antivax, his main point was that isolation should have been targeted at the most vulnerable rather than applied nationwide.

> his main point was that isolation should have been targeted at the most vulnerable rather than applied nationwide.

And you do not notice what the problems are with that solution compared to using lockdowns to keep spread under control until countermeasures (vaccines) are available?

COVID's risk is not even remotely even across age. The overwhelming majority of the people who would potentially die from an infection are the elderly. His plan called for intense lockdown for elderly people and those with significant comorbidities. The overwhelming majority who are not at risk - vaccine or not - do not need to isolate.

You don’t consider other negative long term outcomes like long COVID to be a broad concern?

Even with nearly two years of lockdowns it's estimated that over 70% of the population has gotten COVID at least once. Bhattacharya's whole point is that once it became clear that the virus was going to become endemic, lockdowns are just delaying infection and not preventing them. Thus the same number of long covid cases would have happened.

I assume less of a concern than the mental/developmental problems that came about because of 2 years of lockdowns.

What about overloading of hospital systems? Wasn't a major point of the lockdown that these systems were at a breaking point and any increase in patients risked catastrophe in certain places?

People who weren't elderly or didn't have significant co-morbidities rarely ended up in the hospital for COVID. Thus the "flatten the curve" argument doesn't make sense for that population.

This is the basis of Bhattacharya's thesis: focus the isolation efforts on the elderly people who actually end up in hospitals when they get infected, not just blindly applying lockdowns across all of society.

He was proven wrong. He assumed that the elderly and those with weak immune systems could be isolated from society by pretending that they all lived in nursing homes. Upon being told that almost all of them either work or live with people who do work, he simply ignored it. Many of those people would have died under his plan instead of surviving until vaccine availability, at which time, society could safely fully reopen, as the Dutch first demonstrated.

His plan was never executed, you don't know what would have happened if the government set up isolation centers and took strong efforts to get elderly into them.

The society-wide isolation orders were widely ignored precisely because most people knew they weren't at risk. An isolation plan targeted at those at risk may have been taken a lot more seriously.

Technically isolation is for the infected and quarantine is for the healthy.

I think quarantine orders were largely followed in major cities where the risks of a run away outbreak was worse. The goal was only secondarily to reduce deaths but primarily to protect the acute medical care system from collapse under a major outbreak. “Flatten the curve” didn’t mean end the local epidemics but to reduce the rate of infection to make the rate of people needing acute medical care lower than the rate the hospital systems able to service patients. Except for a few cases we succeeded. Death is a much more exciting metric to count, but it was never our objective in the public health response. Death was mitigated with the vaccine, and secondarily by the public health orders. (Note outside of China I don’t think there has been any actual lockdown or quarantines despite people abusing that word. Advice to stay home and business closure is not a lockdown. A lockdown means you’re forcibly restricted.)

Also - asking people to wear a mask caused hysterical backlash. Can you imagine if we had set up concentration camps for the elderly?

The elderly actually have a strong survival incentive to limit exposure, unlike the bulk of the population. For instance, take the 8% non-vaccination rate among the elderly versus the 32% among non-elderly [1].

Bhattacharya's main point is that "Flatten the curve" is really "widen the curve". Reasonable to do for the at-risk population that are likely to get hospitalized and could create a shortage of hospital resources if they were infected all at once. Not so much for the vast majority of people, and especially not reasonable for children who were at minimal risk. Again, people talk about the need to reduce the load on medical without considering the fact that most non-elderly people who got covid didn't end up in the hospital.

> Note outside of China I don’t think there has been any actual lockdown or quarantines despite people abusing that word. Advice to stay home and business closure is not a lockdown. A lockdown means you’re forcibly restricted.

This is untrue, in much of Canada and the UK people were forbidden by law to go outside without good reason.

1. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/us/covid-cases.html

Yes, I do, and given that he never even bothered to answer the question with your plan (not his), he did too. In typical libertarian fashion, he just plugged his ears and pretended he wasn't listening while praying the benevolent hand of the market would fix the glaring holes in his plan. Almost 40% of Americans are considered high risk, and very nearly zero percent of them were in the nursing homes his plan accounted for. He never planned to forcibly separate high risk people from their low risk spouses, children, or parents. https://www.kff.org/coronavirus-covid-19/issue-brief/how-man...

