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.
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.
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.
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.
I feel like news sources used to link to their sources too, but now it seems to be an infinite chain of links to their own articles, never directly taking you to the first hand source of information (unless they are the source).
The thing is, if the place you're getting your information from doesn't list it's sources, you can't trust it. Whenever I'm researching a thing on the internet and I find an article or a paper, I don't just stop there, I check where they got their info, then I find that source and read it. I follow it all the way back until I find the primary source.
Like the other day I was writing a paper about a particular court case. In the opinions, as in most cases, they use precedent and cite prior cases. So I found the other cases that referred to the thing I was writing about, and it turns out they were also just using prior cases. I had to go 6 deep before I found them referencing the actual constitution for one of them. On another I found it interesting that the most recent use case was so far removed from what the original one was about and it was could probably be questionable to even use it as precedent if they had used the original instead of another case.
Anyway, the point is, always check sources. If anyone says anything on the internet, assume it's just their opinion until you check and follow the sources..
Are you familiar with Harlow V Fitzgerald, and the full text of article 1983 including the 16 words that went missing in n 1874 when it was "copied" from the Congressional Record into the Federal Register? I'm not a lawyer, but I do want that decision reviewed, since as the law was written and passed by Congress, Harlow V Fitzgerald should have gone the other way.
That's why you don't use Wikipedia as your primary source, you follow the citations. Of course, if you can't verify that it's accurate information, don't report it, but it can be used as a jump off to find a legitimate source if the information you cant immediately verify is useful.
Yup, tried to correct something about a motorcycle manufacturer (no road legal model between year A and Z), linked to another Wikipedia article proving what I was saying (road legal modelS in year W to Y, just before Z), the next day the page was back to its previous version. I linked to the article about the road legal model they pretended didn't exist and they just edited the page back to its previous version...
I don't know if you're making fun of me, but, seriously, for me Wikipedia is an enormously valuable resource, much more than, for instance, YouTube (which I use, maybe, twice per year).
Some folks enjoy reading articles. Some folks enjoy to watch, listen and read (captions) at the same time. Some folks rather ask around and learn through conversations.
I've understood that it's generally easier to learn new things when you use many different channels (audio, imagery etc). To many people but not to all.
I remember in the mid-aughts my brother hacked his iPod — the wheel kind, this was pre-iPhone — to hold the entirety of the text of English Wikipedia at the time.
It's less than 90 gig to do a full backup. I can have the sum total of human knowledge on a 1TB external SDD, and still have room for Skyrim and my modlist.
IIRC this happens in the show or book of Station Eleven where a kid saves Wikipedia offline on his PS Vita (somehow) and it's the only version of it out there post-apocalypse.
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
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.
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.
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."
I edited a page for a new OS update that was coming out. The page was FULL of misinformation, and I cleaned it up, linked official documentation as sources, etc.
My edits were reverted by some butt hurt guy who originally wrote the page full of misinformation, 0 sources, and broken English.
I reverted back to mine.
He reverted back to his.
He spammed my profile page calling me names, and then reported me to Wiki admins. I was told not to revert changes or I would be perma-banned. I explained how the original page was broken English, misinformation, and 0 sources were cited. They straight up told me they did NOT care.
Stopped editing wiki pages, and stopped trusting them. They didn't care about factual information. They just wanted to enforce their reverting rule.
Their profile was banned last time I looked about a year ago. My profile I deleted because it was permanently tainted by that asshole spamming my talk page.
I remember posting about it on Reddit back when it happened a few years ago, and everyone in the comments told me how they've had similar experiences. Really just made me weary about trusting Wikipedia. I mean sure, if they get the date of a movie wrong that's fine, but as for more serious topics, I just can't really trust it.
Even sources can be garbage. I've seen plenty of blog spam cited as sources, which means nothing.
Yep, about a decade ago an expert on a subject was talking about it. He corrected a page because the info presented with tons of sources all ended up taking their info from a single unreliable source. He had to edit things multiple times, making sure to follow guidelines, basically creating a new section that condensed his work on the subject to explain the controversy and so on... The page was edited back to its previous version every time because he didn't have enough local reputation and "older sources are more reliable"...
It's not an uncommon tale about Wikipedia, that's their biggest known issue with getting new blood into the community, which they've acknowledged themselves.
TBH that doesn't surprise me.. I had a minor spat over the existence of a local supermarket, of all the stupid things.. Wiki said it had been refused planning permission and never built. I had shopped in there many times, and could link to many articles about the fully built existing supermarket. I gave up after the second revert because it's just not worth it.
there is a bureaucracy for dealing with the situation you described. the other editor gamed it, but if you were right, a little persistence would have left your edits in place.
you're right. when transitioning away from reddit, i took the time to understand how to navigate the wikipedia editor bureaucracy. I understood most of it in a week. now i just monitor a few articles in which i have an interest, and add to that list periodically.
i wish it were easier. MY SUGGESTION is to just go ahead and use the talk page instead of the main article as your first place to make an edit. if it's a good edit, it's likely someone else will write the edit themselves. if they don't and you dont see objetions, that will help your edit stand up if there is an edit war.
That's what I did recently with my first contribution (not that I had any other option since the article wasn't accepting contributions from new users): One paragraph mentioned something and listed it as missing source, then the next paragraph mentioned it again and included a source. I went to the talk page and commented that the source was already there and it quickly got linked.
I'm a lot less active than I used to be, and I no longer have the time or energy to fight. Nowadays I stick to dry technical topics, personal hobbies and the wiki in my mothertongue.
I didn't know what to do. I was being threatened with a ban, even after explaining myself and my edits.
At the end of the day the Wikipedia page didn't matter to me that much. Who cares if people get misinformation about an OS update. I quite literally didn't get paid enough to deal with that.
It just really changed my perspective on Wikipedia. Unless you look at the history and check out profiles of people who get in edit battles, you really don't know what's going on behind the scenes.
At the end of the day the Wikipedia page I was trying to edit ended up being corrected by someone else (who completely disregarded all of my effort), but it took a month, and someone else to do it, before the page wasn't full of misinformation anymore. RIP to anyone who visited that page within that month and never returned, because they were fed 80% misinformation.
