When “they used to tell us we couldnt trust Wikipedia” it wasn’t in contrast to random websites; it was in contrast to primary sources.
That’s still true today. Wikipedia is generally less reliable than encyclopedias are https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliability_of_Wikipedia.
The people who tell you not to trust Wikipedia aren’t saying that you shouldn’t use it at all. They’re telling you not to stop there. That’s exactly what they told us about encylopedias too.
If you’re researching a new topic, Wikipedia is a great place for an initial overview. If you actually care about facts, you should double check claims independently. That means following their sources until you get to primary sources. If you’ve ever done this exercise it becomes obvious why you shouldn’t trust Wikipedia. Some sources are dead links, some are not publicly accessible and many aren’t primary sources. In egregious cases the “sources” are just opinion pieces.
Just look in this thread. I’m not talking about writing college papers. I’m talking about the boomers saying you can’t trust anything you read on the internet.
Wiki was as reliable as encyclopedias in 2005. It is far superior today.
“Oh, people can come up with statistics to prove anything, Kent. 14% of people know that.”
-Homer Simpson
Anecdotal, but I’ve never had a teacher tell me why Wikipedia wasn’t a good source. Similarly, I’ve never had a teacher educate students on how to properly use resources like Wikipedia as a starting point for sources. All my peers and I heard was “Wikipedia is bad, never use it, it’s not reliable, don’t trust anything from it.”
I wish I had been taught why and how earlier, but I had to learn why and how myself.
There is a lot of bias on pages about religion, I find.
My kind of bias, or the wrong kind?
For example there were pages that would state that “Scholars agree that the gospel of ____ was not written by _____ but was written by an anonymous author” when the original sources never discredited the original claim of authorship, but were essentially “I can’t be sure who wrote it”, never actually saying/discrediting that it wasn’t written by said evangelist.
I think the anonymous perspective belongs there, but when the original source says “I cannot be sure who wrote it” then that’s not saying it wasn’t written by them.
This is hilarious, thank you
The thing is: in the not to distant future encyclopedias will be a thing of the past.
Jokes on you, anything controversial relating to Pakistan and India gets spammed and brigaded hourly.
That being said, its a great resource for finding secondary sources. Even if the sources themselves happen to be biased lol.
Any argument based on “us vs them” is flawed by default.
Elon Musk Offers to Also Ruin Wikipedia https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/elon-musk-wikipedia-twitter-x-encyclopedia-1234861220/
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Definitely not wiremin! it’s scam
Look at their website, they keep babbling about their “protocol”, but all you can find about this supposed protocol is marketing speak, no real technical specification or paper, no code, nothing. How does this thing actually run? Nobody knows.
It’s proprietary, which alone is enough reason to run away from it. And seeing that the dev’s email is gmail, we can be sure they don’t give a fuck about privacy or decentralization.
It seems that this decentralized style starts to be a new trend?
First this Fediverse/Lemmy I heard about. Then The Matrix (messaging platform). And now these Mastodon & WreMin.
Well, if that prevents or slows down the corrupted law of enshittification, then I’m approving it!
A fediverse decentralized Wikipedia substitute would be interesting for sure.
Wikipedia’s massive head start is pretty strong though. With Lemmy, I don’t care if a post has 100 comments while the same article on Reddit has 10,000. The comments here are better anyway. But if a Fedipedia has 1/100 the subjects covered that Wikipedia does, that makes it less useful.
Yup…no matter how good a tool is, if there are no users to it, it might be as good as it never existed (unless if someone takes ideas from said tool and implements them to a user service, growing their quality, which is still better than nothing). Sad but true.
is wiremin using activitypub?
I don’t know myself. I just heard about it. Haven’t studied it at all.
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Not fully trust, but I trust it more than some listicles and low-quality SEO-boost sites.
When I want to learn something new, I often come to Wikipedia, or Britannica, or YouTube to get to know the subject. And generally, they will recommend me with some valuable reference to dig deeper.
They use what to tell you? Smoke signals? Semaphore?
The UHBP protocol, obviously. /s
Hidden messages in advertisements
Oh man the rightoids came out of the woods for this shower thought.
