4 ms·
Wikipedia is not the sum of all knowledge. It's an encyclopedia. Many people seem confused about what that means. Primary source: I say $foo! (blog, YouTube, o
by neilk 8y ago
Wikipedia is not the sum of all knowledge. It's an encyclopedia. Many people seem confused about what that means.
Primary source: I say $foo! (blog, YouTube, opinion piece)
Secondary source: neilk said $foo. (The New Yorker)
Tertiary source: Reliable, fact-checked publications, such as The New Yorker, have said that neilk said $foo. (Wikipedia)
Wikipedia is a tertiary source. At best WP represents the range of viewpoints that learned people have. If many published articles in reputable outlets give credence to something false, and there's no good refutation in print, there's not much that Wikipedians can do.
Roth always had an option, one that he seems unaware of. There is an exception for primary sources for exactly this sort of thing.[1]. All he had to do was publish a blog post or a tweet or have his publishers do so for him.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Identifying_and_using_self-published_works#For_claims_by_self-published_authors_about_themselves https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Identifying_and_usin...
- scrollaway 8y agoWikipedia probably falls more in the secondary source category. In fact, I'm quite certain it does. If you think about the numbers between the amount of information and citations on wikipedia, vs. the amount of information that is on "reliable, fact-checked publications", it becomes obvious that there is an immense amount of first-party information and citations.
- ubernostrum 8y agoWikipedia is not the sum of all knowledge. It's an encyclopedia. Many people seem confused about what that means. Quoting from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia we find: Wikipedia seeks to create a summary of all human knowledge in the form of an online encyclopedia, with each topic covered encyclopedically in one article.
- beefsack 8y agoThat's not a useful comparison, "sum of all knowledge" isn't the same as "summary".
- ubernostrum 8y agoA "summary of all human knowledge" that deliberately follows up with "well, actually not all human knowledge" is either dishonest or a failure.
- siddboots 8y agoThey are different statements. They just sound similar. "The sum of all human knowledge" would suggest that everything in Wikipedia is known to be true, and everything known to be true is in Wikipedia. In "a summary of all human knowledge," the indefinite article and the word summary both imply a point of view. The sentence says that the knowledge has been abridged, and therefore, that there exists an abridger. It says that Wikipedia is one among many possible summaries.
- ubernostrum 8y agoAn abridged summary is one thing. An abridged summary that editorially chooses which knowledge is worthy of summarizing is another thing. Wikipedia is the latter. The "all knowledge" bit should not be part of the description, because it's not true. Wikipedia actually attempts to create "a summary of selected portions of human knowledge, chosen by those users with the most willingness to endlessly argue on the internet about what should and should not be included".