This is the third insightful comment from you on this thread against him. Are you by any chance, the alt of the user who wrote the original article on Wiki of the OS?
I think assuming a better alternative will appear is a bad idea. Most likely some company sees an opening to control the information and monetize it. They can't really now because Wikipedia is the default, but I don't doubt someone would try if they see the hold Wikipedia has falter.
There will always be someone there to take its place. Maybe a more transparent and decentralised alternative like how fan-wikis used to be before Fandom bough them.
Tbh those pieces of trivia don't feel like encyclopedic information in the first place. A reader need not know specific intro songs to have an encyclopedic overview of wrestling, just that intro songs are often used.
A list containing the specific intro songs is vastly more suited for a fandom repository than an encyclopedia.
I have to disagree. Wrestling is all about the show, so a dedicated table of wrestlers' entrance themes, finishers and signature moves seems very on-brand for Wikipedia. It's also unclear if this was just a line item listed on every wrestlers' individual page or if this was a table, but either seems pretty on brand. Maybe there's a dedicated page for entrance theme music and a table of who used what song makes sense there?
To reference something I actually know about almost every Wikipedia page for a railroad will include a detailed route map. One could argue that that's not encyclopedia-like and should be reserved for a travel site or train chasing guide yet here we are
That sucks, but I also kind of empathize with wiki mods, cause it's really hard to know when to cut stuff down. I remember seeing a while back a bunch of people that migrated out from wikipedia to some completely unknown new wiki nobody will ever hear about, because they were working on chronicling all the roads in america with screenshots and notes of location and historical details about it all. Wikipedia didn't really get it, as it's more like a kind of academic and news aggregate, and there was nothing really there to aggregate, it was just an infodump of a bunch of different stuff. If wikipedia was a 1-1 map of the world, then it would be the size of the world. Or bigger, if you include historical stuff. No way you're fitting all that on a 102 gig drive, or whatever the size of wikipedia is. Plus there's hosting costs to consider, so it's not like they could do that even if they really wanted.
My workplace got a "coronavirus" chat on the corporate chat server. And the known "conspiracy theorist" guy on my team posted a link to some article on some total misinformation mill masquerading as a news source.
I looked up the name of the source on Wikipedia, which said it was a total misinformation mill.
So I linked to the Wikipedia article in the chat.
I work at a fairly big and diverse company, so of course there was more than one conspiracy guy there. It was really surreal watching people who literally think all governments are run by a secret cabal of Democrat extraterrestrial pedophile child-adrenaline junkies attack the trustworthiness of Wikipedia.
Edit: I'd forgotten the name of the "misinformation mill" that originally started that shit storm in the work chat, but I went back and looked it up. It was Project Veritas. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Veritas
They've got the permissions set up on the work chat server to allow anyone to create chats at will. Those chats can be public (listed in the search and anyone can join with a click) or private (can't be joined without an invite from the owner of the channel).
And they don't discourage non-work-related chats for... team building reasons, probably? There's one for "Video Games" for instance.
I know the guy who made the "coronavirus" chat and he 100% did not intend it for conspiracy theories. The whole IT department was in the process of going remote when that chat was created and that chat was intended for everything from helpful tips for working remotely to news/rumors about when/if we might be going back to the office to news about death rate statistics and such.
And this conspiracy guy had (still has, actually) a deep-seated need to proselatize for the conspiracy of the week 24/7/365. So he just decided that was as good a pulpit as any.
Shortly after the shitstorm started, three levels of management above both me and Conspiracy McGee entered the chat. They didn't end up doing anything. (It fizzled before they had to take action.) But I'm sure they all had their fingers hovering about 2mm above the "shut that shit down" button.
Now, all that said, there is a chat on the work chat server dedicated to the conspiracy podcast "No Agenda." And I'm pretty certain it was created by Conspiracy McGee. And I'm pretty sure my/his direct boss is in the No Agenda chat.
So, I guess the short answer to your question is that they don't want to shut down non-work-related chats so as to pay some lip service to team building and not appear too draconian (while at the same tacitly encouraging a culture in which it's not really acceptable to spend too much time in those chats rather than furiously typing code). And the company's management is sufficiently right-wing as to not get that allowing conspiracy theorists to conspiracy theorist is eventually going to backfire on them, so they don't see it as dangerous. So they see it not much unlike having a chat about the latest Mario Kart game or the Marvel Cinematic Universe or whatever.
Wikipedia was useful for me as a grad student because I could look up a topic and there would be a whole lot of citations I could follow. I never used them as a source, but rather as a curated forum of information.
Wikipedia is like our dear friend. It gives us general information, good advice, and direction in life, but never gets too deeply in it. The choice is ours to make.
I've been doing exactly the same thing with LLMs recently.
"Tell me about "
"What are the big problems their industry is trying to solve?"
"Who are their biggest competitors?"
"What's the worst/best thing about them?"
Questions like that often give me a great framework to look up specific questions, find relevant articles and get a handle on the sources that are likely to be useful.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yet if you ever try to edit a page, the "Talk" tab is filled with the most pretentious protectionist people. You can add helpful context or missing information with sources to the wiki, and it will get deleted simply because you haven't spent months cozying up to the greaseball who sits on that specific wiki entry as if they possess it.
Tbf the gamergate saga basically caused the infrastructure to have a rolling panic attack over how that such a large movement to insert misinformation against any effort to correct it.
Just call then out on it in talk by mentioning why you would add it.
Alternatively make an upgraded English-only wiki alternative with way larger article max sizes so we can finally evolve it past 2005. And start using YouTube links and not (just) a native video player. And start quoting/including entire chapters from relevant books.
The problem with using YT videos is that they are transitory. Also, you're then subjecting your reader to somebody else's advertisements for their gain.
In general wikipedia is a great source of knowledge that would be very hard to find elsewhere. That said, it can and often is edited by anyone. I'll never forget a friend sent me a link to file system comparison chart which included ReiserFS and someone added the last column 'Murders your wife' to 'Features'
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Comparison_of_file_systems&oldid=209063556#Features
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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..
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.
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)
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.
