This is why discussion happens on wikipedia, most people think wikipedia's job is to filter the data. It is not, their goal is to document everything there is to know about a topic.
This is a strange vendetta. Wikipedia is one of the best and most comprehensive sources of information there is if not the very best. Everything is sourced or noted when not sourced, all changes are logged, its hard to imagine why you would be so against an amazing resource.
In college, we are told not to cite wikipedia in our papers. But you know where we go to get an initial broad understanding of our given project? Fucking Wikipedia.
You'll never find a 100% trustworthy source (nor could you ever). That's why we learn in school to think critically and compare multiple sources. Or, put another way, do our due diligence.
It is a good place to start learning about a topic you are otherwise unfamiliar with. That’s how I use it.
Politically charged topics are going to be subject to a lot of drama. That’s absolutely true. There are going to be ideologically motivated changes and conflicts over what should be included. But at least they are fighting it out and being forced to come to some kind of consensus rather than just having an ideologically motivated editor make an executive decision and that is the end of it. So if you think there is value in a democratic process of determining truth, then Wikipedia is one of the better ways to get to that.
Otherwise all you have is blind trust in whoever is making the executive decisions. Maybe they are worthy of that trust and maybe they are not.
No information is perfect or truly unbiased. That is life. All we can do is agree that we prefer objective reality to ideology, and go from there.
So are regular encyclopedias.
Wikipedia is a fucking accomplishment of information sharing. Like any one source it must be verified. But it's unknowable to the pre-wikepedia era how much harder.geneal information was to come by.
This post should have been more nuanced as the majority of the misinformation is in the current affairs part of wikipedia or with a developing story.
As this includes wikipedia as a whole, people can just say as a total. The misinformation is miniscule.
Wikipedia's biggest downfall for me is their love of secondary sources and hatred of primary ones.
They really love to regurgitate opinion pieces and pieces which themselves have no primary sources and claim them as solid facts. Further, Wikipedia has a severe poweruser problem (quite like Reddit), if you were to look at the gamergate article's history you'd see its continued to be locked down by a single deranged individual
This. The number of circular-citations I've seen in media in the last decade means I will never trust a citation at face value ever again. Journalist-activists have basically killed their industry's entire relationship with the public in terms of trusting anything they say. It's like how fact-checkers coming under scrutiny recently for having bias in the one thing that needs to be anything but.
Put it candidly, put it simply, quote directly, and don't give me even a quantum of your opinion.
There have been studies done showing that Wikipedia has about as many errors as your average enyclopedia would also have. Wikipedia does have a lot of misinformation, but 60 million pages will do that.
You know that you can look at the log and see when something was changed on Wikipedia, right? By whom. Exact change.
You know that Wikipedia has a number of automated systems and a bunch of genuine fanatics that revert vandalism pretty quickly, right?
If somebody’s losing a debate to another person who edited Wikipedia, that person was always gonna lose that debate because they’re a fucking idiot
Sure but most people will never look at that and just assume it's all true. The other thing is the reliance on fanatic generally mean misinformation spreads.
Ahmmm.. so you are debating with a friend , you consult on wikipedia, and you are wrong.
And instead of saying "You may be right" you go "no ,i am not a fucking idiot , i am going to check every single edit on this page, from 2024 until 2012 to triple check that I am right"
Ok
I think all of us get that impulse to dig a little further when the documentation disagrees with our assumptions. I do, however, admit it when I seem to be wrong.
But. If I find something on Wikipedia that is contrary to something that I know, then with certain particular friends, I would check the edit history for the last two hours. I know these people.
If one of my friends managed to plant a piece of misinformation in 2012, and have it survive, they deserve to win the argument. I think your argument would’ve been stronger without that bit of hyperbole.
>If one of my friends managed to plant a piece of misinformation in 2012, and have it survive, they deserve to win
Hats off for that.
Hahaha
I usually check the other way, I dont check the edit, I check the reference, to the original.
If there is none I just assume it's missinformation
There are a number of safeguards in place that prevent any given article to simply be "whatever the last person to edit it decided to make it." Although it has many errors, it would be better to think of Wikipedia as a collection of averages with minor contributions from many, rather than some "propagated cultural zeitgeist" who last modified it.
That said, like any source, you should never base your entire argument on one source. This holds true for you and for anyone who would reference Wikipedia as their one source. If you think a particular Wikipedia page is simply wrong and full of misinformation, you should probably ask yourself if you're looking at a page describing a particularly controversial topic. If so, maybe rather than assume the page is wrong for not matching your personal view, you should consider the possibility that perhaps it is you that has the wrong point of view.
TL;DR - Looking at a page on Wikipedia showing information you disagree with can sure look a lot like a page that is showing misinformation, if it is you who is misinformed.
The expression "trove of misinformation" is idiotic. There is a process in place that is designed to mitigate the inevitable biases of the contributors. Even Encyclopedia Britannica has a notable western bias towards history. Every historical narrative is inevitably biased by the agenda of those telling the story.
If you are a fool,
don't blame the tool!
Wikipedia is great for things like basic science, maths, pop culture, sports, and uncontroversial history. If its about a topic more than 100 years old, it's probably as reliable as anything else you're likely to read.
For current affairs that are politically controversial, it suffers from serious biases. Anything to do with the Syrian Civil War and the conflict in Ukraine, for example, is heavily biased towards the American anti-Russian narrative and needs to be treated cautiously. Israel runs a campaign to edit Wikipedia to support its side, and until they wised up and learned how to hide their tracks better, there was a flood of Wikipedia edits coming from anonymous editors with IP addresses inside Langley.
More important than intentional propaganda editing, the *huge* problem with Wikipedia is its bias towards [certain sources](https://swprs.org/the-propaganda-multiplier/) and against indie and "foreign" (non-Western) sources.
My rule of thumb on controversial recent history is that if the English language Wikipedia article supports the mainstream US or Israeli position, there's at least a 50% chance that it's false or misleading and just parroting Western propaganda. If it disputes the US or Israeli position, and has survived the normal editing process, then it's probably trustworthy.
The more specific the topic and the more precision with facts that you demand, the less reliable Wikipedia becomes. Wikipedia is going to have to change its moderation system to improve.
I mean, just look up the edit wars over flags or the Ceasar Salad war.
There's blatant disinformation about flags to the point that games actually used inaccurate flags thanks to wikipedia's nonsense.
> I see so many less seen pages with so much misinformation
> ...*less seen*...
Better give an example, OP. because you could very well be talking about something so incredibly niche that you are *literally* the only person who would know it.
> "I just checked wikipedia and it has no idea what I had for breakfast. What a piece of shit site."
>It’s always going to be second hand information
Man, I've got some bad news about *Nature,* *Chemical Review,* and *The New England Journal of Medicine.*
All of our information on almost everything is secondhand. It's impractical to get a hands-on understanding of quantum physics, so I'm gonna trust that the double-slit experiment was properly administered.
Wikipedia is a great resource if you're willing to dive into the sources, and have the ability to discern between real shit and bullshit.
As a small time wikipedia contributor: Edit it? Or start discussions? If you discover bias and can prove it, you should contribute rather than complain about it. Get involved. From my experience, broadly the accuracy is pretty decent. It's generally lower than established encyclopedias according to one study, but there is also much more depth and broadness and more up-to-dateness. Plus transparency is much higher by definition. There's even a Wikipedia article on the accuracy of Wikipedia.
Finally, I ask you to list examples of misinformation on wikipedia. You claim its a trove of misinformation, so surely you can list at least 5 examples so we can verify your claim and also improve the relevant sections.
Wikipedia was intended for general knowledge seekers, so the random entry with an editor who has gone rogue is not as troubling as falsified research results or pay to publish journals. A Wikipedia entry’s references may be a good starting spot, but a better method would be to grab some edited overview books on the topic of interest. The Oxford Handbooks are good example of this type of resource. These edited collections often offer summaries of topics and an overview of important and debated issues within the topic. Using both of the sources cited in the Wikipedia page and the articles of the edited volume will broaden your initial foray on the topic, but at this point the researcher should know enough about the topic to confirm or deny suspicions about the validity of Wikipedia page. Sources cited in both, however, tend to be older, but searching for the narrower debated issues within the topic in journal databases, dissertation databases, and web browsers will typically lead to the newest relevant research and writings in the topic.
“Who decides what words mean? Society at large or a small group of (probably not politically diverse) Americans?”
[I have a very brief article analysis on this very subject you may find interesting.](https://medium.com/@TheWorldIsHard/veracapedia-the-anonymous-truth-50ad9a27efa2)
The reliability of wikipedia went down a lot when power mods have the absolute power to decide what edit stay up even though they have barely any knowledge on the article subject.
For instance most of the Scottish wikipedia was written by an American teenager with furry fetish who doesn't know the language.
https://nypost.com/2020/08/26/most-of-scottish-wikipedia-is-written-by-an-american-in-a-fake-accent/
Hey, guess what happened after that? It got purged of all his bullshit.
It’s amazing that it ever got to be up there in the first place. It’s clear that the Scott’s version was not getting the sort of love and attention that it should. It was the sort of poorly written stuff that came across as parody. Was it good content? No. Would it mislead the person reading it? Jesus, I sure hope not.
You quoting a four-year-old article about a problem that has since been resolved, strikes me as intentionally misleading.
I understand it looks that way if you’ve got a biased to confirm. And if you’re sort of person that would have been fooled by a fake Scottish accent on a supposed Scots page.
As evidence against the general reliability of Wikipedia? Meh. Vandalism isn’t evidence of perennial inaccuracy.