The society-wide isolation orders allowed elderly people and those at risk as well as those who live with them to work from home without employer retaliation, reducing spread and saving lives until vaccine availability.

The figure of 40% high risk is due to a very liberal application of the term "high risk". Half of all COVID in the US deaths are among people aged 65 or older. ~6% of deaths were among people under 50. The overwhelming majority of people were not, in fact, high risk in the sense that an infection would probably lead to death or hospitalization. 60-70% of the US population have gotten COVID, so chances are a large portion of "high risk" people have been infected.

Society wide isolation orders were widely ignored as people realized the actual risks became clear. You point out that Bhattacharya did not propose using force to isolate the elderly, yet you neglect to mention the fact that no force was used to enforce the society-wide isolation orders either. A targeted isolation order may have been more stringently adhered to, leading to lower infections among those at high risk (real high risk, not this idea that 40% of people were "high risk").

There is no need to mention that no force was used for the society-wide isolation orders. They did the job of reducing mobility and reducing spread, which means that many of the 60-70% of the US population that has gotten COVID got it after they had been vaccinated. This would not have happened if Bhattacharya's incredibly naïve plan of just closing off nursing homes had been followed.

16% of Americans are over 65. Of those who died under 65 (retirement age in the US), composing roughly 1/4 of all COVID deaths in the US, many of those were high risk (obese, diabetic, etc.) The estimate of 40% does not seem unreasonable.

> They did the job of reducing mobility and reducing spread, which means that many of the 60-70% of the US population that has gotten COVID got it after they had been vaccinated.

And for the vast majority of them, COVID would not have caused serious health issues vaccination or not.

> This would not have happened if Bhattacharya's incredibly naïve plan of just closing off nursing homes had been followed.

Again, you have zero evidence to back up this claim. Toothless society-wide lockdowns may have been even less effective than a forceful targeted lockdown. Under Bhattacharya's plan, more drastic measures (but more limited in scope) could be applied to the populations that actually stood a risk. It is baseless to say this would have had worse outcomes since this plan was never put into action.

> 16% of Americans are over 65. Of those who died under 65 (retirement age in the US), composing roughly 1/4 of all COVID deaths in the US, many of those were high risk (obese, diabetic, etc.) The estimate of 40% does not seem unreasonable.

Over 80% of COVID deaths were among people over 65. And even then, people under 70 had a mortality rate of under 5%. You can call 100% of the population "high risk" if you choose any mortality rate over 0.00% as the threshold for "high risk".

This discussion is about Wikipedia. He may be wrong about a covid strategy, but if he has valid research in other areas I don't see why his other contributions should be censored. That being said, I don't really know the context here.

You can look at his Wikipedia page. He wasn't censored. I was responding to this part of GGP's comment: "The scary thing is, he's essentially been proven right." GGP also mistakenly characterized the position of the rest of the world that rejected his plan as zero-COVID forever, which has never at any point been any country's strategy except China's.

I also think GGP was wrong about the doctor. My guess is GGGP was referring to Kary Mullis, who was always quite the character. I don't see where his contributions have been erased, but discussing some of his erratic behavior along with his accomplishments is something that many conspiracy theorists were not happy with. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kary_Mullis

Being accurate and reliable on average is what makes the bias on select topics effective. And bias of omission is most effective.

E.g. the complete absence of any demographics vs. time graph (and near-complete absence of demographic information in general) on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Replacement

One can take a look at the talk page of that article to see the fervent resistance of editors to include more demographic information. One person compared it to debunking JFK assassination conspiracy theories without mentioning that JFK was in fact killed.

The entire "Demographic statistics" section is only a reference to the 8-12% Muslim population in France, which can charitably be described as misleading, since, in addition to giving no information on the rate of change or past statistics, is a very low estimate:

[Sickle cell] screening suggests that in 2000, 19% of all newborn babies in Metropolitan France had at least one parent originating from one of the risk regions. The figure for [..] 2015 [is] 38.9 %. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_France#Statist...