Wikipedia has been dealing with AI and bots since someone made a 2000 census article writer in 2003. Hopefully they are resistant to the rise of Chatbots
my understanding from an English professor is less about its reliability of information, but more its reliability regarding citing sources. you can't cite something that consistently changes
Does anyone know if there is a way to see which wiki articles are edited the most? I don't mean new topics or edits because there's a lot of new info. I mean potential back-and-forth edits where there is disagreement on facts (or one viewpoint denies a fact, etc.).
If that exists, I'd be curious to know what articles they are (obviously probably religion or politics). On the other side, those articles that have remained unedited for a long time are probably pretty rock solid, assuming they also get traffic.*
*I'm literally thinking out loud here and am sure there are many other factors to consider
No. There are plenty of articles with the "needs citations" tag.
But even of the ones that are? A LOT of people never actually read the sources and you have plenty of wild claims that are not at all supported by their citation. Plenty of "celebrities" have even talked about how it was a huge hassle to get something changed because the lie was cited... with something unrelated.
Step 2. Go to the talk page explaining why you removed it
Step 3. If someone puts it back, edit war them, tag needs citation, call them out in the talk page, get the article locked by an admin, etc etc etc. These things happen all the time, and 95% of the time it gets corrected as long as someone gives a damn
A lot of the political entries are written with a bent towards being sympathetic with leftists.
The Kyle Rittenhouse article spends a lot of time on how Rittenhouse ‘appeared in conservative media’ or ‘appeared with conservative personalities’ which is a pretty weird thing to say, if you don’t already understand the political undertones of the Kenosha riot.
When you click the article for the Kenosha riot, it’s titled ‘civil unrest in Kenosha’ and focusses a lot on what a reader would perceive as positive aims of the riot. Protesting racism and police brutality, and doesn’t focus at all on the crime, danger, guns, vandalism, arson, etc
That article mentions BLM and when you read that article it makes sure to state that BLM protests were ‘largely peaceful’ and totally misses the amount of deaths and destruction that had happened at them.
The BLM article, if written like the Rittenhouse article, should focus a fair amount in the organizations ties to Marxism, the overthrowing of capitalism and colonialism, but doesn’t.
Wikipedia articles are written and edited and maintained to push a narrative.
If you agree with the narrative, you probably like that it does this. If you disagree, you probably don’t bother reading Wikipedia very much.
The issue with sources, is that a lot of ‘sources’ for stuff like this are already heavily curated to paint a picture the editors want to put on front street.
And anything that would combat that narrative is just outright banned from the site.
A lot of citations with politically charged topics are just opinions anyway. There is no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ answer or sources on the war between Palestine and isreal, for example. But if Wikipedia editors want to push propaganda for either side over the other, all they have to do is only cite pro-Palestinian or pro-Israeli sources.
This is easily exploitable by editors for whatever narrative they choose to push.
Wikipedia is not an exhaustive gathering of all relevant information, it is a carefully curated propaganda machine for the editors.
In any discipline some part has to be trusted for the next to follow. It is not circular, it is axiomatic. You can do a Descartes to find a "guarantee of truth", but there won't be one. Hence your critique could literally be applied to anything. Check sources and be happy they are freely provided (and donate to Wikipedia).
Ah, I now see better what you meant. That is in part a fun little contradiction, but much of Wikipedia's sources are books and articles that come in printed form. These are easier than other websites to verify as sources due to their tangible nature.
Not really. Just sail the high seas with Library Genesis or Sci-Hub. The nature of being published is being non-editable, a digital copy is an okay compromise.
EDIT: There is an issue of trust in piracy, though hardly in practice, but Open Access should help with this.
Not at all. I'm responding to OP, and while my comment is informative and sourced so that other people can understand it too, I do not care at all that my in-kind response turns some people off.
Thanks, trusting wikipedia because it has a "source"(, as if a source meant the truth 🙄,) is super weird, and i'll also add that a lot of sources are inaccessible anyway, such as those pointing to books. Wikipedia will hopefully(, in part because it's always a mistake to pretend knowing "the one truth",) be replaced one day, it's long overdue.
The inaccessibility of many wiki sources is a very good point, thanks.
I think Wikipedia serves its purpose as a broad strokes indicator of things that are likely significant in some way, but its limitations are as important as its content.
Nah wikipedia has been taken over by politically motivated actors. I really enjoyed it when it was relatively agenda free. If you don't believe me go check the talk page of any controversial article.
"Taken over" is a little strong. Anyone can edit a page, but you can see the edit history. That doesn't mean wikipedia is compromised. It means you need to be media literate. If there's too many bad faith edits, the article gets reverted and locked.
Go look at some of the most active wikipedia contributors, they are mostly hyper political nerds. Wikipedia is heavily reliant on the social consensus of it's contributors. It's not a far out idea that there could be a slant among them.
curation can still skew towards one side. you know this, everyone knows this. just saying wikipedia used to better before it was taken over by ideologues.
I imagine you can figure it out from here. If you need, I can suggest a tutor to help you master the art of typing text into a text box and then clicking the button below it.
It was reasonably big news when it was noticed, so it's not unreasonable that people might remember it. IIRC, the gist of it was one contributor that had historically contributed to a large number of articles added a redirect for every article with breast in the name so you could also access it by replacing breast with titty or boob, so for example, typing titty cancer into the search bar would bring you to the page for breast cancer.
The Scots guy is a better example, imo. Someone who was trying to contribute in a positive manner but filled the wiki with complete gibberish, as opposed to a troll, of which there many.
All of those are funny and obviously untrue. Using Wikipedia isn't a one stop perfect information system. Knowing how to use it comes with knowing how to use the sources.
Well Wikipedia is striving to be a perfect information system. So they don't belong there. There are better locations on the internet for those kinds of jokes.
So his contributions were wrong but now you're moving goalposts and saying they're funny and obviously wrong, so it's okay? WTF kind of standard is that lol
ooh a real one. I see you under there. can you copy paste some wicked rant about how Wikipedia is neoliberal shill org? bonus points if you link to a 40 page google doc that cites reddit
I feel bad for you because this guy is hackish and you obviously respect him. If I could save every rube I would but I just can't. So I feel sorry instead.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
Nah, you can't. It's still a great resource, but you always gotta read it critically.