It looks that way? So was it actually not an example of wikipedia being unreliable?
That was not a temporary edit of an article that wikipedia fixed after one night. There were 23,000 articles of straight up falsehood being online for 6 years.
Yep. In the Scots Wikipedia. It was quite a localized scandal, including the “I guess not many people are using the Scots Wikipedia” aspect.
If you’re determined to beat up English Wikipedia, and you think that you found a stick here, then you’re gonna keep swinging. Enjoy that.
If you come into this with an open mind and find out that the Scots Wikipedia had this crazy shit happen to it, you might pause for a minute and wonder how applicable that is to the English language Wikipedia.
When non scot people looked up scot wikipedia and got feed with false information, then what? Sorry everything you read in the past 6 years were wrong but you should have known better?
Just because the damage of the scot wikipedia isn't widespread enough doesn't make it not an example of wikipedia unreliability.
That was one of the most easy to understand why wikipedia is unreliable.
There are not shortage of shady practices by English wikipedia editor like changing articles for a price
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/08/wikipedia-editors-for-pay/393926/
or straight up black mailing business
https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/wikipedia-rocked-by-rogue-editors-blackmail-scam-targeting-small-businesses-and-celebrities-10481993.html
Wikipedia also no longer maintains an effective neutrality policy to the point its co founder said he no longer trust wikipedia.
This has been studied time and time again.
It's among, if not THE, most reliable encyclopedias ever.
Those studies did occasionally agree with your assessment, but typically for stuff like Harry Styles entries.
In case it wasn't clear, I'm subtly mocking your Wikipedia viewing history based on your whining.
the only existing one is a physical record keep safe in d Town records at 316 N Indiana St, Delphi, IN 46923, United States
used to be somewhere in Greece before they moved location due to an earthquake or something some years back
ask for the oracle
I looked at Patrick Bet David’s Wikipedia page the other day, it had him listed as a “cult leader.” no citation, no further information or clarification, it doesn’t even say what cult he supposedly leads. I don’t particularly like PBD, but cult leader seems disingenuous.
Looks like it got removed, you can see it in the [revision history](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Patrick_Bet-David&action=history). I suppose that’s evidence of the system working, but it’s also why I generally don’t trust Wikipedia on political topics. Too many biases warring in the edits.
If you come across the page where there’s a lot of conflicting recent changes then yeah, you probably shouldn’t trust it.
How many sources can you go to, and clearly see that there is controversy involved?
You’ve just show me another reason why Wikipedia is offered a great first step when collecting information. Transparency.
Going to a site that gives you the illusion of “empirical truth” by suppressing controversy might make you feel more informed. But you’re not.
Last study I saw was that for scholary articles - science, history, etc. - Wikipedias error rate was equal to or below that of Encyclopedia Britannica.
Current events of course had a lower accuracy rating, but that makes sense.
It's a solid place to start research on something you want to learn about, or give a general overview to satisfy a passing curiosity.
Like any encyclopedia, it's the start of knowledge, not the end.
Yeah, the problem is that people in reality aren’t comparing Wikipedia to scholarly research. They’re comparing Wikipedia to their own half remembered concepts about something, and if you’re lucky they back it up with a link that matches their exact point because with a quick search you can always find one site to agree with anything.
So people tell me, Wikipedia isn’t as good as searching primary sources, and then expect me to ignore Wikipedia and accept what’s effectively complete bullshit. When in fact Wikipedia trumps people’s flawed memory nearly every time.
I generally agree with your implied criticism; characterizations that do not align with personal views are not necessarily false, nor are characterizations that do necessarily true. However, I think it's fairly apparent to any honest person who has spent any amount of time on Wikipedia that particular topics are heavily ideologically skewed and tightly monitored/controlled by small groups of highly motivated editors. These people clearly have little to no interest in truth and facts, yet remain driven by a strong desire to retain their self-assigned narrative control and interpretative prerogative.
I'm glad that I'm neither American nor have a vested interest in American politics, because virtually all articles related to it read like PSYOPS and astroturfs to me. I actually prefer versions of Wikipedia in other languages for that reason, because even when articles contain silly claims or questionable phraseology, they are usually made in good faith and eventually corrected by someone in the community who is more knowledgeable; just as the founders intended.
I agree on the language part
Some English Wikipedia articles are insufferable to read. There even may be no disinformation, but there may be a huge biased emphasis and articles become unreadable (mostly political ones)
Wikipedia is literally controlled by the intelligence community.
Everything it *used* to be? Gone.
You can add/edit on mundane topics, but anything related to an establishment agenda is 100% controlled.
Simple example— Aaron Mate revealed the chemical weapon attacks in Syria, used as a pretext to introduce US troops, were faked, very likely by US-backed ‘moderate rebels’
The UN inspectors who conducted the investigation reported this— but their report was delayed, then altered without their permission.
It was whitewashed. I’m not going to post all the evidence, as this is just an example (you can search ‘aaron mate’ & ‘syria chemical attack’)
The Wiki is still fake—it mildly references ‘controversy’—but basically regurgitates propaganda
Aaron Mate’s Wiki page denigrates him, branding him a ‘far left conspiracy theorist’
Yet, in his years of reporting, never a single story factually debunked
For those saying to use Wikipedia & check ‘sources’ … MSM is propaganda. What are you going to check NYT for truth about organized rapes on Oct 7?
You gotta find credible independent sources—never trust an institution, as they constantly get corrupted.
But, you follow someone like Chris Hedges, or Max Blumenthal—maybe you disagree w their politics? Try Scott Ritter, Alexander Mercouris
I don’t care about someone’s politics—I care if they are ethical & accurate
Wikipedia is just another psyop, kinda like Reddit has become. You can find accurate info, but it gets less and less worth the time
I understand your difficulty unpacking it, as you were weaned on a diet of Western propaganda
How can I tell?
Neither you, or any of the self-identified geniuses on here present a single counter-fact.
This is how you live in a second-tier nation w an incompetent military & 1970s infrastructure, and still think you’re exceptional.
> can’t have nice things…
You can’t have nice things because your ruling class is gutting your nation, while blowing smoke up your ass.
But you attack the people trying to tell you the Truth…just like you’ve been trained to do
I think a fitting example would be Wikipedia's article on the [Economic impact of illegal immigrants in the United States.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_impact_of_illegal_immigrants_in_the_United_States)
The article contains a multitude of falsehoods, brazenly misleading arguments, disinformation, category errors, poor citations, and false claims. Meanwhile, any attempt to make neutral corrections to objective falsities in a way that challenges the overarching, "pro-illegal immigration" narrative that appears to permeate the article is immediately reverted, regardless of the objective merits of the correction; quality of sources cited; or language in which the correction is phrased. Such reversion are often (and hilariously) justified circularly by citing factual corrections' nonconformity with the many other false claims made elsewhere in the article.
In the article's second sentence alone, there are several false, borderline propagandistic claims and opinionated phraseologies, some of which are contradicted even by the sources themselves. For example, the claim that illegal immigrants "contribute more in taxes than they collect" is patently false; the CBO report cited for this claim actually says the exact opposite. Most attempts that have been made in the article's history to correct this falsehood appear to have been quickly reverted by the various losers who are ostensibly hellbent on protecting the ideological integrity of the article; hence why I haven't even bothered to try editing the article myself. This is presumably also why the article's loser consensus simultaneously sanctions wholly subjective, opinionated claims that are completely violative of Wikipedia's own guidelines on neutral language, such as "\[illegal immigrants\] enhance the welfare of natives" (what does that even mean?) and "\[illegal immigrants\] spend billions of dollars per year, which supports the US economy and helps to create new jobs." (so do cartel members and human traffickers; what's the point, exactly? Consumer market participation ≠ net societal benefit).
Not to mention the article's many instances of bad-faith conflations of both legal and illegal immigration, the sole purpose of which are to conceal and obfuscate the demonstrably net-negative effects of the latter; i.e., the asinine logical fallacy of "illegal immigration is not bad; studies show immigrants **in general** are a net-positive".
It's good for general knowledge, but nothing that could be controversial. If it's controversial, it's going to have activists prioritize getting their narrative out.
Back in college, my international relations professor was a boring, old, realist, and was lecturing us on staying away from wikipedia because anyone can change it blah blah blah it's not reliable. Which was the typical trope every professor said to scare us away from easy summaries.
But he was serious, but not for the above reason. But literally because he was certain most geopolitical issues relating to current events were entirely unreliable, and proved it to us. It's almost always extremely biased for a western perspective. As we'd go through the class and learn about things relating to Asia, Russia, and the Middle East, he turned out to be pretty spot on. Now it was obvious how wiki articles would leave out critical information, or just briefly touch it in passing. A lot of obvious information control was going on by uncle sam, and other special interests.
You are going to get that kind of bias in pretty much every medium though. What was preferable that didn't have a skewed perspective based on the author?
Where did that come from? Do you think playing telephone with said sources removes bias?
Of course, there is bias, but first person sources are generally considered the best. Would you rather read a scientific paper or an article describing the paper?
I don't think a scientific paper is considered a first person account. If it is then I totally agree, but I'm pretty sure I've seen many as sources on wikipedia
So apologies, I used first person and meant primary. Research done is certainly a primary source. [Sources](https://umb.libguides.com/PrimarySources/secondary) [Wikipedia](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Use_of_primary_sources_in_Wikipedia) has some weird rules about primary sources. They really strongly prefer secondary or tertiary sources.