It's generally accurate. It suffers from the fundamental problem of truth by consensus rather than truth by competence, though. There is severe cherry-picking about disputed issues.

An experience I had some years back makes it very clear. It was an Israel/Palestine article, I noticed one item that should have a link didn't. Being naive about it's biases at the time I added the missing link--no words changed, just the link added behind a couple of words. It got reverted--that's a link the left would prefer people not make.

> reverted--that's a link the left would prefer people not make.

Notably, you haven't shared the link here. So all we're getting is vague accusations about "the left".

What was the link? And why do you think it was removed?

Not to speak for the person you're replying to, but I included several sources in my response above, if that helps. Just in terms of their financial/organizational potential for bias

I agree it's generally accurate, but I think it suffers from "truth by persistence" rather than "truth by consensus". That is, the editors who are the most persistent often "win".

As an example, many years ago I edited some rather unflattering information to a controversial politician's Wikipedia article, properly referenced and cited of course. It was promptly removed by a "fan" and accused of "spreading lies" by referencing "obscure sites" or whatnot (the references were not obscure). I just ... gave up, because fuck this shit, and it's not all that important anyway.

It is in the current version though, so someone took up the torch I guess.

Either way, as a persistent and slightly-rude-but-not-rude-enough-to-be-banned editor you can exert a lot of control (and it takes quite a lot to be banned from Wikipedia in the first place).

This is not a problem of "the left", or at least not uniquely so. In my example it was a right wing politician.

Hahahhahaha....evidence they say....hahahahahah.

Exhibit A: https://www.vice.com/en/article/pkgbwm/chinese-woman-fake-ru...

What a great example of how accurate Wikipedia is, someone went to extreme lengths to falsify information, they were discovered and their edits reverted, as happens in most cases

Well, yes, after ten years, just as in the case of the toaster. And the translations of her Featured Article in three other Wikipedia language versions had STILL not been corrected last time I looked.

As a joke, some of my colleagues created a fake persona for another colleague after obtaining an old picture of him in punk rocker garb from college.

It was a long con, they created a fake band, added references to various obscure pages, etc. ultimately a page was created with the photo posted that followed every Wikipedia policy except for being false.

I’m sure people are doing that professionally. The problem with Wikipedia is that it’s awesome except for when it isn’t.

The weakness of the system is that it depends on arbitrary standards of notability and online reference. Not novel problems but you need to have a different kind of critical eye than other platforms.

Then there was the case of the man whose image was used for two years to illustrate the Wikipedia article on a serial killer.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/5dgpnq/wikipedia-and-google-...

Completely fictitious content is bad PR for Wikipedia, but it doesn't really materially affect its usefulness as a reference. Nobody's coming to Wikipedia looking to write their thesis on a band that never existed. The reason fictitious pages like this survive is because nobody is reading them. Even infamous long-lived examples like "Jar'Edo Wens" had essentially no real-world impact.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jar%27Edo_Wens_hoax

It enables all sorts of grifts.

Foolish as it may seem, people use Wikipedia to vet stuff and make decisions.

> they were discovered and their edits reverted

Eventually they were discovered and their edits reverted. The misinformation was on the site for years.

This is like Donald Trump now (finally) admitting he lost the 2020 election fair and square and that Biden is the legitimate president of the United States and then using that as an example of what an honest and upstanding democracy-loving bloke he is. Ehh ... no.

I'm happy with Wikipedia with hard facts. Numbers are usually good enough. Programming too. Physics and Chemistry no issue. Though haven't digged into more political sides of those.

Anything topical and controversial the sources are clearly curated to one side. And likely rather untrustworthy. It never seems to drive to neutrality and being unbiased on these topics.

And yet, some topics are so widely cited one sidedly that even people skeptical of biases tend to just go along with it anyways. (Gamergate, for example)

https://youtu.be/xs69lv0UGNU

I have certainly edited quite a few inaccuracies and misrepresentations over the years. Example: the Wikipedia page of a certain controversial figure once contained a sentence along the lines of "in 2016 Duckburg Times revealed that Donald Duck had a criminal history". When checking the reference it was something like a disorderly conduct and resisting arrest misdemeanours at a party when they were 18 (over 20 years ago) or something along those lines and some minor traffic citations. Is some stupid drunken thing they did when they were 18 (no felonies) a "criminal history"? I don't think anyone would phrase it as such.