The thing is that it is very easy to read Wikipedia critically, since it lists every single source they get info from at the bottom of the page.
And here I am fixing missing sources on some wiki articles just yesterday.
Someone has to do the job for everyone else can enjoy it.
Thank you very much for your service my friend.
Haha you're welcome. I just wished that the original authors would be more careful about providing sources for claims or statements.
The hero we don't deserve
I feel like news sources used to link to their sources too, but now it seems to be an infinite chain of links to their own articles, never directly taking you to the first hand source of information (unless they are the source).
The thing is, if the place you're getting your information from doesn't list it's sources, you can't trust it. Whenever I'm researching a thing on the internet and I find an article or a paper, I don't just stop there, I check where they got their info, then I find that source and read it. I follow it all the way back until I find the primary source.
Like the other day I was writing a paper about a particular court case. In the opinions, as in most cases, they use precedent and cite prior cases. So I found the other cases that referred to the thing I was writing about, and it turns out they were also just using prior cases. I had to go 6 deep before I found them referencing the actual constitution for one of them. On another I found it interesting that the most recent use case was so far removed from what the original one was about and it was could probably be questionable to even use it as precedent if they had used the original instead of another case.
Anyway, the point is, always check sources. If anyone says anything on the internet, assume it's just their opinion until you check and follow the sources..
Are you familiar with Harlow V Fitzgerald, and the full text of article 1983 including the 16 words that went missing in n 1874 when it was "copied" from the Congressional Record into the Federal Register? I'm not a lawyer, but I do want that decision reviewed, since as the law was written and passed by Congress, Harlow V Fitzgerald should have gone the other way.
And very often it's dead links or sources that don't say what the article pretends...
That's why you don't use Wikipedia as your primary source, you follow the citations. Of course, if you can't verify that it's accurate information, don't report it, but it can be used as a jump off to find a legitimate source if the information you cant immediately verify is useful.
Love reading any article then opening the talk tab for the civil war of edits proposed.
You should read everything critically. Which is easier on Wikipedia because it provides sources.
Wikipedia is an excellent starting point for information - but saying you can absolutely trust it hell no.
Yup, tried to correct something about a motorcycle manufacturer (no road legal model between year A and Z), linked to another Wikipedia article proving what I was saying (road legal modelS in year W to Y, just before Z), the next day the page was back to its previous version. I linked to the article about the road legal model they pretended didn't exist and they just edited the page back to its previous version...
How dare you hurt another editor's feelings with your facts!
It's like chatGPT then!
at least Wikipedia is human-curated.
Wikipedia is the only piece of the internet I would save from apocalipse. Like, seriously.
Yeah, I have Wikipedia saved to a portable hard drive... Just in case
I don't know if you're making fun of me, but, seriously, for me Wikipedia is an enormously valuable resource, much more than, for instance, YouTube (which I use, maybe, twice per year).
There is a lot of People with a copy of Wikipedia, it only takes 8GB. Just for the case something happens. I dont think he is making fun of you.
Edit: this 8 GB was 10 years ago. From another article from 2022 it says 150Gb.
Some folks enjoy reading articles. Some folks enjoy to watch, listen and read (captions) at the same time. Some folks rather ask around and learn through conversations.
I've understood that it's generally easier to learn new things when you use many different channels (audio, imagery etc). To many people but not to all.
Wasn't making fun of you, just agreeing with you and telling you my fix
I remember in the mid-aughts my brother hacked his iPod — the wheel kind, this was pre-iPhone — to hold the entirety of the text of English Wikipedia at the time.
How much data does it use?
According to my app, the whole English Wikipedia with pictures weighs 102.62GB, down to 60,06GB without.
There’s also a mini version that weighs 58,29GB but I don’t know what it contains
Wikipedia 1m Top Articles weighs 43,53GB
kiwix
Any idea how the 8gb from another comment might be achieved?
Edit: I guess zipping it should work pretty well
TBH I have no idea
I just took a look at what my app is saying, but I didn’t dig into it
It's probably only the text. Images and videos weigh a lot more than text.
60GB is still more than 8GB
The other comment checked a 10 year reddit link but didnt notice the date untill it went to search for it again because of this thread. Dumbass!
Source: it was I, the guy that did the comment.
It's less than 90 gig to do a full backup. I can have the sum total of human knowledge on a 1TB external SDD, and still have room for Skyrim and my modlist.
Even less so if you exclude images
Those images are important, I would keep them. Wikipedia just scrapes the surface of information, a picture can give a bigger insight.
True, if you have the space by all means
Is there an easy way of doing a full backup?
Funnily enough, wikipedia has the answer
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download
ah I see, ty lol
That's interesting
That's only the text without any media. If you wanted to save all media on Wikimedia Commons, that would be about 420tb.
You get the images, just not audio or video files.
IIRC this happens in the show or book of Station Eleven where a kid saves Wikipedia offline on his PS Vita (somehow) and it's the only version of it out there post-apocalypse.
What if you need to remember how to procreate? I hear there are a number of informative videos about how to out there.
But there aren't on YouTube :-P
It would also be nice to have a p2p service still up in the internet apocalypse to share all the things we have left.
Could work like the underground networks in Cuba (I say underground but apparently there's wires everywhere?)
I bought an app by Wikimedia CH that allows to download the whole thing. It’s called Kiwix.
you "bought" kiwix? AFAIK it's free
There is a paid version on the Mac AppStore to support the project
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:
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 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.
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.
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.
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
Wikipedia completely slanders people it doesnt like. For example Daniele Ganser who helped to reveal Operation Gladio.
Honestly the aren't that biased
Nah.
I edited a page for a new OS update that was coming out. The page was FULL of misinformation, and I cleaned it up, linked official documentation as sources, etc.
My edits were reverted by some butt hurt guy who originally wrote the page full of misinformation, 0 sources, and broken English.
I reverted back to mine.
He reverted back to his.
He spammed my profile page calling me names, and then reported me to Wiki admins. I was told not to revert changes or I would be perma-banned. I explained how the original page was broken English, misinformation, and 0 sources were cited. They straight up told me they did NOT care.
Stopped editing wiki pages, and stopped trusting them. They didn't care about factual information. They just wanted to enforce their reverting rule.