The same people who told you that now do fact checking on facebook instead
- With the exception of any article that’s even slightly political.
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Honestly the aren’t that biased
Even for political content it’s damn good. Every time someone on Lemmy points to an explicit article of bias, it falls into one of 3 categories:
- Slightly unfair bias, but still largely true
- Article is correct, Lemmy cannot provide a reliable source proving otherwise
- Article is incorrect, reliable source found, article amended
The third case happened once in an article about a UN Resolution on North Korea, and it was because the original article source was slightly misinterpreted. But yea, basically what I’m trying to say is if a “political article” is “wrong” but you can’t prove it, it’s not the political article that’s wrong but you.
Edit: ITT - People upset with my analysis, but not willing to provide sources to the articles they disagree with
Wikipedia completely slanders people it doesnt like. For example Daniele Ganser who helped to reveal Operation Gladio.
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Wikipedia has a claimed positive-bias, in which negative things are often left out of the article. This is more true the lower profile the page is.
And Wikipedia has an overall left-bias, because of the demographic of contributors.
And Wikipedia has an overall left-bias, because of the demographic of contributors.
FROM YOUR LINK
Until 2021, we rated Wikipedia as Center, but changed them to Not Rated because the online encyclopedia does not fit neatly into AllSides’ media bias rating methodologies, which were developed specifically for news sites.
Allsides, that rates media outlets, doesn’t give a media bias rating. However, that page I linked still shows the bias even if it doesn’t get them a media bias rating.
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tankies be like
“Wikipedia is unreliable, here’s our wiki where we source reddit comments”
Yo the tankie wiki is fucking hilarious. The USSR page has this gold mine:
“On 8 August 1945, exactly three months after the defeat of Nazi Germany, Soviet troops entered Manchuria and Korea, and Japan surrendered within a week.”
careful! That wiki is managed by the Lemmy Developers, they might BLOCK you
And sometimes it literally is USA propaganda. It’s quite rare, but those articles should get fixed. Changing something like “The guerrilla fighters killed babies” to “The US State Department claimed the guerrilla fighters killed babies, but critics call the claim “wholly unfounded” [source]”.
But yea, as I said, actually a lot more rare than you’d think.
I was always told not to quote Wikipedia. They told everyone this because people would constantly quote Wikipedia and then someone would edit it so that the paragraph was now different. It was a right pain even if the information was correct.
What you do is you check Wikipedia’s sources and then quote those sources. Hopefully they’re quoting academic papers and not blog posts because otherwise you’re just kicking the cam down the road.
Quote the sources or the source’s sources of Wikipedia. You would not believe how bullet proof this is against plagiarism if you do your citations correctly.
I don’t even understand how people get caught.
I hated in high school that teachers always said the internet isn’t a good source.
In college I finally realized that websites were poor sources because they change and move, whereas a published book, edition, and page number won’t change. But that doesn’t mean you can’t use the Internet to find a good source - you just need to cite the source itself and not the site.
Everything I’ve published is published digitally, but the journals still have editions and page numbers. When someone cites my work, they need to cite that information - not the website that may change names or shut down.
So now I’m mostly mad that teachers don’t explain why websites shouldn’t be cited. It makes good sense in that context.
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Hardly a loophole - Wikipedia’s greatest strength is as an aggregator of reliable information, and using Wikipedia’s sources is how people SHOULD use it. They just taught you how to use it.
Damn, this is genious. My future kids are going to learn so much cool stuff branded as “loopholes”.
It’s basic research and writing. You should absolutely teach your kids common sense practices.
My SO is a little scared I will push too much information on them (I have a degree in geek), so I thought more of the pedagogic value of calling something a loophole/hack/cheat etc…
I agree with that. Word it how they respond to it.
“Turns out if you willingly focus on the fear, it diminishes. Neat little loophole”
That is a nice one! Brb, going to internalize it for
my own sakethe theoretical children.
Educators HATE this weird loophole!
Schools aren’t with it. I was told in the 90s that cursive was the future. We had already progressed beyond word processors and they are having us learn fucking loopy letters.
Uni wasn’t much better. Found myself over thirty years behind industry when I got out.