This is the kind of "bias" people with axes to grind can put in; I don't even think it's intentional (or not always, at least) because summarizing an entire story is hard, but the entire story was already a red herring hit piece IMHO, and summarizing it as "criminal history" a horrible summarisation of said red herring. But ... people will read the Wikipedia article and go "zomg, that guy is a criminal!!!!"

I came across a case where a disgruntled former lodger added stuff like that to a woman academic's Wikipedia biography, citing purported court documents (alleged driving offences) that had never been the subject of a press report. The whole thing was presented under the heading “Brushes with the law” and took up more than half the body of the biography.

I think the main problem with the accuracy of Wikipedia comes into play when reading about events related to politics or similar controversial topics. I have seen plenty of wrong information on Wikipedia related to recent events which I knew for a fact that were wrong because those events happened in my city and the area in which I reside in.

The information related to the field of science is accurate but can't say the same for modern events or history.

Without even looking, I'm willing to bet that articles related to sex and gender are heavily politicized despite being scientific topics (well, sex at least, gender is questionable). Likely the same for climate change, racial groups, and thousands of other scientific topics.

It varies a lot. When did Medieval Studies, I was told “Never cite, Wikipedia. Don’t even look at it.”

A year later I was studying computer programming and “Wikipedia is an amazing source of information.”

Medieval studies is a field where the general public believes many falsehoods (witch persecutions, etc). Wikipedia reflected that.

A friend of mine is a professor of medieval philsophy. He tried to contribute to Wikipedia for a while. He gave up in disgust. (The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which is also free, is much better for anything in that topic area.)

Medieval philosophy was my area of focus too!

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is very good - so is the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Fordham’s Internet Medieval Sourcebook is an absolute godsend.

Another important resource is the “Cambridge Companion to …” series. It’s paid (about $45/book on Kindle), but will provide you with everything you need to start work on the topic.

It can be taken seriously enough but I can also change Suleiman the Magnificent’s birthplace to Nairobi and no one will notice for a week.

Wikipedia should publish curated “editions” like a traditional encyclopedia.

I assume curating would mean freezing and cross-checking each article. This would take a while (I imagine years) and by the time it's done the information would be outdated.

> I can also change Suleiman the Magnificent’s birthplace to Nairobi and no one will notice for a week.

Have you actually tried doing something like that? You might be surprised how fast it gets reverted.

I think it's a case of a million people trying, and 99% being reverted. Which sounds great, until you realise that it means ten thousand bits of nonsense aren't spotted. Case in point:

https://www.dailydot.com/unclick/amelia-bedelia-wikipedia-ho...

Yes. I have had edits stay for months.

This one stayed for ten years:

https://wikipediocracy.com/2022/08/11/wikipedias-credibility...

I don't think vandalism is the big problem.

It's not hard to find articles that are written with some agenda, either product advertisement or political motives, but presented with the same objective encyclopedic tone as the rest.

This article is a pretty good example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pair_programming

The entire article is basically an advertisement for the idea, citing a handful of fairly old studies, including prominently a fairly odd one in its own section:

"In an online survey of pair programmers from 2000, 96% of programmers stated that they enjoyed work more while pair programming than programming alone. Furthermore, 95% said that they were more confident in their work when they pair programmed. [...]"

Just... stop and think about that survey for a moment. At a glance you might not catch it, but they basically asked people who prefer pair programming whether they prefer pair programming, and discovered that yeah, almost all of them did.

Both the "indicators of non-performance" and "pairing variations" also seem oddly out of place in a wiki article.

I just considered something as you described this: I have a knack for sniffing bullshit on the web. It is intuitive and unconscious, that I don't really assume something is true if the combination of topic and source could lend itself to self-service. On the other hand, if I see sources I'm aware of or on a topic that is less likely to be controversial, I feel more comfortable believing something. I bet many people do not operate this way.