I'd love their perspective on this and the actual messages sent as this isn't very useful standalone.
Their profile was banned last time I looked about a year ago. My profile I deleted because it was permanently tainted by that asshole spamming my talk page.
I remember posting about it on Reddit back when it happened a few years ago, and everyone in the comments told me how they've had similar experiences. Really just made me weary about trusting Wikipedia. I mean sure, if they get the date of a movie wrong that's fine, but as for more serious topics, I just can't really trust it.
Even sources can be garbage. I've seen plenty of blog spam cited as sources, which means nothing.
Yep, about a decade ago an expert on a subject was talking about it. He corrected a page because the info presented with tons of sources all ended up taking their info from a single unreliable source. He had to edit things multiple times, making sure to follow guidelines, basically creating a new section that condensed his work on the subject to explain the controversy and so on... The page was edited back to its previous version every time because he didn't have enough local reputation and "older sources are more reliable"...
Could you link us the article?
And what's your source for that claim you keep making?
what's the article in question?
It's not an uncommon tale about Wikipedia, that's their biggest known issue with getting new blood into the community, which they've acknowledged themselves.
What's your damage?
TBH that doesn't surprise me.. I had a minor spat over the existence of a local supermarket, of all the stupid things.. Wiki said it had been refused planning permission and never built. I had shopped in there many times, and could link to many articles about the fully built existing supermarket. I gave up after the second revert because it's just not worth it.
there is a bureaucracy for dealing with the situation you described. the other editor gamed it, but if you were right, a little persistence would have left your edits in place.
Yes, but people shouldn't have to jump through hoops to help Wikipedia.
you're right. when transitioning away from reddit, i took the time to understand how to navigate the wikipedia editor bureaucracy. I understood most of it in a week. now i just monitor a few articles in which i have an interest, and add to that list periodically.
i wish it were easier. MY SUGGESTION is to just go ahead and use the talk page instead of the main article as your first place to make an edit. if it's a good edit, it's likely someone else will write the edit themselves. if they don't and you dont see objetions, that will help your edit stand up if there is an edit war.
That's what I did recently with my first contribution (not that I had any other option since the article wasn't accepting contributions from new users): One paragraph mentioned something and listed it as missing source, then the next paragraph mentioned it again and included a source. I went to the talk page and commented that the source was already there and it quickly got linked.
I'm a lot less active than I used to be, and I no longer have the time or energy to fight. Nowadays I stick to dry technical topics, personal hobbies and the wiki in my mothertongue.
I didn't know what to do. I was being threatened with a ban, even after explaining myself and my edits.
At the end of the day the Wikipedia page didn't matter to me that much. Who cares if people get misinformation about an OS update. I quite literally didn't get paid enough to deal with that.
It just really changed my perspective on Wikipedia. Unless you look at the history and check out profiles of people who get in edit battles, you really don't know what's going on behind the scenes.
At the end of the day the Wikipedia page I was trying to edit ended up being corrected by someone else (who completely disregarded all of my effort), but it took a month, and someone else to do it, before the page wasn't full of misinformation anymore. RIP to anyone who visited that page within that month and never returned, because they were fed 80% misinformation.
the etiquette and process is non-obvious so i think your reaction was totally understandable.
That's a shame
This is the third insightful comment from you on this thread against him. Are you by any chance, the alt of the user who wrote the original article on Wiki of the OS?
Hello butthurt Wikipedia admin
Pro wrestling wiki pages used to have entrance themes, finishers and signature moves in the wrestler's page.
One power-mod removed it and it's gone.
People suck wiki's cock on the Internet, but it's a pretty dogshit site and I wish it dies so that a new and better alternative pops up.
I think assuming a better alternative will appear is a bad idea. Most likely some company sees an opening to control the information and monetize it. They can't really now because Wikipedia is the default, but I don't doubt someone would try if they see the hold Wikipedia has falter.
It doesn't need to die for a new alternative to pop up.
I just doubt any alternative will be as good as the one we have now.
There will always be someone there to take its place. Maybe a more transparent and decentralised alternative like how fan-wikis used to be before Fandom bough them.
Tbh those pieces of trivia don't feel like encyclopedic information in the first place. A reader need not know specific intro songs to have an encyclopedic overview of wrestling, just that intro songs are often used.
A list containing the specific intro songs is vastly more suited for a fandom repository than an encyclopedia.
I have to disagree. Wrestling is all about the show, so a dedicated table of wrestlers' entrance themes, finishers and signature moves seems very on-brand for Wikipedia. It's also unclear if this was just a line item listed on every wrestlers' individual page or if this was a table, but either seems pretty on brand. Maybe there's a dedicated page for entrance theme music and a table of who used what song makes sense there?
To reference something I actually know about almost every Wikipedia page for a railroad will include a detailed route map. One could argue that that's not encyclopedia-like and should be reserved for a travel site or train chasing guide yet here we are
That sucks, but I also kind of empathize with wiki mods, cause it's really hard to know when to cut stuff down. I remember seeing a while back a bunch of people that migrated out from wikipedia to some completely unknown new wiki nobody will ever hear about, because they were working on chronicling all the roads in america with screenshots and notes of location and historical details about it all. Wikipedia didn't really get it, as it's more like a kind of academic and news aggregate, and there was nothing really there to aggregate, it was just an infodump of a bunch of different stuff. If wikipedia was a 1-1 map of the world, then it would be the size of the world. Or bigger, if you include historical stuff. No way you're fitting all that on a 102 gig drive, or whatever the size of wikipedia is. Plus there's hosting costs to consider, so it's not like they could do that even if they really wanted.
It's mostly true for articles that do not have large public coverage. Otherwise the number of those who stubbornly fight for the truth will prevail
How dare you trash Wikipedia on Lemmy? Infidel like you should be sent to gulag.
My workplace got a "coronavirus" chat on the corporate chat server. And the known "conspiracy theorist" guy on my team posted a link to some article on some total misinformation mill masquerading as a news source.
I looked up the name of the source on Wikipedia, which said it was a total misinformation mill.
So I linked to the Wikipedia article in the chat.