I think it might depend on the field of study and location, but schools are often a little on the conservative side. Even so “loopholes” as best practices is arguably even better.
Yup. My friend is a high school teacher, and he did the same thing to his class - told them not to use Wikipedia, but that Wikipedia sources were fine, and the kids did actual research.
Big brain move: Tell your students about this neat loophole, gets them started on actual research.
(Ideally - I’d be lying if I said I’ve never used a quote from Wikipedia citing the stated source without actually reading it [usually at 5 am for papers due in two hours], but more often than not Wikipedia was the signpost for the rabbit hole)
Yes. That’s how you use an encyclopedia.
Huh?
And interestingly it’s trustable because it’s got no central authority core that can be corrupted
That’s is definitely not true…
Except there are defacto central authorities governing certain pages.
Not only that there’s a turf war going on for control of them.
Certain ahem religious organizations monitor a variety of pages and snipe any changes they disagree with. Businesses are doing it too.
And certain politicians
Which religious orgs?
Probably all of them… Just a guess though.
I haven’t participated in wikipedia enough to see how these turf wars play out. I’ve heard that, unsurprisingly, there are groups that control pages, some opposed and some unopposed. It’s a really interesting thing to me.
I’m afraid of politics, generally speaking. But I bet it would be interesting to be a part of all that.
yeah, apart from the admins that have absolute authority over everything and can do whatever the hell they want and make up arbitrary rules that disqualify your perfectly valid sources.
that doesn’t happen
There definitely are editors who game the rules. And they are enough of a problem that sometimes rules need to be modified specifically to handle them.
you seem to be conflating editors with admins.
Admins are a subgroup of editors. As more senior members, they should behave more responsibly. But some don’t.
I think the word you’re looking for is “trustworthy” but yes.
I consider it a separate concept.
That’s kind of sad
Wiki was getting popular when I was in college over 10 years ago. I recall a history professor telling me not to use Wikipedia as source. I am like, okay, I will just use the source wiki uses, which are pretty solid in my opinion. Wiki came a long way.
Yeah, it’s important to remember that wikipedia, itself, isn’t a source, it’s a summary of different sources. It’s a great resource to find sources and get an overview of a topic, though.
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As long as you verify the source still exists. There are so many dead links on Wikipedia.
Archive.org bots replace dead links with working alternatives a lot nowadays. All the more reason to support that modern museum
Wikipedia does a pretty decent job of eventually being correct, at any given time it can be outrageously inaccurate. Its good to not just use wikipedia entrys and use the sources that are linked there. By using the sources that are cited you are helping to keep wiki trustworthy and helps avoid you using bad information.
It works well to manage the integrity of wiki. I think being able to intuitively navigate between entries by a variety of metrics like edits that have remained unedited the longest/shorest, newest/oldest, etc would be a very good addition to wiki.
Some kind of webarchive of wiki sources would also be amazing so that if the sources disappear or change over time there is a connection to what it was at the time it originally/previously was used as a source on wiki.
And maybe some of this already exists and im just not very good at getting my 4dollars a month worth :P
Wikipedia does a pretty decent job of eventually being correct, at any given time it can be outrageously inaccurate.
Yeah, I agree with this. I work at a high end engineering company, and some engineers have gotten into trouble using things like materials properties that they got from Wikipedia and turned out to be wrong, with unfortunate results. By policy, if we don’t know something like that we’re supposed to ask our tech library to get us the information, and that’s why.
Why not fix theses pages?
They get fixed, but that doesn’t prevent someone from using erroneous information on the next one. Just one bad number can be a big deal.
A bunch of wikipedia sources are already archived on the wayback machine, anything cited to like pre-2010, online, there’s a good chance it got taken down or changed in the last 13 years.
Please dig a little bit deeper. You may end up with a stack of links to 404 sites instead of actual sources. Just because you copied a citation from WP doesn’t mean the source actually exists, let alone contains the information you seek.
In that case, try using an archived version of the webpage, for example at the Wayback Machine
And it’ll get even better. That being said, it’s worth checking out the Talk pages on the articles you want to use, as they may contain information about what is (and isn’t) displayed.
I started passively editing it and I’ve been incredibly impressed.