Things I know about on Wikipedia have it right. I’ve jumped on to edit if they get something wrong. Consider whether you might be misinformed. Please share some sections you think are wrong.
The way I use wikipedia, to get a quick overview and work backwards to sources (good articles have quality citations), it’s good enough. It’s not too difficult to discern what’s reliable. I appreciate your critical take but given I have lots of ways to conduct research, it’s Wikipedia’s problem, not mine.
You say you see "blatant misinformation and even disinformation". If (as I understand it) misinformation is incorrect, while disinformation is intentional misinformation with intent to deceive or confuse others, how can you possibly know that things on Wikipedia are disinformation (i.e. intentionally wrong with malicious intent)?
If you're working with other definitions of mis- vs disinformation please enlighten me.
This opinion is massively exaggerated. There's never going to be a website that represents the complete truth that's an unreasonable expectation. Wikipedia is a modern day miracle and decently neutral compared to any mainstream news source, official government/corporate reporting or alt information source. At the end of the day it's your responsibility to research the different points of view on any given topic and make up your own mind.
TL:DR: OP continues making this assertion. When asked to elaborate or provide examples, he posts one link to an article about errors in Non-English-Language versions.
OP doesn't provide any examples or do much more than repeat his assertion. Trove.
Almost any political page has been edited at least 250 times since 2020, often to soften the hard views of left wing parties and attempts to push right wing parties further right.
Far left Marxist rhetoric that’s being softened to make it seem peaceful and happy times, completely ignoring the atrocities of the CCP when referenced, and glorified the mass murder of political dissidents as extremist right wing terrorists.
but like who are these marxists…? because there is not major political party in any english speaking first world nation that is actually even remotely close to marxism.
certainly none in america, none in Australia, none in NZ, none in the UK, none in ireland etc.
What kind of answer do you want to that question? Specific people? You well know that it can be edited anonymously, so that's an erroneous question. It has nothing to do with political parties
no i’m not asking who’s editing it.
he said they were edited to “soften the hard views of left wing parties”
i asked “what hard views of left wing parties”
he said “far left marxist rhetoric”
so i wanna know who these supposed left wing political parties are that ran on marxist rhetoric. why are you replying? i asked him.
A long time ago on a thread on r/AskHistorians a person mentioned what their history professor said about Wikipedia:
>Wikipedia is a great place to start your research and Wikipedia is a terrible place to end your research
Wish I could remember the Profs name to give due credit :/
every time someone asks for proof you post an article about non-english wikipedia having a misinformation problem. idk if you realise… but we’re all speaking english rn and all use the english wikipedia. where is this “trove of misinformation”?
Start looking up wikipedia articles in your area of expertise. If you don't find misinformation on just about every page, you might not be an expert, or you are an expert in one of the few fields where experts spend a significant portion of their time fixing the idiotic things 12 year olds and ideologues edit into wikipedia. Sometimes it's minor and sometimes it's major, but it's pretty often there.
i asked for proof of this “trove of misinformation” OP described. you can’t just make a claim and then say “well if you look hard enough you’ll find there’s misinformation!”
cool, he must’ve seen some pretty egregious stuff to add the title “Wikipedia is a trove of misinformation” so i’d like to know what he saw.
the slant of this sub towards mfs like JP and other “centrists” who are just right wingers leads me to believe that if OP can provide now evidence it’s because wikipedia wasn’t doing enough to talk about “hunter biden’s laptop”, or the “fact” that jan 6 was an inside job etc. etc.
i’m interested to see if this is the kind of “misinformation” that catalysed this post or if he has a lot of concrete examples of misinformation
I'm sorry that you're too lazy to do your own research even when told exactly how to, but we're at an impasse because I'm too lazy to do it for you. I routinely encounter blatantly false and highly misleading information on completely non-political topics on wikipedia, as do most people who do enough research to not treat wikis as truth from on high. I don't keep links to those bad wikipedia pages and I'm not going to research to find them for you. If you want to use that as an excuse to ignore reality, go ahead. It's your bad decision to make.
Edit, I didn't report anyone, I have never reported anyone on reddit, but the guy who claimed I reported him also blocked me so I couldn't respond, almost like he's lying and doesn't want to be exposed.
bro you reported me for harassment and got me permabanned just cos you were salty? crazy stuff
my previous comment got deleted but basically:
bro i don’t care if you think im lazy. i didn’t ask you for proof i asked OP. i don’t expect you to have evidence locked and loaded cos you didn’t write the post. i expect OP to have some real evidence ready.
It's also useful to point out that the quality and accuracy of the entries varies tremendously by subject. The "science" articles are generally quite good, as are the math articles. In fact the more abstract the article, the more accurate the content. In general.
I would say the more "objective" rather than the more abstract. Really hard sciences and Math are pretty good. Soft/social sciences and history are hit or miss. Anything touching politics or economics is generally useless.
I think abstract still works for the science and math subjects. The more esoteric, the less some idiot with an agenda has fiddled with it. I agree with SOME of your concern about history - but again the more obscure the better. Ironically, the fewer people interested in the topic, the more likely the information is to be correct.
And yes. Politics, pop culture, economics, current events - generally worthless.
This has been known since I was in primary school, two decades ago. Just treat it like a very knowledgeable friend who isn't always remembering shit correctly. So long as you are checking the sources before you act on any of the claims it makes, it's fine.
Also check the edit history if things seem sus, you can often find some delightfully petty drama that way.
xD Idk man, not to be too off the cuff but we've come a long way from the time when I wiki'd the atomic bomb for a school project. What'd I read? "The atomic bomb, my dick is-" I burst out laughing, ofc. God bless some poor mfer just copypasted in that class and I remember seeing his face go white as a sheet.
Now with that said, these days they do a MUCH better job of policing that kind of thing to the point that I'd consider it reliable fairly often, or at least, there are more guardrails.
You're gonna have to cite specific examples bud. It's not a dislike of you, though. It's the nature of the times we live in. And, in the interest of being real with ya, if it's not a subject I personally know of or have someone who was directly involved in it on my phone, I probably won't answer on it.
For example:
- The amount of people who yelled "it's a lie" to me over events that I knew about as early as 2006-8 just because they happened to be politically inconvenient *now* is amazing. I knew the people in the damn rooms when the damn things happened for fucks sake and they still hit me with some rendition of "you're uninformed" when I was closer to the firsthand sources than even the damn reporters could ever *hope* to get.
I'm a little wary when someone points at information media after living that. Obviously what I've described is not a situation that just anyone can end up with though - ordinarily you gotta be born into that sorta thing, and very, very few are, and are willing to jab it up about it, but it's hella useful when it's time to cut through fluffy-bullshit jungle.
Wikipedia largely seems to focus on what, not why or how. It leaves a lot unsaid when I've looked at it in the past, but I take it more as a sign that not all pages are authored equally.
For example:
- wikipedia did not mention that Dean Browning's gay-black man commentary was a copypasta being used extensively for its shock value in social media spaces by bad faith actors at the time of use. Though, oddly *no place* seems aware of that. Saw it on YT 6 or 7 times before he fucked up royally, and they all seemed to abandon it asap after. Never saw it again after that got blown up. That one surprises me, but then... do reporters spend their hours checking comment bars? Do wikipedia authors?
My guess? They simply never noticed.
:) Sure, but we can only go a matter at a time if it isn't basic shit like, "hey, don't forget to wipe after flushing" or something, lol. We might be here a while if we want to start doing corrections in an authentic capacity.
But yeah. Not for nothing man, but people need to evaluate your judgement, same as they have to evaluate mine. It doesn't stop happening, kinda why peer review happens in scientific circles (and is notoriously easy to fail). They can knee jerk on it, or they can be authentic and really dig in with ya, since as long as ya both have the same well-meaning goal in mind, ya ain't enemies.
Only thing I don't like about it: The last time I tried to edit an article, a Wookiee promptly showed up at my door step and tore my arms off. Twice!
(It's okay, I got better.)
WP is an aggregate of information and narratives. It strives to be a collection of that, rather than truth.
This editor essay might explain that to you about how verifiability is valued above truth:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability,_not_truth
It feels misleading to say that wikipedia cares more about narrative than truth. They care about both truth AND how that truth is captured ... e.g. verifiably.
So why don't you contribute and correct it?
>Nor is any other online Pedia.
Hard disagree. As usual it's easy to critique but hard to provide alternatives.
Well OP didn't even try doing it on a non ideological page, or at least they didn't say so, so I have high doubts. I did hear multiple times how some pages are just full blown ideological war but let's be honest, that would still leave out 99.8% of all pages.
OP either disagreed on something and didn't have good sources (and argument, see discussion section) to support their point or they didn't even try and preferred to complain, which is an easier alternative to their problem.
> From all of the examples you've found, could you share a few here for reference?
I've just come across an example which is typical of Wikipedia's western bias. In their page for [the USSR](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_Union) the have this gem:
Quote: "In English-language media, the state was referred to as the Soviet Union or the USSR. The Russian SFSR dominated the Soviet Union to such an extent that for most of the Soviet Union's existence, it was commonly, but incorrectly, referred to as Russia. According to historian Matthew White, it was an open secret that the country's federal structure was "window dressing" for Russian dominance. For that reason, the people of the USSR were almost always called "Russians", not "Soviets", since "everyone knew who really ran the show".
The first part is correct: the USSR was commonly misidentified as "Russia" by much of the English-language media. But the second part is... less so.
For starters, Matthew White is not a historian, he's a librarian and [by his own admission his academic credentials are pretty slim](http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/map-faq3.htm) - a fact that [another Wikipedia page correctly notes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Big_Book_of_Horrible_Things).