I work at a fairly big and diverse company, so of course there was more than one conspiracy guy there. It was really surreal watching people who literally think all governments are run by a secret cabal of Democrat extraterrestrial pedophile child-adrenaline junkies attack the trustworthiness of Wikipedia.
Edit: I'd forgotten the name of the "misinformation mill" that originally started that shit storm in the work chat, but I went back and looked it up. It was Project Veritas. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Veritas
RIP in Piss P. Veritas I hope hell is hot for you on the way down
They still exist. They just do not have James O'Keefe who was shit canned.
Wait, James OKeefe was always a can of shit
Please let me live in the world where they were internationally disgraced and every pundit that used them as a resource equally disgraced
99% of people bashing Wikipedia do so because they read that they're delusional about something.
Source: have read >100 Wikipedia bashings that answered follow-up questions.
Silly question but why is a work chat used for conspiracy theories? It seems like a bad use of company resources
They've got the permissions set up on the work chat server to allow anyone to create chats at will. Those chats can be public (listed in the search and anyone can join with a click) or private (can't be joined without an invite from the owner of the channel).
And they don't discourage non-work-related chats for... team building reasons, probably? There's one for "Video Games" for instance.
I know the guy who made the "coronavirus" chat and he 100% did not intend it for conspiracy theories. The whole IT department was in the process of going remote when that chat was created and that chat was intended for everything from helpful tips for working remotely to news/rumors about when/if we might be going back to the office to news about death rate statistics and such.
And this conspiracy guy had (still has, actually) a deep-seated need to proselatize for the conspiracy of the week 24/7/365. So he just decided that was as good a pulpit as any.
Shortly after the shitstorm started, three levels of management above both me and Conspiracy McGee entered the chat. They didn't end up doing anything. (It fizzled before they had to take action.) But I'm sure they all had their fingers hovering about 2mm above the "shut that shit down" button.
Now, all that said, there is a chat on the work chat server dedicated to the conspiracy podcast "No Agenda." And I'm pretty certain it was created by Conspiracy McGee. And I'm pretty sure my/his direct boss is in the No Agenda chat.
So, I guess the short answer to your question is that they don't want to shut down non-work-related chats so as to pay some lip service to team building and not appear too draconian (while at the same tacitly encouraging a culture in which it's not really acceptable to spend too much time in those chats rather than furiously typing code). And the company's management is sufficiently right-wing as to not get that allowing conspiracy theorists to conspiracy theorist is eventually going to backfire on them, so they don't see it as dangerous. So they see it not much unlike having a chat about the latest Mario Kart game or the Marvel Cinematic Universe or whatever.
Hopefully that answers somewhat.
It sounds like the simple answer for you would be not to participate in chats that will upset you
Wikipedia was useful for me as a grad student because I could look up a topic and there would be a whole lot of citations I could follow. I never used them as a source, but rather as a curated forum of information.
Wikipedia is like our dear friend. It gives us general information, good advice, and direction in life, but never gets too deeply in it. The choice is ours to make.
Only problem is that half of them are broken :(
I've been doing exactly the same thing with LLMs recently.
"Tell me about "
"What are the big problems their industry is trying to solve?"
"Who are their biggest competitors?"
"What's the worst/best thing about them?"
Questions like that often give me a great framework to look up specific questions, find relevant articles and get a handle on the sources that are likely to be useful.
I'd definitely be careful about made up stuff, but this sounds like an interesting idea.
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.
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.
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
There is a lot of bias on pages about religion, I find.
My kind of bias, or the wrong kind?
This is hilarious, thank you
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.
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.
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.
The thing is: in the not to distant future encyclopedias will be a thing of the past.
The Tab "Talk" gives you a lot more to learn on some pages, take a look !
Yet if you ever try to edit a page, the "Talk" tab is filled with the most pretentious protectionist people. You can add helpful context or missing information with sources to the wiki, and it will get deleted simply because you haven't spent months cozying up to the greaseball who sits on that specific wiki entry as if they possess it.
there is a bureaucratic machine for dealing with this kind of problem
But what do we do if every level of that machine is completely controlled by those people?
it's not. there are boards on Wikipedia specifically for calling in neutral editors.
Yep, generally different editors focus on different subjects.
Tbf the gamergate saga basically caused the infrastructure to have a rolling panic attack over how that such a large movement to insert misinformation against any effort to correct it.
All articles referencing this topic on Wikipedia are extremely biased.
Just call then out on it in talk by mentioning why you would add it.
Alternatively make an upgraded English-only wiki alternative with way larger article max sizes so we can finally evolve it past 2005. And start using YouTube links and not (just) a native video player. And start quoting/including entire chapters from relevant books.
The problem with using YT videos is that they are transitory. Also, you're then subjecting your reader to somebody else's advertisements for their gain.
Also YT follows the same rules as Wikipedia for being a source.
You don't cite it, you find what it's citing and cite that if you decide what those sources have to say are relevant to your intended argument.
In general wikipedia is a great source of knowledge that would be very hard to find elsewhere. That said, it can and often is edited by anyone. I'll never forget a friend sent me a link to file system comparison chart which included ReiserFS and someone added the last column 'Murders your wife' to 'Features' https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Comparison_of_file_systems&oldid=209063556#Features
And interestingly it’s trustable because it’s got no central authority core that can be corrupted
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?
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.
I think the word you're looking for is "trustworthy" but yes.
I consider it a separate concept.
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.
That's is definitely not true...
Elon Musk Offers to Also Ruin Wikipedia https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/elon-musk-wikipedia-twitter-x-encyclopedia-1234861220/
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.
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".
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.
“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.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.
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.
Educators HATE this weird loophole!
Yes. That's how you use an encyclopedia.
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)
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.
Wikipedia has been dealing with AI and bots since someone made a 2000 census article writer in 2003. Hopefully they are resistant to the rise of Chatbots
my understanding from an English professor is less about its reliability of information, but more its reliability regarding citing sources. you can't cite something that consistently changes
Only if the source checks out
Oh man the rightoids came out of the woods for this shower thought.
Any argument based on "us vs them" is flawed by default.
Does anyone know if there is a way to see which wiki articles are edited the most? I don't mean new topics or edits because there's a lot of new info. I mean potential back-and-forth edits where there is disagreement on facts (or one viewpoint denies a fact, etc.).
