Just a couple of these circular references build up a circumstantial base of "evidence" which is then itself used to bolster the original weak claims which often reflect nothing more than an editorial or journalistic assumption or bias.
It turns out that the source was a book, which was citing a news story, which was about a letter a farmer had written in. I recall tagging this in the backed with 'weak source' (or something).
Checking back now, the claim has been changed to: "The only sure way of killing them quickly is through a blow to the skull with a club or a shot to the head with a gun, as their skin is almost impervious to arrows and spears."
Which is more plausible a claim than the original, and I'm absolutely prepared to believe killing a Honey Badger with arrows is hard, but the source still isn't actually proving that.
Anyway it was a useful lesson for younger me about Wikipedia.
Years ago I noticed that the article for the mimic octopus said that it mimicked various things, including the "venomous sole" (!) with a citation that looked suspiciously similar to the wikipedia article. Of course, there's no such thing, but if you search the web you can still find articles based on the wikipedia article claiming it (the wikipedia article itself was eventually corrected to the (non-venomous) zebra sole).
It was a minor point and I wasn't going to dig deeper but it does show how at least (possibly) simplified/incomplete narratives drive out more complicated histories.
(I do find the concept of a venomous sole fascinating, though. How would that work? Would it _bite_ people? They're seabed-dwelling flatfish!)
Then the entire world press copies the article within hours. Even Reuters and AP have adopted the practice.
Then Wikipedia cites the narrative as the truth.
Hold on, when is it you think that newspapers did _not_ do this?
In general, if a paper is writing about anything vaguely contentious, it will use unnamed sources; if it names its sources then its sources won't stay sources for long, and the media will become little more than a system for regurgitating press releases. It is always worked this way; this isn't new.
(There was a fun bit in "Yes Minister" where the minister, while leaking something, was offended that the journalist wanted to use "sources" instead of "sources close to the Prime Minister" to attribute his leak...)
[0] and submarines, of course ;)
Just like journalism is full of individuals paid off or paid to say (or not) something (sometimes blantantly untrue), wikipedia has plenty of inaccurate or false information.
So, it used to be I would use wikipedia as a type of third hand source - find information on a topic, then dig through it's references, then list Wikipedia as a source that I had used, but never quote Wikipedia.
The problem being there are few encyclopedic sources on the internet to begin with, so when the articles start sourcing the article aggregator, then the quality is bound to go down the tubes as well.
Technically, Wikipedia is a tertiary source. A "third hand source", as you say.
A secondary source is something like e.g. a book written by a historian based on research they did translating and putting together some primary-source ancient writings. The secondary source can be considered semi-authoritative on a topic; but is still interpreted through a lens. You can quote a secondary source, though always with attribution. What you cannot do, is to state claims from a secondary source as [cited] fact (like you can with a primary source.)
Because of the "anyone can edit" part, though, Wikipedia has no authoritative-ness to it — nobody is standing behind and vouching for the validity of any given text that exists on Wikipedia; there's nobody to take responsibility for the inaccuracy of a statement, nobody's professional scholarly or journalistic or critical reputation is on the line. So it's not valid to quote Wikipedia even as a secondary-source "attributed fact." So it's not a valid secondary source. Thus, tertiary.
Mind you, it's also bad even for a tertiary source. A dictionary is a tertiary source, but writers on grammar like https://www.grammarphobia.com/ might still cite historical editions of dictionaries to prove extant historical understanding of a meaning of a term. Not to take the dictionary as authoritative, but just to, effectively, "do cultural anthropology to it" — seeing the dictionary as a well-known work of writing at the time, that can be analyzed for its word choices regardless of who wrote it. In theory, you could cite [a particular point-in-time snapshot of a page from] Wikipedia for similar reasons; but it's one of those rare exceptions where you have to really know what you're doing. You might say that it's challenging to cite Wikipedia, both in a technical sense, and in the sense of doing so being the best thing to do.