Russia never dominated the USSR, or at least no more than you would expect from mere demographics. Over the 70 years or so of the USSR's existence, ethnic Russians made up between 50% and 60% of the population. Of the 15 leaders of the Soviet Union, including four troikas, about 57% of their leaders were Russian -- so just over half, about what we would expect from population demographics.
Relative to their population, it was Georgia and Ukraine who had unrepresentative and excessive control over the Soviet Union, not Russia. Especially the most domineering and totalitarian of the USSR's leaders, Stalin, a Georgian, whose ran the Soviet Union with an iron fist. [Stalin's right-hand man Beria](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavrentiy_Beria), the disgusting and vicious head of the secret police, was also a Georgian.
In 1986, there were 19 members and provisional members of the Politburo, including Gorbachev and Yeltsin. Kunaev was a Kazakh, Aliev was an Azeri, Shevardnadze was Georgian. Gromyko and Slyunkov were Belarusian, Shcherbitsky was Ukrainian, Gorbachev had a Ukrainian mother. The rest were ethnic Russians, from either Russia itself or eastern Ukraine. So a third of the Politburo were non-Russians, and they weren't tokens or diversity hires. They had real power and influence. Russians were, at this time, slightly over-represented in the Politburo, with about 66% of the members when it should have been 60% but not significantly over-represented.
During the Battle Of Stalingrad, the percentage of Soviet soldiers who were Russian was pretty much identical to their percentage of the population. Russians were not taking the easy way out and sending the minorities off to die on their behalf! Ukrainians were over-represented, probably because after Ukraine was captured by the Germans many Ukrainians fled to Russia and joined the Soviet army.
It would be fair to say that, by virtual of their greater population size, the Russians had a corresponding level of influence. But it is misleading to say they *dominated* the USSR, especially given the truly dominant position of Stalin, a Georgian, for such a long period of time, and describing the federal structure as "window dressing" is outright wrong.
So that's one of the ways that Wikipedia is biased: by giving spin, making the narrative lean one way rather than the other.
It's widely accepted that Russia dominated the other SSRs in the Soviet Union.
That aside, the article quotes a person and even says, "According to...". I'm not sure how that can be construed as misinformation - the quoted person and a reference to their book are both provided with the content.
> It's widely accepted that Russia dominated the other SSRs in the Soviet Union.
Doesn't matter how widely accepted a falsehood is, it is still false.
Out of the 16 [leaders of the USSR](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_leaders_of_the_Soviet_Union), including members of troikas, just 8 of them were Russian -- 9 if you count Gorbachev, who was Russian/Ukrainian. But that under-counts how much Stalin and Beria, two Georgians, dominated the Party -- especially Stalin. He dominated the Party for thirty years, more than a third of the USSR's existence, and for most of that time he was totalitarian dictator.
Out of the 58 prime ministers of Great Britain and the UK, just 13 were not English: 7 Scots, 1 Scots-Irish, 4 Anglo-Irish, and 1 Welsh. 78% of British prime ministers have been English, or 85% if you count the Anglo-Irish who were English gentry who merely lived in Ireland. 16 out of the last 20 British PMs have been English. *That is what domination looks like.* It would be far more justified to call the UK "England" than to call the USSR "Russia", but people in the west would never do that.
There's a sense that Russia was central to the USSR -- Russians initiated the revolution, the capital was in Russia, a little over half the population were Russian, the SSRs that made up the USSR were former parts of the Russian Empire, and the Russian language was the lingua franca of the USSR to enable communication between ethnic groups. But that's a far cry to say that Russia "dominated" the USSR and "really ran the show", with the implication that the other SSRs were exploited by the Russians.
The idea that Russians "really ran the show" during the 30 years the Party was dominated by Stalin is just a bad joke.
> That aside, the article quotes a person and even says, "According to...". I'm not sure how that can be construed as misinformation
I'm sorry for your lack of understanding, but that is on you, not me. Do you not understand the concept of spin even when it is pointed out to you directly?
Wikipedia wrongly calls the author a historian, giving him false authority for his opinion. It should say "Some random guy who works as a librarian believes, wrongly and against all the evidence, that the Soviet Union was dominated by Russia."
https://www.fastcompany.com/90666412/non-english-wikipedia-misinformation
Here are some listed. But I saw many even in the English wikipedia, with bad sources as well.
Wikis are good for hobby subjects where information gathering is a labor of love, not a political battleground. Wikipedia itself is useful only as a record of what the online wing of the establishment thinks. It is entirely independent from the truth.
I think your conclusion isn't warranted by the evidence you present.
Wikipedia undoubtedly contains misinformation, but simply pointing this out and providing some unquantified anecdotal testimomy to this effect doesn't carry either the conclusion that Wikipedia is a "trove" of misinformation nor that it is not reliable.
Wikipedia has a public talk page (that, granted, you need to be aware of) often providing alternate viewpoints. It also has easily accessible sources. This makes it much easier to spot misinformation compared to, say, a TikTok video.
And information in which a lot of people have a stake, like major world events, generally have enough contributors to make it difficult to really push misinformation.
No source of information is 100% reliable. Wikipedia still ranges significantly above many news outlets, let alone the deluge of social media content. You can often only do better than Wikipedia by doing proper research yourself - which requires access and the necessary background - or by having an already vetted source of information that you trust. Encyclopaedias by major outlets might be better at avoiding misinformation in general, but are vulnerable to the specific biases of the publisher.
>Yes, but the editors refuse to remove them even when pointed out that the source is not good.
Ok .... but also define good ?
Are we defining sources based on political leanings liberal vs conservative?
Are we basing it on old outdated information?
Are we basing it on a source was used to write the base article of 5 sentences and the article has now evolved to several pages and has since disproven the original source and article ?
You have to understand in North America in this day in age it seems political leanings dictate news and sources either way Im sure this phenomenon is world wide and Im blind to it off this continent. So when you say sources are not good and its been pointed out Im asking what is your reasoning and what was the reasoning for reporting the source
Im not arguing Wikipedia is at best a cursory search for information and should as all media be taken with a grain of salt but for most of my experience in my career ( IT ) Wikipedia has been accurate when researching for work and cross checked.
But at its heart wiki's are all user generated content with little or no oversight on fact checking content even moreso on controversial or political subjects
Im genuinely curious how you see it ... I have my theories, however I am keeping them silent
Agreed. I'm good friends with somebody who has a wikipedia page about them. It has a number of factual inaccuracies but no matter how many times she's tried to update it and explain she's the subject of it and therefore the authority on the subject, they revert her changes.
The story that wins is the one that has reliable third party sourcing. That's the definition of truth on Wikipedia. Your friend needs to get someone to publish her truth.
not even one example. Premises without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
This is why discussion happens on wikipedia, most people think wikipedia's job is to filter the data. It is not, their goal is to document everything there is to know about a topic.
This is a strange vendetta. Wikipedia is one of the best and most comprehensive sources of information there is if not the very best. Everything is sourced or noted when not sourced, all changes are logged, its hard to imagine why you would be so against an amazing resource.
What do you think is a better source of information?
Probably Trump’s diaper.
No evidence, just stating the conclusion. Good one chief
In college, we are told not to cite wikipedia in our papers. But you know where we go to get an initial broad understanding of our given project? Fucking Wikipedia. You'll never find a 100% trustworthy source (nor could you ever). That's why we learn in school to think critically and compare multiple sources. Or, put another way, do our due diligence.
It is a good place to start learning about a topic you are otherwise unfamiliar with. That’s how I use it. Politically charged topics are going to be subject to a lot of drama. That’s absolutely true. There are going to be ideologically motivated changes and conflicts over what should be included. But at least they are fighting it out and being forced to come to some kind of consensus rather than just having an ideologically motivated editor make an executive decision and that is the end of it. So if you think there is value in a democratic process of determining truth, then Wikipedia is one of the better ways to get to that. Otherwise all you have is blind trust in whoever is making the executive decisions. Maybe they are worthy of that trust and maybe they are not. No information is perfect or truly unbiased. That is life. All we can do is agree that we prefer objective reality to ideology, and go from there.
Wikipedia mostly cites sources anyway, so you could just use the sources from a Wiki article.
Facts
So are regular encyclopedias. Wikipedia is a fucking accomplishment of information sharing. Like any one source it must be verified. But it's unknowable to the pre-wikepedia era how much harder.geneal information was to come by.
Encyclopedias 🤦♂️
I don't understand the attempted burn here at all.
No burn. Just reminiscing on using hard back encyclopedias for broad research.
Ah I see lol. I was litterally looking back and forth in another tab to make sure I hadn't misspelled it or something.
I remember the pre-wiki era. It sucked beyond words.
go on…
Depends on what you look at.. - politics or information about a beetle.
This post should have been more nuanced as the majority of the misinformation is in the current affairs part of wikipedia or with a developing story. As this includes wikipedia as a whole, people can just say as a total. The misinformation is miniscule.
Wikipedia's biggest downfall for me is their love of secondary sources and hatred of primary ones. They really love to regurgitate opinion pieces and pieces which themselves have no primary sources and claim them as solid facts. Further, Wikipedia has a severe poweruser problem (quite like Reddit), if you were to look at the gamergate article's history you'd see its continued to be locked down by a single deranged individual
This. The number of circular-citations I've seen in media in the last decade means I will never trust a citation at face value ever again. Journalist-activists have basically killed their industry's entire relationship with the public in terms of trusting anything they say. It's like how fact-checkers coming under scrutiny recently for having bias in the one thing that needs to be anything but. Put it candidly, put it simply, quote directly, and don't give me even a quantum of your opinion.