Also, I tend not to make big life decisions on anything in Wikipedia; if it is doing any more than satisfying curiosity, I am looking for additional sources.

I think it is a good general purpose encyclopedia and the world is better for having it.

For some topics, you can go through the years and see dramatically different articles on the same topic that have been entirely overhauled, sometimes removing sources and detail to mask nuance unfortunately. The incentives are high to influence what is written for certain articles on there when everyone and their mother says "just check on wikipedia" these days for the source of truth on anything they don't have expertise with. How could they not be?

Wikipedia is already taken seriously enough by most people under the age of 50 that I know.

That said, it does still have issues and by its very nature is prone to organized disinformation campaigns. Yes, it will be corrected in time, but if timed correctly it could be too late.

Imagine this:

A post on social media site X goes viral. The post makes some wildly divisive claim about an American political figure. The claim is untrue, but the posts virality leads many to believe it. Simultaneously, a group of dedicated attackers change the political figures wiki page to match the disinformation in the viral post, keeping it like that until the posts virality cools down. The Wikipedia article gets linked in the comments of the post. The hundreds of thousands of people who saw that post at its peak all now believe the false claim. The malicious actor benefits.

> Wikipedia is already taken seriously enough by most people under the age of 50 that I know.

Seriously , yes, enough , no. And i would say people under the age of 18 and their teachers take Wikipedia as a serious source. There are some good articles on Wikipedia but the majority is lacking quality.

Then media outlets start picking up on it and include it in their reporting, then reporting on reporting happens and so on, then someone adds it to wikipedia with the news source, and then that gets uaed as a reference without saying so.

Then those new artikles get added to the wiki and it becomes an established fact.

Wikipedia has a list of cases where this precise sequence of events occurred:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_citogenesis_...

Combining the current-ness and expansiveness of current research and journalism with the connectedness and cohesiveness of an encyclopedia is, without a question, a revolutionary product.

But I think when people say that Wikipedia is "accurate" and "reliable", they mean nothing more or less than that it's a faithful rendition of what you'd get if you grind up a certain set of secondary sources into a slop and bake it into a homogeneous pie. Within any given article, the mistakes in Wikipedia are nothing more or less than you would see slip through in a random mainstream newpaper or academic journal.

Wikipedia feels like a grand unified "view from nowhere". In a scientific journal, you can speak with a neutral point of view, representing the consensus of experts in that field. But when your scope is "everything", who are the domain experts? Is it the domain experts for the specific page (who may have fringe views about adjacent topics), or is it the editors who have a shallow consensus about everything, despite not being experts on the page in question?

...and ultimately, why do we take it as a given that this question can be meaningfully resolved?

[from the article]

>I suspect in part because many gatekeepers of knowledge – journalists, scientists, teachers, the Encyclopedia Britannica – simply don’t like the idea that anonymous amateurs are competing on their domain.

Similar comment, and additional recent discussion, here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32793755

The "Why I hate Wikipedia" YouTube video discussed at the other thread you link was made by YouTuber and journalist J. J. McCullough. You wanna see something funny? This discussion is from 2008:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletio...

The J. J. McCullough biography was created and deleted a total of five times on Wikipedia (with two different spellings of J.J.):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletio... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletio... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletio... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletio...

I believe he may not be telling the whole story in that video.

I think wikipedia could be saved by not being it a necessary condition to have a secondary* source. I can't remember the article (or maybe it was more than one), but I distinctly remember having an article cited that used a youtube interview as a source. The article then butchered the quote and extrapolated on the content of the video, and that was cited, despite the fact that you could see the actual content of the video itself!

You get burned even once, you get wary.

I saw a solid video a couple days ago called "Why I hate Wikipedia (and you should too!)" https://youtu.be/-vmSFO1Zfo8

I'd never given Wikipedia much thought, but it raised some very interesting points to think about.

TLDR: Despite mediocre information, Wikipedia's ubiquity has supplanted the market for better sites dedicated to specific topics.

I’ll have to watch the video later to see how good their argument is… but I don’t but it.

“The market” has seemingly deemed low value SEO spam to be what’s valuable. If Wikipedia didn’t exist, I imagine the alternative would more likely be garbage rather than quality.