If that exists, I'd be curious to know what articles they are (obviously probably religion or politics). On the other side, those articles that have remained unedited for a long time are probably pretty rock solid, assuming they also get traffic.*
*I'm literally thinking out loud here and am sure there are many other factors to consider
Maybe if you keep refreshing this search wiki filtered by talk
Thanks, I think this is effectively the metric I want. Just have to combine it somehow (if possible) with traffic info by page.
I always trust the streets. People lie. Governments lie. News lies. But the streets. The streets never lie.
Gotta be careful roaming the streets, tho.
I been listening to these streets for years man and there’s one thing I’ve learned: streets ain’t sayin shit
I do for economic data. I really don't care what funny numbers the White House and shills put out.
Except not really.
Lol, everything is sourced.
No. There are plenty of articles with the "needs citations" tag.
But even of the ones that are? A LOT of people never actually read the sources and you have plenty of wild claims that are not at all supported by their citation. Plenty of "celebrities" have even talked about how it was a huge hassle to get something changed because the lie was cited... with something unrelated.
"a huge hassle"
Step 1. Remove the unfounded claim
Step 2. Go to the talk page explaining why you removed it
Step 3. If someone puts it back, edit war them, tag needs citation, call them out in the talk page, get the article locked by an admin, etc etc etc. These things happen all the time, and 95% of the time it gets corrected as long as someone gives a damn
Can you show some examples of this?
Nice.
Lol this guy is getting ready to edit some articles.
A lot of the political entries are written with a bent towards being sympathetic with leftists.
The Kyle Rittenhouse article spends a lot of time on how Rittenhouse ‘appeared in conservative media’ or ‘appeared with conservative personalities’ which is a pretty weird thing to say, if you don’t already understand the political undertones of the Kenosha riot.
When you click the article for the Kenosha riot, it’s titled ‘civil unrest in Kenosha’ and focusses a lot on what a reader would perceive as positive aims of the riot. Protesting racism and police brutality, and doesn’t focus at all on the crime, danger, guns, vandalism, arson, etc
That article mentions BLM and when you read that article it makes sure to state that BLM protests were ‘largely peaceful’ and totally misses the amount of deaths and destruction that had happened at them.
The BLM article, if written like the Rittenhouse article, should focus a fair amount in the organizations ties to Marxism, the overthrowing of capitalism and colonialism, but doesn’t.
Wikipedia articles are written and edited and maintained to push a narrative.
If you agree with the narrative, you probably like that it does this. If you disagree, you probably don’t bother reading Wikipedia very much.
The issue with sources, is that a lot of ‘sources’ for stuff like this are already heavily curated to paint a picture the editors want to put on front street.
And anything that would combat that narrative is just outright banned from the site.
A lot of citations with politically charged topics are just opinions anyway. There is no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ answer or sources on the war between Palestine and isreal, for example. But if Wikipedia editors want to push propaganda for either side over the other, all they have to do is only cite pro-Palestinian or pro-Israeli sources.
This is easily exploitable by editors for whatever narrative they choose to push.
Wikipedia is not an exhaustive gathering of all relevant information, it is a carefully curated propaganda machine for the editors.
Good point. I forgot to mention that Wikipedia editors, for all their flaws, are really good at shutting down hateful right wing bullshit.
So you’d categorize it as hateful right wing bullshit if someone mentions that there as violence or criminal activity at BLM protests?
Why would that be hateful? Or right wing? Or anything other than just a description of what happened?
Exactly
You can have violence at a largely peaceful protest, as long as it is ... largely peaceful.
Which they were, the majority ended peacefully and only a handful were violent.
So what Wikipedia did was state the facts. You can disagree with those facts, but you would be wrong.
Well it’s the old fact that reality has a left-wing bias, as someone once put it.
That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.
Whoever said that should step out of their bubble and have a look around once in awhile
Have you ever looked at the sources? Some pages have some insane blog spam "sources" linked.
That's a circular argument. If you can't trust the sources how can you trust the wikipedia article which cites those sources.
You can trust the sources, because unreliable sources can't be used on Wikipedia: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Perennial_sources
In any discipline some part has to be trusted for the next to follow. It is not circular, it is axiomatic. You can do a Descartes to find a "guarantee of truth", but there won't be one. Hence your critique could literally be applied to anything. Check sources and be happy they are freely provided (and donate to Wikipedia).
That's my point, by mistrusting every other website, OP is violating axioms upon which Wikipedia is built, yet still claiming it's trustworthy
Ah, I now see better what you meant. That is in part a fun little contradiction, but much of Wikipedia's sources are books and articles that come in printed form. These are easier than other websites to verify as sources due to their tangible nature.
But it takes more effort to confirm a tangible source than one on the internet?
Not really. Just sail the high seas with Library Genesis or Sci-Hub. The nature of being published is being non-editable, a digital copy is an okay compromise.
EDIT: There is an issue of trust in piracy, though hardly in practice, but Open Access should help with this.
Oh, you're taking me literally. Sorry I didn't catch that.
You can check the sources... if the source doesn't check out... Guess what, Wikipedia has given you all the information you need.
Lawl, 1) 25% of Wikipedia in English is unsourced
https://venturebeat.com/ai/how-wikimedia-is-using-machine-learning-to-spot-missing-citations/#:~:text=With%20crowdsourced%20content%2C%20citations%20are,articles%20lack%20a%20single%20citation.
lAwL 2) 77% of Wikipedia is written by 1% of its editors
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliability_of_Wikipedia#:~:text=If%20the%20original%20information%20in,an%20apparent%20credibility%20to%20falsehood
RaWfL 3) once a source is credited once, it isn't rechecked and can be used as a source on Wikipedia countless times
LmFAo 4) literally anyone saying something does not make it credible or true.
It could even be someone purposefully poisoning the well
Kinda like how the government hires people to put terrible music over all the UFO footage so we perceive it as crazy people stuff.
Not at all. I'm responding to OP, and while my comment is informative and sourced so that other people can understand it too, I do not care at all that my in-kind response turns some people off.
Lol.... kinda reminds of something.... Wikipedia?