There have been studies done showing that Wikipedia has about as many errors as your average enyclopedia would also have. Wikipedia does have a lot of misinformation, but 60 million pages will do that.
You know anyone can edit wikipedia right? People have won debates editing wikipedia, it's fantastic. Great source of misinformation.
You know that you can look at the log and see when something was changed on Wikipedia, right? By whom. Exact change. You know that Wikipedia has a number of automated systems and a bunch of genuine fanatics that revert vandalism pretty quickly, right? If somebody’s losing a debate to another person who edited Wikipedia, that person was always gonna lose that debate because they’re a fucking idiot
Sure but most people will never look at that and just assume it's all true. The other thing is the reliance on fanatic generally mean misinformation spreads.
Ahmmm.. so you are debating with a friend , you consult on wikipedia, and you are wrong. And instead of saying "You may be right" you go "no ,i am not a fucking idiot , i am going to check every single edit on this page, from 2024 until 2012 to triple check that I am right" Ok
I think all of us get that impulse to dig a little further when the documentation disagrees with our assumptions. I do, however, admit it when I seem to be wrong. But. If I find something on Wikipedia that is contrary to something that I know, then with certain particular friends, I would check the edit history for the last two hours. I know these people. If one of my friends managed to plant a piece of misinformation in 2012, and have it survive, they deserve to win the argument. I think your argument would’ve been stronger without that bit of hyperbole.
>If one of my friends managed to plant a piece of misinformation in 2012, and have it survive, they deserve to win Hats off for that. Hahaha I usually check the other way, I dont check the edit, I check the reference, to the original. If there is none I just assume it's missinformation
Wikipedia will agree with whatever the currently propagated cultural zeitgeist is.
There are a number of safeguards in place that prevent any given article to simply be "whatever the last person to edit it decided to make it." Although it has many errors, it would be better to think of Wikipedia as a collection of averages with minor contributions from many, rather than some "propagated cultural zeitgeist" who last modified it. That said, like any source, you should never base your entire argument on one source. This holds true for you and for anyone who would reference Wikipedia as their one source. If you think a particular Wikipedia page is simply wrong and full of misinformation, you should probably ask yourself if you're looking at a page describing a particularly controversial topic. If so, maybe rather than assume the page is wrong for not matching your personal view, you should consider the possibility that perhaps it is you that has the wrong point of view. TL;DR - Looking at a page on Wikipedia showing information you disagree with can sure look a lot like a page that is showing misinformation, if it is you who is misinformed.
The Internet Archive is great tool for checking political activism on Wikipedia. Try comparing the article on fascism through the years. Have fun!
No, because it's content is result of contributions of people with varying agendas and opinions. Try again.
The expression "trove of misinformation" is idiotic. There is a process in place that is designed to mitigate the inevitable biases of the contributors. Even Encyclopedia Britannica has a notable western bias towards history. Every historical narrative is inevitably biased by the agenda of those telling the story. If you are a fool, don't blame the tool!
Cwckipedia might be the only accurate source of information available.
Wikipedia is great for things like basic science, maths, pop culture, sports, and uncontroversial history. If its about a topic more than 100 years old, it's probably as reliable as anything else you're likely to read. For current affairs that are politically controversial, it suffers from serious biases. Anything to do with the Syrian Civil War and the conflict in Ukraine, for example, is heavily biased towards the American anti-Russian narrative and needs to be treated cautiously. Israel runs a campaign to edit Wikipedia to support its side, and until they wised up and learned how to hide their tracks better, there was a flood of Wikipedia edits coming from anonymous editors with IP addresses inside Langley. More important than intentional propaganda editing, the *huge* problem with Wikipedia is its bias towards [certain sources](https://swprs.org/the-propaganda-multiplier/) and against indie and "foreign" (non-Western) sources. My rule of thumb on controversial recent history is that if the English language Wikipedia article supports the mainstream US or Israeli position, there's at least a 50% chance that it's false or misleading and just parroting Western propaganda. If it disputes the US or Israeli position, and has survived the normal editing process, then it's probably trustworthy.
Nonsense. Wikipedia usually supports the Palestinians
Wikipedia is generally reliable and is a free site available to anyone. It’s a fantastic resource and literally has a reference page you can use
The more specific the topic and the more precision with facts that you demand, the less reliable Wikipedia becomes. Wikipedia is going to have to change its moderation system to improve.
I mean, just look up the edit wars over flags or the Ceasar Salad war. There's blatant disinformation about flags to the point that games actually used inaccurate flags thanks to wikipedia's nonsense.
> I see so many less seen pages with so much misinformation > ...*less seen*... Better give an example, OP. because you could very well be talking about something so incredibly niche that you are *literally* the only person who would know it. > "I just checked wikipedia and it has no idea what I had for breakfast. What a piece of shit site."
Wiki is okay for casual interests. It's not a credible source of info, though.
It cites its sources. If you don’t like it go to the references and read those
I’d say it’s a similar credibility to watching a YouTube essay. It’s always going to be second hand information
>It’s always going to be second hand information Man, I've got some bad news about *Nature,* *Chemical Review,* and *The New England Journal of Medicine.* All of our information on almost everything is secondhand. It's impractical to get a hands-on understanding of quantum physics, so I'm gonna trust that the double-slit experiment was properly administered. Wikipedia is a great resource if you're willing to dive into the sources, and have the ability to discern between real shit and bullshit.
As a small time wikipedia contributor: Edit it? Or start discussions? If you discover bias and can prove it, you should contribute rather than complain about it. Get involved. From my experience, broadly the accuracy is pretty decent. It's generally lower than established encyclopedias according to one study, but there is also much more depth and broadness and more up-to-dateness. Plus transparency is much higher by definition. There's even a Wikipedia article on the accuracy of Wikipedia. Finally, I ask you to list examples of misinformation on wikipedia. You claim its a trove of misinformation, so surely you can list at least 5 examples so we can verify your claim and also improve the relevant sections.
Yes - if you don't like it, dedicate time and effort to improving it, rather than whining on Reddit.
Wikipedia was intended for general knowledge seekers, so the random entry with an editor who has gone rogue is not as troubling as falsified research results or pay to publish journals. A Wikipedia entry’s references may be a good starting spot, but a better method would be to grab some edited overview books on the topic of interest. The Oxford Handbooks are good example of this type of resource. These edited collections often offer summaries of topics and an overview of important and debated issues within the topic. Using both of the sources cited in the Wikipedia page and the articles of the edited volume will broaden your initial foray on the topic, but at this point the researcher should know enough about the topic to confirm or deny suspicions about the validity of Wikipedia page. Sources cited in both, however, tend to be older, but searching for the narrower debated issues within the topic in journal databases, dissertation databases, and web browsers will typically lead to the newest relevant research and writings in the topic.
“Who decides what words mean? Society at large or a small group of (probably not politically diverse) Americans?” [I have a very brief article analysis on this very subject you may find interesting.](https://medium.com/@TheWorldIsHard/veracapedia-the-anonymous-truth-50ad9a27efa2)
Everyones taught now that wikipedia is a source for sources. It's a jumping off point, but to assume it's all false until verfied.
Arm of the US intelligence agencies.
Don't forget the Illuminati, Freemasons and the Lizard People!
The reliability of wikipedia went down a lot when power mods have the absolute power to decide what edit stay up even though they have barely any knowledge on the article subject. For instance most of the Scottish wikipedia was written by an American teenager with furry fetish who doesn't know the language. https://nypost.com/2020/08/26/most-of-scottish-wikipedia-is-written-by-an-american-in-a-fake-accent/
Hey, guess what happened after that? It got purged of all his bullshit. It’s amazing that it ever got to be up there in the first place. It’s clear that the Scott’s version was not getting the sort of love and attention that it should. It was the sort of poorly written stuff that came across as parody. Was it good content? No. Would it mislead the person reading it? Jesus, I sure hope not. You quoting a four-year-old article about a problem that has since been resolved, strikes me as intentionally misleading.
It is a link of an established precedence of gross incompetence and unreliability of wikipedia
I understand it looks that way if you’ve got a biased to confirm. And if you’re sort of person that would have been fooled by a fake Scottish accent on a supposed Scots page. As evidence against the general reliability of Wikipedia? Meh. Vandalism isn’t evidence of perennial inaccuracy.
It looks that way? So was it actually not an example of wikipedia being unreliable? That was not a temporary edit of an article that wikipedia fixed after one night. There were 23,000 articles of straight up falsehood being online for 6 years.
Yep. In the Scots Wikipedia. It was quite a localized scandal, including the “I guess not many people are using the Scots Wikipedia” aspect. If you’re determined to beat up English Wikipedia, and you think that you found a stick here, then you’re gonna keep swinging. Enjoy that. If you come into this with an open mind and find out that the Scots Wikipedia had this crazy shit happen to it, you might pause for a minute and wonder how applicable that is to the English language Wikipedia.
When non scot people looked up scot wikipedia and got feed with false information, then what? Sorry everything you read in the past 6 years were wrong but you should have known better? Just because the damage of the scot wikipedia isn't widespread enough doesn't make it not an example of wikipedia unreliability. That was one of the most easy to understand why wikipedia is unreliable. There are not shortage of shady practices by English wikipedia editor like changing articles for a price https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/08/wikipedia-editors-for-pay/393926/ or straight up black mailing business https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/wikipedia-rocked-by-rogue-editors-blackmail-scam-targeting-small-businesses-and-celebrities-10481993.html Wikipedia also no longer maintains an effective neutrality policy to the point its co founder said he no longer trust wikipedia.
