Hacker News Reader

Comment by h4kunamata | Hacker News Reader

Wikepedia, the most untrustworthy source ever, cases and cases of people who gained access to the article and completely changed it with fake information:

1. Assassin's Creed video game: A guy changed Japanese history by introducing a black samurai. The whole dramas was so bad that Janapense officials got involved, and one of the reasons Ubisoft Studio which was already broke due to DEI, went even more bankrupt.

2. A lawyer changed specific laws on Wikipedia and waited, as expected, judges were caught using the "fabricated law" against real cases with real consequences.

I could go on and on, but hey, you do you :)

View on HN

>1. Assassin's Creed video game: A guy changed Japanese history by introducing a black samurai. The whole dramas was so bad that Janapense officials got involved, and one of the reasons Ubisoft Studio which was already broke due to DEI, went even more bankrupt.

Honestly one of the best Wikipedia talk pages I had ever read, during the controversy. I read amazing arguments well put from both sides, but personally fell on the "Yes its fine to call him a samurai" side based on a very good argument about how the language was applied in that time period. But I felt I could strongly grasp the other sides argument too.

> A guy changed Japanese history by introducing a black samurai.

Playable character in Samurai Warriors 5.

Wait, did people really get worked up over a playable character in a video game? How is Ubisoft changing history or whatever with this? Its a silly assasin game where you murder a lot of people?

Yes they did. Not to mention its always been about a secret murder cult, and their enemy, people who use DNA to travel through time.

Any angle they can open a new front in the culture war with is enumerated immediately.

A technology that is used up to a million times a day is bad, here's the proof, two times it has failed:

A tale as old as time. I don't just want to know the instances of harm, I want to know how representative they are supposed to be. And I think people who have thought through the latter question aren't the types to do the former.

In neither cases it was really a flaw of wikipedia, the model is clear, contributions should include content and sources, and it's the responsibility of the reader to check the reference.

I get it if bullshit is uploaded and a layman is fooled, but both cases involve trained professionals who know very damn well what a source is, judges and journalists, and it was principally their failure, not of Wikipedia.

Exactly. If someone thinks this is a fatal flaw, they're kind of telling on themselves about the extent to which they check sources.

But also I think just as a fact of the matter Wiki is not frequently incorrect or manipulated (though there are exceptions). It's no coincidence that people who want to peddle misinformation are suddenly up in arms against Wikipedia's supposed bias.

Yeah, Wikipedia has some unreliable articles, but "the most untrustworthy source ever"? Whatever country you live in, I'm sure it has its share of Fox News, The Sun, or Bild Zeitung.

I was wondering what the heck ① was all about and found this site in a search that seems to have a bone to pick with Thomas Lockley. https://japanese-with-naoto.com/2024/07/10/perfidious-histor... https://japanese-with-naoto.com/2024/05/29/disappointment-in...

First I've heard about this controversy, and I've never played the game, but I could see if a historian was a cite for something and they were saying different things in japanese and english, that the english wikipedia would end up citing inaccurate things.

There's been problems in the past with the deletionist faction on wikipedia or moderators abusing small fiefdoms - some of which has even ended up here on HN, but in this case, wikipedia just citing information from a supposedly reputable source seems to be wikipedia operating as intended.

Yeah, and all search engines can index a website with fake info to the top of the results for a question, so that makes search engines a terrible tool for looking up information. /s

Wikipedia never was a definitive or authoritative source on anything, that is by design, that is on the official guidelines. You can't cite Wikipedia on Wikipedia, you must provide sources for information, if no sources exist for an excerpt of an article then it must be tagged as citation needed.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com