As scrambled as your brain is, anything could.
my comment is informative and sourced so that other people can understand it too, I do not care at all that my in-kind response turns some people off.Thanks, trusting wikipedia because it has a "source"(, as if a source meant the truth 🙄,) is super weird, and i'll also add that a lot of sources are inaccessible anyway, such as those pointing to books. Wikipedia will hopefully(, in part because it's always a mistake to pretend knowing "the one truth",) be replaced one day, it's long overdue.
The inaccessibility of many wiki sources is a very good point, thanks.
I think Wikipedia serves its purpose as a broad strokes indicator of things that are likely significant in some way, but its limitations are as important as its content.
Rolfcopter. This guy doesn't know how to use Wikipedia.
You probably learned how to use Wikipedia from Wikipedia, that's how you got so wrong.
Not bad actually https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_and_fact-checking
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.
They use what to tell you? Smoke signals? Semaphore?
Hidden messages in advertisements
The UHBP protocol, obviously. /s
The same people who told you that now do fact checking on facebook instead
Huh?
Better than Google because at least it tries to fact check but it should be seen as a search engine
Not when elon turns it into dickipedia and makes every page reference him in a positive light
Wikipedia is not for sale.
I'm well aware, it is something that we call a "joke" if you haven't seen the news lately
Yeah, I c. So sick of that guy. Let him have his toys and he can go fuck off.
did he?
We should be careful or we will turn it into the Ministry of Truth.
For a minute I thought this was in c/writingprompts. I don't know what to do with this prompt
That's kind of sad
Wikipedia has the rest of the internet beat in terms of despot admins.
Nah wikipedia has been taken over by politically motivated actors. I really enjoyed it when it was relatively agenda free. If you don't believe me go check the talk page of any controversial article.
"Taken over" is a little strong. Anyone can edit a page, but you can see the edit history. That doesn't mean wikipedia is compromised. It means you need to be media literate. If there's too many bad faith edits, the article gets reverted and locked.
Go look at some of the most active wikipedia contributors, they are mostly hyper political nerds. Wikipedia is heavily reliant on the social consensus of it's contributors. It's not a far out idea that there could be a slant among them.
Just so you know, you can check any claim by going to the cited source. If there is no source, you're free to ask for one or ignore.
That's far better then other systems. It's also an encyclopedia, not a news paper. You shouldn't be using it for current events anyway.
curation can still skew towards one side. you know this, everyone knows this. just saying wikipedia used to better before it was taken over by ideologues.
The problem is that the Wikipedia admins are arrogant. I suppose power corrupts
I'd like an example of what you're talking about.
There are tons. Use your favorite internet search tool and look for “Wikipedia editor controversy”. Happy reading!
So you favorite, uncited, pet political theory got deleted then?
I’ve never edited a Wikipedia page.
Ok, cause you sound like one of those facebook moms saying "do your research" when you question them on their bleach enema treatments.
Are you incapable of searching the internet? Do you need me to do it for you?
https://letmegooglethat.com/?q=wikipedia+controversy+editor
And because I know how hard it is to click the link above, here’s a couple results, you dullard.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedia_controversies
https://slate.com/technology/2019/07/wikipedia-fram-banning-editor-controversy.html
https://www.engadget.com/scots-wikipedia-230210674.html
I imagine you can figure it out from here. If you need, I can suggest a tutor to help you master the art of typing text into a text box and then clicking the button below it.
Remember the prolific wikipedia contributor who had an extreme fascination with boobs?
Edit: It was a joke people. I wasn't being serious. But yeah, that did happen and there were articles about it for a while.
There's thousands of prolific Wikipedia contributors. Writing high quality articles takes a lot of time.
So no
It was reasonably big news when it was noticed, so it's not unreasonable that people might remember it. IIRC, the gist of it was one contributor that had historically contributed to a large number of articles added a redirect for every article with breast in the name so you could also access it by replacing breast with titty or boob, so for example, typing titty cancer into the search bar would bring you to the page for breast cancer.
Is that … bad?
Not really. It was amusing at worst probably. I was trying to be humorous when I mentioned it, but I guess a lot of people thought I was serious.
And many with extreme fascination for boobs.
Yeah I’m not buying it. Until I see some stats on the normal level of boob fascination I can’t conclude this guy was extreme
The Scots guy is a better example, imo. Someone who was trying to contribute in a positive manner but filled the wiki with complete gibberish, as opposed to a troll, of which there many.
How does that make his contributions wrong?
Gee I don’t know let’s have a look:
It’s getting out of hand I’d say
All of those are funny and obviously untrue. Using Wikipedia isn't a one stop perfect information system. Knowing how to use it comes with knowing how to use the sources.
Well Wikipedia is striving to be a perfect information system. So they don't belong there. There are better locations on the internet for those kinds of jokes.
So his contributions were wrong but now you're moving goalposts and saying they're funny and obviously wrong, so it's okay? WTF kind of standard is that lol
Hm, I was looking for unhinged Hexbear replies at the bottom, but there aren't any! I guess the defed did good
Who is hexbear? Now I am curious.
it's a whole instance
Give it up weirdo
ooh a real one. I see you under there. can you copy paste some wicked rant about how Wikipedia is neoliberal shill org? bonus points if you link to a 40 page google doc that cites reddit
I'm not even on hexbear, I'm just tired of you morons looking for boogeymen everywhere.
Wikipedia is dominated by a bunch of special interest groups that make ideological edits and lock others from reverting them.
Check out the "talk" tab if you want to see the psychopaths determining what content is shown.
that's cool you read my mind.
this website is somehow even worse than reddit
He literally can't, it's a freely licensed work that you can copy and modify whenever you want.
Wikipedia is nefarious as fuck and nobody should trust it.
https://youtu.be/tExxkV1Xgzg?si=cqgkEghiy9a9m4aG
I feel bad for you
wah wah
Try to draw your own conclusions instead of just being a follower. That applies to all political stances and life in general
Because people have a different opinion than you, you feel "bad" for me? Well I don't feel a bit bad for you.
I feel bad for you because this guy is hackish and you obviously respect him. If I could save every rube I would but I just can't. So I feel sorry instead.
🤡
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/tExxkV1Xgzg?si=cqgkEghiy9a9m4aG
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.