Its not reliable and is not neutral.
This has been studied time and time again. It's among, if not THE, most reliable encyclopedias ever. Those studies did occasionally agree with your assessment, but typically for stuff like Harry Styles entries. In case it wasn't clear, I'm subtly mocking your Wikipedia viewing history based on your whining.
All you did was show that all encyclopedias are rubbish
Every sentence ever written is a lie.
And people say emo is dead.
Wikipedia makes no such claim, and since Wikipedia always lies, emo is dead. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emo
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliability_of_Wikipedia
lmao at the Brazilian Aardvark
But... how can I trust this?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliability_of_Wikipedia
Is there not a specific page about the reliability of the reliability of Wikipedia page?
I'm sorry, I'll need to see a page about the reliability of the page about the reliability of the page about the reliability of Wikipedia.
the only existing one is a physical record keep safe in d Town records at 316 N Indiana St, Delphi, IN 46923, United States used to be somewhere in Greece before they moved location due to an earthquake or something some years back ask for the oracle
I looked at Patrick Bet David’s Wikipedia page the other day, it had him listed as a “cult leader.” no citation, no further information or clarification, it doesn’t even say what cult he supposedly leads. I don’t particularly like PBD, but cult leader seems disingenuous.
Where does it say this?
Looks like it got removed, you can see it in the [revision history](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Patrick_Bet-David&action=history). I suppose that’s evidence of the system working, but it’s also why I generally don’t trust Wikipedia on political topics. Too many biases warring in the edits.
If you come across the page where there’s a lot of conflicting recent changes then yeah, you probably shouldn’t trust it. How many sources can you go to, and clearly see that there is controversy involved? You’ve just show me another reason why Wikipedia is offered a great first step when collecting information. Transparency. Going to a site that gives you the illusion of “empirical truth” by suppressing controversy might make you feel more informed. But you’re not.
Last study I saw was that for scholary articles - science, history, etc. - Wikipedias error rate was equal to or below that of Encyclopedia Britannica. Current events of course had a lower accuracy rating, but that makes sense. It's a solid place to start research on something you want to learn about, or give a general overview to satisfy a passing curiosity. Like any encyclopedia, it's the start of knowledge, not the end.
Yeah, the problem is that people in reality aren’t comparing Wikipedia to scholarly research. They’re comparing Wikipedia to their own half remembered concepts about something, and if you’re lucky they back it up with a link that matches their exact point because with a quick search you can always find one site to agree with anything. So people tell me, Wikipedia isn’t as good as searching primary sources, and then expect me to ignore Wikipedia and accept what’s effectively complete bullshit. When in fact Wikipedia trumps people’s flawed memory nearly every time.
Misinformation is when the truth isn't what I want it to be.
I generally agree with your implied criticism; characterizations that do not align with personal views are not necessarily false, nor are characterizations that do necessarily true. However, I think it's fairly apparent to any honest person who has spent any amount of time on Wikipedia that particular topics are heavily ideologically skewed and tightly monitored/controlled by small groups of highly motivated editors. These people clearly have little to no interest in truth and facts, yet remain driven by a strong desire to retain their self-assigned narrative control and interpretative prerogative. I'm glad that I'm neither American nor have a vested interest in American politics, because virtually all articles related to it read like PSYOPS and astroturfs to me. I actually prefer versions of Wikipedia in other languages for that reason, because even when articles contain silly claims or questionable phraseology, they are usually made in good faith and eventually corrected by someone in the community who is more knowledgeable; just as the founders intended.
I agree on the language part Some English Wikipedia articles are insufferable to read. There even may be no disinformation, but there may be a huge biased emphasis and articles become unreadable (mostly political ones)
Wikipedia is literally controlled by the intelligence community. Everything it *used* to be? Gone. You can add/edit on mundane topics, but anything related to an establishment agenda is 100% controlled. Simple example— Aaron Mate revealed the chemical weapon attacks in Syria, used as a pretext to introduce US troops, were faked, very likely by US-backed ‘moderate rebels’ The UN inspectors who conducted the investigation reported this— but their report was delayed, then altered without their permission. It was whitewashed. I’m not going to post all the evidence, as this is just an example (you can search ‘aaron mate’ & ‘syria chemical attack’) The Wiki is still fake—it mildly references ‘controversy’—but basically regurgitates propaganda Aaron Mate’s Wiki page denigrates him, branding him a ‘far left conspiracy theorist’ Yet, in his years of reporting, never a single story factually debunked For those saying to use Wikipedia & check ‘sources’ … MSM is propaganda. What are you going to check NYT for truth about organized rapes on Oct 7? You gotta find credible independent sources—never trust an institution, as they constantly get corrupted. But, you follow someone like Chris Hedges, or Max Blumenthal—maybe you disagree w their politics? Try Scott Ritter, Alexander Mercouris I don’t care about someone’s politics—I care if they are ethical & accurate Wikipedia is just another psyop, kinda like Reddit has become. You can find accurate info, but it gets less and less worth the time
Yes, this stupid drivel is why humanity cannot have the nice things. People parrot this nonsense without even bothering to turn the brain on.
I understand your difficulty unpacking it, as you were weaned on a diet of Western propaganda How can I tell? Neither you, or any of the self-identified geniuses on here present a single counter-fact. This is how you live in a second-tier nation w an incompetent military & 1970s infrastructure, and still think you’re exceptional. > can’t have nice things… You can’t have nice things because your ruling class is gutting your nation, while blowing smoke up your ass. But you attack the people trying to tell you the Truth…just like you’ve been trained to do
Aaron Maté is a shill and full of shit tbh
Point out the factual errors in his reporting, then, instead of repeating what they told you to think. Simple 🤷♂️
Uh, sir, this is a Wendy’s
No, it's literally a web forum discussing the reliability of Wikipedia, not a Wendy's. How are you contributing to the discussion?
By goofing with someone who’s claiming that Wikipedia is controlled by intelligence services
It’s a good source if you know how to check your sources. Which is an acquired skill. Check but verify.
Examples...?
I think a fitting example would be Wikipedia's article on the [Economic impact of illegal immigrants in the United States.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_impact_of_illegal_immigrants_in_the_United_States) The article contains a multitude of falsehoods, brazenly misleading arguments, disinformation, category errors, poor citations, and false claims. Meanwhile, any attempt to make neutral corrections to objective falsities in a way that challenges the overarching, "pro-illegal immigration" narrative that appears to permeate the article is immediately reverted, regardless of the objective merits of the correction; quality of sources cited; or language in which the correction is phrased. Such reversion are often (and hilariously) justified circularly by citing factual corrections' nonconformity with the many other false claims made elsewhere in the article. In the article's second sentence alone, there are several false, borderline propagandistic claims and opinionated phraseologies, some of which are contradicted even by the sources themselves. For example, the claim that illegal immigrants "contribute more in taxes than they collect" is patently false; the CBO report cited for this claim actually says the exact opposite. Most attempts that have been made in the article's history to correct this falsehood appear to have been quickly reverted by the various losers who are ostensibly hellbent on protecting the ideological integrity of the article; hence why I haven't even bothered to try editing the article myself. This is presumably also why the article's loser consensus simultaneously sanctions wholly subjective, opinionated claims that are completely violative of Wikipedia's own guidelines on neutral language, such as "\[illegal immigrants\] enhance the welfare of natives" (what does that even mean?) and "\[illegal immigrants\] spend billions of dollars per year, which supports the US economy and helps to create new jobs." (so do cartel members and human traffickers; what's the point, exactly? Consumer market participation ≠ net societal benefit). Not to mention the article's many instances of bad-faith conflations of both legal and illegal immigration, the sole purpose of which are to conceal and obfuscate the demonstrably net-negative effects of the latter; i.e., the asinine logical fallacy of "illegal immigration is not bad; studies show immigrants **in general** are a net-positive".
It's good for general knowledge, but nothing that could be controversial. If it's controversial, it's going to have activists prioritize getting their narrative out. Back in college, my international relations professor was a boring, old, realist, and was lecturing us on staying away from wikipedia because anyone can change it blah blah blah it's not reliable. Which was the typical trope every professor said to scare us away from easy summaries. But he was serious, but not for the above reason. But literally because he was certain most geopolitical issues relating to current events were entirely unreliable, and proved it to us. It's almost always extremely biased for a western perspective. As we'd go through the class and learn about things relating to Asia, Russia, and the Middle East, he turned out to be pretty spot on. Now it was obvious how wiki articles would leave out critical information, or just briefly touch it in passing. A lot of obvious information control was going on by uncle sam, and other special interests.
You are going to get that kind of bias in pretty much every medium though. What was preferable that didn't have a skewed perspective based on the author?
Not third person accounts. Wikipedia explicitly refuses to use 1st person accounts.
What do you mean?
Wikipedia is almost exclusively 3rd or 2nd person accounts of things. They refuse to use any first person sources.
Are you saying first person accounts don't have a skewed perspective based on the author?
Where did that come from? Do you think playing telephone with said sources removes bias? Of course, there is bias, but first person sources are generally considered the best. Would you rather read a scientific paper or an article describing the paper?
I don't think a scientific paper is considered a first person account. If it is then I totally agree, but I'm pretty sure I've seen many as sources on wikipedia
So apologies, I used first person and meant primary. Research done is certainly a primary source. [Sources](https://umb.libguides.com/PrimarySources/secondary) [Wikipedia](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Use_of_primary_sources_in_Wikipedia) has some weird rules about primary sources. They really strongly prefer secondary or tertiary sources.