In this case, "the market" is essentially just Google - who incidentally created the market for SEO spam.

I don't necessarily blame Google for the tight integration with Wikipedia. It's much easier to deal with one site than many.

I think it's disingenuous to blame "the market" for what's essentially the decision of a monopoly.

Did the government grant Google a monopoly?

This is a market outcome. Perfect competition is not the natural state of the market, even though free marketers prefer to hand wave it into existence.

The government is absolutely granting Google a monopoly today. They own the browser, your email, and search. If antitrust had any teeth in this era the company would have been nuked a decade ago if not even sooner.

Antitrust is government intervention into the market. Not enforcing antitrust is not granting a monopoly.

Don’t get me wrong, antitrust is good! Government intervention is necessary. But lasseiz-fares does not mean what you appear to think it means.

When a corporation has an obvious monopoly and the government does not intervene, they are signalling the status quo is allowed to continue

Yes, except that is not a market outcome, that is government intervention into the market.

That is substantively different from a government granted monopoly, wherein it is illegal to create a competing business.

The point is that monopolies are a natural market outcome, and are what created Google. Does Google continue to exist as it is because the government has chosen not to do anything? Yes. Welcome to the free market.

Google was not really created by a natural market outcome when you consider what it takes to be a large multinational corporation operating out of the US. Any time a policy decision is made that can benefit either the larger or more politically connected stakeholder versus the smaller stakeholder, guess who gets the short end of the stick almost every time in practice. It's not the big guy. Google is open about this, they have a political action committee, they have a website page where they open with "At Google, we believe it is important to have a voice in the political process..." (1). To suggest that they don't use these mechanisms to better their own position in this market you allege to be free is naive.

https://www.google.com/publicpolicy/transparency/

The "Why I hate Wikipedia" video was made by YouTuber and journalist J. J. McCullough. You wanna see something funny? This discussion is from 2008:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletio...

The J. J. McCullough biography was created and deleted a total of five times on Wikipedia (with two different spellings of J.J.):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletio...

Each time it was deleted for "lack of notability". I believe he may not be telling the whole story in that video.

Apart from that, his criticisms are quite valid, if not exactly new. The video was discussed here the other day, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32793755

Discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32793755

The interesting thing about truth is that it is binary by its nature. Something is either true or false. There is no "My Truth" or "Your Truth" as the public school system would corrupt you into believing but there is only "The Truth". Since you cannot account for a random person telling the truth without recourse, there is no implicit trust in Wikipedia.

The lie in the world is that people are basically good. No, people are basically greedy of fame and fortune. People want and they mostly want the wrong things at the wrong times and for the wrong reasons. Given these facts trust cannot be implied if reputation and gain are not inherent in the founding of the trust.

Zero trust is even worse because now you have nothing.

Wikipedia is untrustworthy at best and is only useful as a stepping stone to the truth not as a source and certainly not as an immutable source.

Truth is rarely binary , it’s nuanced and detailed and when you convert it into a simple statement you inject your own opinion. The world isn’t black and white.

For example, you’re right that people are naturally greedy, but most are also naturally altruistic. Many people are kind to strangers, and provide help as long as it doesn’t get in their way.

Most Wikipedia authors want the popularity which is why they publish, but they’re not publishing the wrong information (esp. because it’s more likely to be removed). Wikipedia is for the most part trustworthy because there are a lot of people who have dedicated themselves to providing “truth”, and while these people each have their own biases especially wrt controversial articles, the factual content is agreed on and so that it what ultimately gets published.

What you are describing is "consensus" among those with the power to veto or edit articles.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23724917

Wikipedia is an amazing resource, but we should be careful to realize where the bulk of its funding comes from.