Giving indications about the source is important for the reader to evaluate its seriousness. Not giving too much information is important to keep your source long term, and to get others (nobody is going to talk to a journalist know to expose their sources). Of course this depends on journalists being reasonably truthful otherwise the whole thing has no value. This is why reputation is critical and serious journals sack their journalists when they find out they lied.
What is the alternative? It is also very easy to make up a quote, attributing it to someone who’s never said anything like it or just make up a name.
(I only noticed this because the 9.1 y estimate may no longer be valid, and we are putting together a paper on the subject.)
> "These [claims] would get picked up in different types of media, I would cite them, and they would become fact," Alex says.
Now think, how many time have you heard that fact when reading retrospectives on Game Boy, or watching Youtube videos?
Please elaborate. Or, even better, link to examples.
For Wikipedia's own various discussions on the subject if you want to delve further, try:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Systemic_bias
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideological_bias_on_Wikipedia
Remember, none of these problems are necessarily intentional, it's just not as simple as implying Wikipedia is a special, neutral case free of those issues.
But there are other entities that seem to do a reasonably good job of being impartial (e.g. BBC), I just don't buy the idea that Wikipedia is very special (or especially effective) in regard to neutrality.
What possible motivation could exist for establishing a online reference using the media as the canonical and sole source of truth?
Because "the media" is... the best source we have?
To be clear, Wikipedia doesn't require that you cite mainstream media sources only. You can cite anything that's a primary source as fact (whether that be a work of investigative journalism, a book, a letter, a blog post by someone involved, a study described in a journal paper, etc); and anything that's a secondary source as an attributed quote (whether that be a work of editorial journalism, a magazine article, a blog post by someone who isn't involved, a meta-analysis described in a journal paper, etc.)
That's actually a very low bar. For example, people who are discouraged from "original research" on Wikipedia, can simply stick said original research onto a website they own, and then edit Wikipedia to cite that, and that's 100% allowed. (It's disincentivized to promote your own investigative reporting or quote your own words on Wikipedia, but if you did it all "by the book", nobody's going to revert the edit.)
In all cases, the only real requirement is that everything Wikipedia says has to be be attributable via citation to something, somewhere, that exists in the public sphere of semi-permanent accessibility, such that a reader could reasonably be expected to be able to fact-check the citation qua citation by "chasing the pointer" to its referent. So you can't cite a person (as a person won't necessarily give you the same answer twice); but you can cite an interview with said person recorded at a specific time and put into some form of public record (e.g. a court proceeding.)
"Original research" is exactly the opposite of what you mean, original research in the context of Wikipedia generally means citing primary sources. The "research" that is original is the interpretation of the raw data (the primary sources). The preferred approach is to cite an expert's interpretation of the data or event.
You can disagree whether this makes sense, or whether most articles follow this, but this is Wikipedia's policy:
> Wikipedia articles should be based on reliable, published secondary sources, and to a lesser extent, on tertiary sources and primary sources.
> Secondary or tertiary sources are needed to establish the topic's notability and avoid novel interpretations of primary sources. All analyses and interpretive or synthetic claims about primary sources must be referenced to a secondary or tertiary source and must not be an original analysis of the primary-source material by Wikipedia editors. [1]
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_research...
Or, maybe to couch this in language more friendly to how a Wikipedia editor might think of the process: if you are already providing an attributed quote of a secondary source; and in the secondary source, a fact is quoted from some primary source without a true citation being provided (only a weak, implicit-in-context mention of the source); is it not better to do the "original research" of figuring out what primary source the secondary source got the data for the claim from, and then putting in a citation for the fact inside the quote, yourself, in exactly the way the secondary source's author likely would have if the format they were publishing in allowed true citation? "Repairing" the citation graph, so to speak, where the secondary source has left a gap in it.
(And this is important to the topic at hand: citing only secondary sources for "blunt facts", where those secondary sources are not themselves expected/required to provide citations to primary sources, is exactly how hoax citation graphs arise.)
At least in theory, no it's not, per Wikipedia policy. Now, in practice, if you reference some government dataset for a non-controversial fact like the area of a state, only the most procedural whackjob admin is going to flag it. But, in general, you're not supposed to use primary sources.