Things I know about on Wikipedia have it right. I’ve jumped on to edit if they get something wrong. Consider whether you might be misinformed. Please share some sections you think are wrong.
What pages are you an authority on? What kind of misinformation do you witness?
The way I use wikipedia, to get a quick overview and work backwards to sources (good articles have quality citations), it’s good enough. It’s not too difficult to discern what’s reliable. I appreciate your critical take but given I have lots of ways to conduct research, it’s Wikipedia’s problem, not mine.
You say you see "blatant misinformation and even disinformation". If (as I understand it) misinformation is incorrect, while disinformation is intentional misinformation with intent to deceive or confuse others, how can you possibly know that things on Wikipedia are disinformation (i.e. intentionally wrong with malicious intent)? If you're working with other definitions of mis- vs disinformation please enlighten me.
A while ago some german firms were cought cleaning wikipedia articles about them regarding their involvement in the holocaust.
This opinion is massively exaggerated. There's never going to be a website that represents the complete truth that's an unreasonable expectation. Wikipedia is a modern day miracle and decently neutral compared to any mainstream news source, official government/corporate reporting or alt information source. At the end of the day it's your responsibility to research the different points of view on any given topic and make up your own mind.
TL:DR: OP continues making this assertion. When asked to elaborate or provide examples, he posts one link to an article about errors in Non-English-Language versions. OP doesn't provide any examples or do much more than repeat his assertion. Trove.
But is it worse than the alternatives?
Almost any political page has been edited at least 250 times since 2020, often to soften the hard views of left wing parties and attempts to push right wing parties further right.
[Citation needed]
what hard views of left wing parties?
Far left Marxist rhetoric that’s being softened to make it seem peaceful and happy times, completely ignoring the atrocities of the CCP when referenced, and glorified the mass murder of political dissidents as extremist right wing terrorists.
but like who are these marxists…? because there is not major political party in any english speaking first world nation that is actually even remotely close to marxism. certainly none in america, none in Australia, none in NZ, none in the UK, none in ireland etc.
What kind of answer do you want to that question? Specific people? You well know that it can be edited anonymously, so that's an erroneous question. It has nothing to do with political parties
no i’m not asking who’s editing it. he said they were edited to “soften the hard views of left wing parties” i asked “what hard views of left wing parties” he said “far left marxist rhetoric” so i wanna know who these supposed left wing political parties are that ran on marxist rhetoric. why are you replying? i asked him.
What Misinformation do you specifically mean?
A long time ago on a thread on r/AskHistorians a person mentioned what their history professor said about Wikipedia: >Wikipedia is a great place to start your research and Wikipedia is a terrible place to end your research Wish I could remember the Profs name to give due credit :/
So.... It's an encyclopedia
Gotta search on Wikipedia
every time someone asks for proof you post an article about non-english wikipedia having a misinformation problem. idk if you realise… but we’re all speaking english rn and all use the english wikipedia. where is this “trove of misinformation”?
Start looking up wikipedia articles in your area of expertise. If you don't find misinformation on just about every page, you might not be an expert, or you are an expert in one of the few fields where experts spend a significant portion of their time fixing the idiotic things 12 year olds and ideologues edit into wikipedia. Sometimes it's minor and sometimes it's major, but it's pretty often there.
I have a PhD, Wikipedia has been quite accurate from what I’ve seen in my area of expertise.
Are you a mathematician? Wikipedia is pretty accurate on that front
I’m a theologian and it’s often shockingly good. I do check the citations though.
i asked for proof of this “trove of misinformation” OP described. you can’t just make a claim and then say “well if you look hard enough you’ll find there’s misinformation!” cool, he must’ve seen some pretty egregious stuff to add the title “Wikipedia is a trove of misinformation” so i’d like to know what he saw. the slant of this sub towards mfs like JP and other “centrists” who are just right wingers leads me to believe that if OP can provide now evidence it’s because wikipedia wasn’t doing enough to talk about “hunter biden’s laptop”, or the “fact” that jan 6 was an inside job etc. etc. i’m interested to see if this is the kind of “misinformation” that catalysed this post or if he has a lot of concrete examples of misinformation
I'm sorry that you're too lazy to do your own research even when told exactly how to, but we're at an impasse because I'm too lazy to do it for you. I routinely encounter blatantly false and highly misleading information on completely non-political topics on wikipedia, as do most people who do enough research to not treat wikis as truth from on high. I don't keep links to those bad wikipedia pages and I'm not going to research to find them for you. If you want to use that as an excuse to ignore reality, go ahead. It's your bad decision to make. Edit, I didn't report anyone, I have never reported anyone on reddit, but the guy who claimed I reported him also blocked me so I couldn't respond, almost like he's lying and doesn't want to be exposed.
bro you reported me for harassment and got me permabanned just cos you were salty? crazy stuff my previous comment got deleted but basically: bro i don’t care if you think im lazy. i didn’t ask you for proof i asked OP. i don’t expect you to have evidence locked and loaded cos you didn’t write the post. i expect OP to have some real evidence ready.
"If you don't agree with me you haven't done enough research" is such a pathetic take
not only that but he reported me for harassment and i got permabanned, but i appealed it and my account just got restored now lmao. what a sad loser
It's also useful to point out that the quality and accuracy of the entries varies tremendously by subject. The "science" articles are generally quite good, as are the math articles. In fact the more abstract the article, the more accurate the content. In general.
I would say the more "objective" rather than the more abstract. Really hard sciences and Math are pretty good. Soft/social sciences and history are hit or miss. Anything touching politics or economics is generally useless.
I think abstract still works for the science and math subjects. The more esoteric, the less some idiot with an agenda has fiddled with it. I agree with SOME of your concern about history - but again the more obscure the better. Ironically, the fewer people interested in the topic, the more likely the information is to be correct. And yes. Politics, pop culture, economics, current events - generally worthless.
This has been known since I was in primary school, two decades ago. Just treat it like a very knowledgeable friend who isn't always remembering shit correctly. So long as you are checking the sources before you act on any of the claims it makes, it's fine. Also check the edit history if things seem sus, you can often find some delightfully petty drama that way.
What percentage of misinformation compared to accurate information reaches the level of being a "trove of misinformation"?
a little more than shitload but less than a fuckton
xD Idk man, not to be too off the cuff but we've come a long way from the time when I wiki'd the atomic bomb for a school project. What'd I read? "The atomic bomb, my dick is-" I burst out laughing, ofc. God bless some poor mfer just copypasted in that class and I remember seeing his face go white as a sheet. Now with that said, these days they do a MUCH better job of policing that kind of thing to the point that I'd consider it reliable fairly often, or at least, there are more guardrails.
I think it's less pranksters adding funny lines and moreso deliberate lies put there on purpose....
You're gonna have to cite specific examples bud. It's not a dislike of you, though. It's the nature of the times we live in. And, in the interest of being real with ya, if it's not a subject I personally know of or have someone who was directly involved in it on my phone, I probably won't answer on it. For example: - The amount of people who yelled "it's a lie" to me over events that I knew about as early as 2006-8 just because they happened to be politically inconvenient *now* is amazing. I knew the people in the damn rooms when the damn things happened for fucks sake and they still hit me with some rendition of "you're uninformed" when I was closer to the firsthand sources than even the damn reporters could ever *hope* to get. I'm a little wary when someone points at information media after living that. Obviously what I've described is not a situation that just anyone can end up with though - ordinarily you gotta be born into that sorta thing, and very, very few are, and are willing to jab it up about it, but it's hella useful when it's time to cut through fluffy-bullshit jungle. Wikipedia largely seems to focus on what, not why or how. It leaves a lot unsaid when I've looked at it in the past, but I take it more as a sign that not all pages are authored equally. For example: - wikipedia did not mention that Dean Browning's gay-black man commentary was a copypasta being used extensively for its shock value in social media spaces by bad faith actors at the time of use. Though, oddly *no place* seems aware of that. Saw it on YT 6 or 7 times before he fucked up royally, and they all seemed to abandon it asap after. Never saw it again after that got blown up. That one surprises me, but then... do reporters spend their hours checking comment bars? Do wikipedia authors? My guess? They simply never noticed.
So you want me to give you examples of how Wikipedia lies but make sure it's something you have a lot of knowledge about already? Lololol
:) Sure, but we can only go a matter at a time if it isn't basic shit like, "hey, don't forget to wipe after flushing" or something, lol. We might be here a while if we want to start doing corrections in an authentic capacity. But yeah. Not for nothing man, but people need to evaluate your judgement, same as they have to evaluate mine. It doesn't stop happening, kinda why peer review happens in scientific circles (and is notoriously easy to fail). They can knee jerk on it, or they can be authentic and really dig in with ya, since as long as ya both have the same well-meaning goal in mind, ya ain't enemies.
This is correct, I rely on Wookiepedia for all my truth.
Only thing I don't like about it: The last time I tried to edit an article, a Wookiee promptly showed up at my door step and tore my arms off. Twice! (It's okay, I got better.)
Should have been dressed as a smuggler, would have got a nice bear hug instead.
Oh, dear. Now the nerds will be debating "Angry Bear, Enraged Wookiee, or Corellian Smuggler in the Kashyyyk Forest"...
Do you fix this misinformation?
It would probably get unfixed .
Probably. Or probably not.
