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Comment by satiric | Hacker News Reader

"Editors of the [Wikipedia] page appear to be non-experts in the field and biased against me personally for unknown reasons... It is unfortunate that Wikipedia cannot be trusted as a reliable source of information."

No, you cannot be trusted over the USGS (US Geological Survey). This is an important thing to understand when editing Wikipedia. It's not enough to be an expert in the field (other editors have no idea what your experience is). Peer-reviewed, published data from an official source is always going to be more trusted than data in a blog post.

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Actually in this case he can be trusted more than the USGS, as he took a more recent measurement.

This is a known shortcoming of Wikipedia’s model, which is optimized to manage conflicts between editors rather than optimized for accuracy.

Okay, so the author linked to the Seattle Times for a published citation of their measurement. And indeed the author's measurements are confirmed by Signani in that very same article:

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/climate-lab/mount-...

That looks to me like a legitimate Wikipedia source. Plus it's recent and doesn't seem to be disputed by any other recent article.

Is there a reason I'm missing on why this person isn't being allowed to update the elevation for Mt Rainier on Wikipedia?

> Peer-reviewed, published data from an official source is always going to be more trusted than data in a blog post.

Such is the reverance for official sources on Wikipedia that quite often you'll find that the cited source doesn't actually support the article's content.

If you add a correct-looking fact referencing a correct-looking .gov source to a Wikipedia article, the likelihood of your edit being reverted is very low.

The data in this blog post is peer reviewed by an expert.

Isn’t that just an appeal to authority?

Yes, and we can (somewhat humorously) reference Wikipedia's own page on the "argument from authority" page to dig in to the fallacy. [1]

Quoting Wikipedia: "scientific knowledge is best established by evidence and experiment rather than argued through authority". The author of this post has collected evidence, presented it, and had it reviewed by a domain expert (Larry Signani is the person who first surveyed Rainier using GPS in 1998).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority#Use_in...

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