Wikipedia is mostly funded through the Wikimedia Endowment. From their footer: "The Endowment has been established, with an initial contribution by Wikimedia Foundation, as a Collective Action Fund at Tides Foundation (Tax ID# 51-0198509)" [0][1]

The Tides Foundation is a "Donor Advised Fund", which effectively acts as a dark money PAC that funnels money from other non-profits and individual donors to progressive causes.[2]

From the Wikipedia entry itself: "Tides Foundation is an American public charity and fiscal sponsor working to advance progressive causes and policy initiatives in areas such as the environment, health care, labor issues, immigrant rights, LGBTQ+ rights, women's rights and human rights. It was founded in San Francisco in 1976. Through donor advised funds, Tides distributes money from anonymous donors to other organizations, which are often politically liberal."[3]

Also, the General Counsel of Wikimedia Foundation is Amanda Keton, who came over from Tides. "Prior to joining Wikimedia, Amanda was General Counsel of Tides Network, a national public foundation deploying donor-advised grants and investments to build a world of shared prosperity and social justice. While in that role, she worked with the Wikimedia Foundation to establish the Wikimedia Endowment, a permanent source of funding to support the Wikimedia projects and mission in perpetuity. She also served as Head of Tides Foundation and People Operations and the CEO of Tides Advocacy, the policy affiliate in the Tides family of organizations."[4]

One would hope all of this would not lead to a strong bias in the way Wikipedia is edited & managed, but it's important that everyone understands the quite strong bias behind the organization itself.

[0] - https://wikimediaendowment.org/ [1] - https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jan/15/wikipedia... [2] - https://capitalresearch.org/article/tides-legal-laundering-a... [3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tides_Foundation [4] - https://wikimediafoundation.org/profile/amanda-keton/

Most of the Wikimedia Foundation's revenue comes from small donations, and part of that is then funneled to the Endowment at the Tides Foundation – which has never to date published audited accounts:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...

This $100 million endowment was built in half the time anticipated:

https://www.dailydot.com/debug/wikipedia-endownemnt-fundrais...

The Wikimedia Foundation currently has almost $400 million in assets and reserves:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...

That's five times as much as it had in 2015, when the Washington Post published an article titled "Wikipedia has a ton of money. So why is it begging you to donate yours?"

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/12...

> Journalists and academics can’t use it as a reference. Nor can students, though they can use Britannica.

Lots of journalists do use it. That is why there is a bunch of BBC articles claiming that the electric toaster was invented by a Scot called "Alan MacMasters" ... they used Wikipedia without checking its information. It was completely made up:

https://wikipediocracy.com/2022/08/11/wikipedias-credibility...

A book published by Cambridge University Press says that coatis are also called "Brazilian aardvarks" – because the writer copied from Wikipedia. Completely made up.

https://www.theregister.com/2017/01/16/wikipedia_16_birthday...

Wikipedia simply has different flaws than older reference works, and it's important to be aware of them.

Another thing not to trust blindly is the Wikipedia fundraising banners. In 2015, the Washington Post published a piece titled, "Wikipedia has a ton of money. So why is it begging you to donate yours?"

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/12...

In that piece, the Washington Post reported that the Wikimedia Foundation had "net assets in excess of $77 million". Today, the Foundation's assets (including its $115 million endowment with the Tides Foundation) stand at around five times as much:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/1/1e/Wikim...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...

Yet the fundraising banners and emails sound as desperate and guilt-tripping as ever. "Donate to keep Wikipedia online ...", "Donate to protect Wikipedia's independence ..."

Many Wikipedians are disgusted with that:

https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@list...

Seriously, I love Wikipedia. I have been contributing to it for more than fifteen years. But I would say most volunteers who contribute to Wikipedia would NEVER advise anyone – say, a family member who is starting out as a doctor or journalist – to trust anything said in Wikipedia blindly. They'd ALWAYS tell you to check the references, and in a case of "Who invented X" to seek corroboration in a 20th-century source.

Ironically, the Cambridge University book uses the made-up "Brazlian aardvark" moniker copied from Wikipedia in a passage that reads as follows:

"In the case of the Coati, for instance, also known as the Brazilian aardvark, Buffon explained that 'Marcgrave, and practically all of the Naturalists after him, said that the aardvark had six toes in its hind feet: M. Brisson is the only one who has not copied that error of Marcgrave."

https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/The_Legacy_of_Dutch_B...

The story of how Wikipedia came to call the coati the Brazilian aardvark is told in great detail in The New Yorker:

https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/how-a-ra...

Something close to the truth is the best we will ever know.

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