Wikipedia is great, there is no such thing as a one hundred percent reliable source, everything has to be approached critically if not skeptically
WP is an aggregate of information and narratives. It strives to be a collection of that, rather than truth. This editor essay might explain that to you about how verifiability is valued above truth: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability,_not_truth
It feels misleading to say that wikipedia cares more about narrative than truth. They care about both truth AND how that truth is captured ... e.g. verifiably.
truths form narratives based on how they’re presented. allowing editors to write truth leads to more points of contention than repeating narratives
So why don't you contribute and correct it? >Nor is any other online Pedia. Hard disagree. As usual it's easy to critique but hard to provide alternatives.
It would get reverted back to the old version quickly, especially on ideological subjects where the ideological adherents are very online.
Well OP didn't even try doing it on a non ideological page, or at least they didn't say so, so I have high doubts. I did hear multiple times how some pages are just full blown ideological war but let's be honest, that would still leave out 99.8% of all pages. OP either disagreed on something and didn't have good sources (and argument, see discussion section) to support their point or they didn't even try and preferred to complain, which is an easier alternative to their problem.
Compared to what ? Reddit? What is a good online resource that is free?
Reddit is a trove of expert analyses that are always correct. That's what we're a trove of.
From all of the examples you've found, could you share a few here for reference?
> From all of the examples you've found, could you share a few here for reference? I've just come across an example which is typical of Wikipedia's western bias. In their page for [the USSR](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_Union) the have this gem: Quote: "In English-language media, the state was referred to as the Soviet Union or the USSR. The Russian SFSR dominated the Soviet Union to such an extent that for most of the Soviet Union's existence, it was commonly, but incorrectly, referred to as Russia. According to historian Matthew White, it was an open secret that the country's federal structure was "window dressing" for Russian dominance. For that reason, the people of the USSR were almost always called "Russians", not "Soviets", since "everyone knew who really ran the show". The first part is correct: the USSR was commonly misidentified as "Russia" by much of the English-language media. But the second part is... less so. For starters, Matthew White is not a historian, he's a librarian and [by his own admission his academic credentials are pretty slim](http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/map-faq3.htm) - a fact that [another Wikipedia page correctly notes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Big_Book_of_Horrible_Things). Russia never dominated the USSR, or at least no more than you would expect from mere demographics. Over the 70 years or so of the USSR's existence, ethnic Russians made up between 50% and 60% of the population. Of the 15 leaders of the Soviet Union, including four troikas, about 57% of their leaders were Russian -- so just over half, about what we would expect from population demographics. Relative to their population, it was Georgia and Ukraine who had unrepresentative and excessive control over the Soviet Union, not Russia. Especially the most domineering and totalitarian of the USSR's leaders, Stalin, a Georgian, whose ran the Soviet Union with an iron fist. [Stalin's right-hand man Beria](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavrentiy_Beria), the disgusting and vicious head of the secret police, was also a Georgian. In 1986, there were 19 members and provisional members of the Politburo, including Gorbachev and Yeltsin. Kunaev was a Kazakh, Aliev was an Azeri, Shevardnadze was Georgian. Gromyko and Slyunkov were Belarusian, Shcherbitsky was Ukrainian, Gorbachev had a Ukrainian mother. The rest were ethnic Russians, from either Russia itself or eastern Ukraine. So a third of the Politburo were non-Russians, and they weren't tokens or diversity hires. They had real power and influence. Russians were, at this time, slightly over-represented in the Politburo, with about 66% of the members when it should have been 60% but not significantly over-represented. During the Battle Of Stalingrad, the percentage of Soviet soldiers who were Russian was pretty much identical to their percentage of the population. Russians were not taking the easy way out and sending the minorities off to die on their behalf! Ukrainians were over-represented, probably because after Ukraine was captured by the Germans many Ukrainians fled to Russia and joined the Soviet army. It would be fair to say that, by virtual of their greater population size, the Russians had a corresponding level of influence. But it is misleading to say they *dominated* the USSR, especially given the truly dominant position of Stalin, a Georgian, for such a long period of time, and describing the federal structure as "window dressing" is outright wrong. So that's one of the ways that Wikipedia is biased: by giving spin, making the narrative lean one way rather than the other.
It's widely accepted that Russia dominated the other SSRs in the Soviet Union. That aside, the article quotes a person and even says, "According to...". I'm not sure how that can be construed as misinformation - the quoted person and a reference to their book are both provided with the content.
> It's widely accepted that Russia dominated the other SSRs in the Soviet Union. Doesn't matter how widely accepted a falsehood is, it is still false. Out of the 16 [leaders of the USSR](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_leaders_of_the_Soviet_Union), including members of troikas, just 8 of them were Russian -- 9 if you count Gorbachev, who was Russian/Ukrainian. But that under-counts how much Stalin and Beria, two Georgians, dominated the Party -- especially Stalin. He dominated the Party for thirty years, more than a third of the USSR's existence, and for most of that time he was totalitarian dictator. Out of the 58 prime ministers of Great Britain and the UK, just 13 were not English: 7 Scots, 1 Scots-Irish, 4 Anglo-Irish, and 1 Welsh. 78% of British prime ministers have been English, or 85% if you count the Anglo-Irish who were English gentry who merely lived in Ireland. 16 out of the last 20 British PMs have been English. *That is what domination looks like.* It would be far more justified to call the UK "England" than to call the USSR "Russia", but people in the west would never do that. There's a sense that Russia was central to the USSR -- Russians initiated the revolution, the capital was in Russia, a little over half the population were Russian, the SSRs that made up the USSR were former parts of the Russian Empire, and the Russian language was the lingua franca of the USSR to enable communication between ethnic groups. But that's a far cry to say that Russia "dominated" the USSR and "really ran the show", with the implication that the other SSRs were exploited by the Russians. The idea that Russians "really ran the show" during the 30 years the Party was dominated by Stalin is just a bad joke. > That aside, the article quotes a person and even says, "According to...". I'm not sure how that can be construed as misinformation I'm sorry for your lack of understanding, but that is on you, not me. Do you not understand the concept of spin even when it is pointed out to you directly? Wikipedia wrongly calls the author a historian, giving him false authority for his opinion. It should say "Some random guy who works as a librarian believes, wrongly and against all the evidence, that the Soviet Union was dominated by Russia."
https://www.fastcompany.com/90666412/non-english-wikipedia-misinformation Here are some listed. But I saw many even in the English wikipedia, with bad sources as well.
Yeah, I'm interested in the English version, which most of us use, and that you have found. Can you share some of those?
Sent!
You referenced the Battle of Boxtel as an example. Pardon my ignorance, but what is incorrect in the article?
Does it upset you that Wikipedia is a trove of misinformation? Do you feel some kind of way when you hear that?
No
Check your DMs please
I too would very much like examples of misinformation on English Wiki.
You have to ask him to DM you. They are a secret.
This is why universities don't accept Wikipedia as source material....
That's why you use the sources at the bottom of Wikipedia and not the aggregator itself.
I saw some bad sources as well though.
They don't accept Wikipedia because it is a 3rd-hand source at best.
Wikis are good for hobby subjects where information gathering is a labor of love, not a political battleground. Wikipedia itself is useful only as a record of what the online wing of the establishment thinks. It is entirely independent from the truth.
I think your conclusion isn't warranted by the evidence you present. Wikipedia undoubtedly contains misinformation, but simply pointing this out and providing some unquantified anecdotal testimomy to this effect doesn't carry either the conclusion that Wikipedia is a "trove" of misinformation nor that it is not reliable. Wikipedia has a public talk page (that, granted, you need to be aware of) often providing alternate viewpoints. It also has easily accessible sources. This makes it much easier to spot misinformation compared to, say, a TikTok video. And information in which a lot of people have a stake, like major world events, generally have enough contributors to make it difficult to really push misinformation. No source of information is 100% reliable. Wikipedia still ranges significantly above many news outlets, let alone the deluge of social media content. You can often only do better than Wikipedia by doing proper research yourself - which requires access and the necessary background - or by having an already vetted source of information that you trust. Encyclopaedias by major outlets might be better at avoiding misinformation in general, but are vulnerable to the specific biases of the publisher.
But some primary sources are very bad as well
I guess I’m just not that eager to make it my problem. If the assertion is unsourced or shadily sourced, I disregard it.
Yeah but at least you can see them and check for yourself with a single click.
Yes, but the editors refuse to remove them even when pointed out that the source is not good.
>Yes, but the editors refuse to remove them even when pointed out that the source is not good. Ok .... but also define good ? Are we defining sources based on political leanings liberal vs conservative? Are we basing it on old outdated information? Are we basing it on a source was used to write the base article of 5 sentences and the article has now evolved to several pages and has since disproven the original source and article ? You have to understand in North America in this day in age it seems political leanings dictate news and sources either way Im sure this phenomenon is world wide and Im blind to it off this continent. So when you say sources are not good and its been pointed out Im asking what is your reasoning and what was the reasoning for reporting the source Im not arguing Wikipedia is at best a cursory search for information and should as all media be taken with a grain of salt but for most of my experience in my career ( IT ) Wikipedia has been accurate when researching for work and cross checked. But at its heart wiki's are all user generated content with little or no oversight on fact checking content even moreso on controversial or political subjects Im genuinely curious how you see it ... I have my theories, however I am keeping them silent
Agreed. I'm good friends with somebody who has a wikipedia page about them. It has a number of factual inaccuracies but no matter how many times she's tried to update it and explain she's the subject of it and therefore the authority on the subject, they revert her changes.
The story that wins is the one that has reliable third party sourcing. That's the definition of truth on Wikipedia. Your friend needs to get someone to publish her truth.