7 ms·

People need to stop blindly trusting Wikipedia. I have seen sourced facts that failed a sniff test, and checking the source the article contradicted the source

People need to stop blindly trusting Wikipedia. I have seen sourced facts that failed a sniff test, and checking the source the article contradicted the source it linked to, and that’s only the times I noticed. Couple that with the amount of other sites and media that copy off Wikipedia (citogenesis) and BS spreads like wildfire. “Why do you still use Wikipedia?” because the good parts are a great human achievement and even the OK parts can be adequate as a broad outline of a topic. “Why don’t you just fix it?” I try, but it’s hard when I have a busy day and my edit will be reverted within minutes by a full-time Wikipedian / Expert Wikipedia Rules Lawyer and self-appointed lord of said article.

brightball 5y ago
Completely agree with this. Some of the locked topics are the worst too. They end up locked because people are fighting to include more information that’s not being allowed. It’s a huge problem.
jerry1979 5y ago
Would you happen to know if anyone is cataloging these false facts?
howenterprisey 5y ago
>my edit will be reverted within minutes Post a link. I'm doing some research on this. Ideally we'd get rid of the ability to revert people most of the time, and only let people improve the edit by adding sources and such.
akolbe 5y ago
Absolutely right. What doesn't help here is when the Wikimedia PR machine minimizes and whitewashes problems, as it did in the Wikimedia blog post about this incident, making everyone think that Wikipedia is of uniformly stellar quality, better than Britannica and all the rest of it ... When the reality is that Wikipedia quality can and does vary tremendously from one article to the next, even from one paragraph to the next, and reader caution is always indicated. (For six or seven years, this specific article contained two different birth dates—one in the infobox, one in the lead paragraph. Nobody noticed or cared. Then someone picked up on the discrepancy and made both dates the same—wrong.)
caseysoftware 5y ago
Wikipedia is steadily trending towards Gell Man Amnesia at scale for any remotely contentious topic.
- notriddle 5y ago
  Considering how Wikipedia considers newspapers to be reliable sources, this should be expected.
  - Ekaros 5y ago
    Certain newspapers, but not all... Specially if they don't lean the way most prolific author on article wants.
- blondin 5y ago
  this is concerning. i can't say we can predict where all this is going or what will come out of this case. but wikipedia seems to have too much power over what constitute the "truth". i recently read a book on cognitive science that has most of their sources from wikipedia.
rtpg 5y ago
I mean your criticism in the abstract applies to basically any source. The argument is very general and applies to everything out there! Hell, for contentious articles given you have antagonistic co-authors it’s more likely to be fact checked than in the Wapo “2 Pinocchios” echo chamber. Words are written by people…
- DenverCoder99 5y ago
  It's not just that Wikipedia is vulnerable to human error just like anything else, it seems to be driven by activists. Larry Sanger, one of Wikipedia's co-founders, has been trying to warn people that his own creation has been bastardized. I still use Wikipedia for pure STEM subjects, but beyond that, I wouldn't trust it.
  - MereInterest 5y ago
    Even for pure STEM subjects, the further you go into esoterica, the less checking there can be on it. I remember one instance, mainly because it added an hour or two to a problem set in grad school. (Apologies for any errors, as it's been the better part of a decade since then.) Wikipedia gave simplified formulas for the asymptomatic forms of the modified Bessel functions, and each formulas they gave were correct. However, each simplification used a different branch cut, so subtracting two of the asymptomatic forms wouldn't give the correct result. Tracing back that error, and why I was consistently off by a factor of 2*pi took a long time.
  - cronix 5y ago
    Here's a pretty good interview Larry did on Tim Pools show about 7 months ago, outlining just how bad it is. It's a topical show and not 100% focused on Larry though. Tim also outlines how hard it is to correct factually inaccurate information on what people write about him in his wiki entry (stating he created a "blimp" etc). Also goes into the fake, circular references and activists gaming the system. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWQaVx5mGco https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWQaVx5mGco
  - rtpg 5y ago
    I fail to see how this effect would be less pronounced than, say, newspaper editors determining the overall voice of how they cover things. Im not declaring that Wikipedia is objective, but I don’t honestly believe it’s worse than other sources of info (beyond like… really digging into a primary source of a subject? And even then)
WhyNotHugo 5y ago
> “Why do you still use Wikipedia?” It has mistakes, just like any other human-made source of knowledge too. it's not like we have a god-given encyclopedia which is known to be completely right. I can use Google, DDG, or the library instead of wikipedia, and there's also chances that the sources there are mistaken or outdated too.
superdisk 5y ago
> full-time Wikipedian / Expert Wikipedia Rules Lawyer and self-appointed lord of said article. So absolutely true. These people are insufferable. Any time I've made a non-trivial edit to Wikipedia I usually end up clashing with these people. It really sucks because a lot of the time, they don't argue in good faith, and throw every rule in the book at you to get their way, while hiding behind a facade of impartial rule-abiding. So frustrating, and has drastically lowered my confidence in Wikipedia. Also, it's fun to note the "lords" of various general topics. Find an article about a person in the right-wing political sphere and you're very likely to find the same small set of "Wikipedian" toadies ruling over it with an iron fist. I'm sure the same goes for many other topics that aren't about politics.
- lutoma 5y ago
  It's particularly bad in the German Wikipedia. Compared to the situation there the English language version is downright welcoming.
  - mbirth 5y ago
    Yes, our “Blockwärter” do this for a decade now. If they don’t know something, it doesn’t exist and also isn’t “relevant” enough for Wikipedia. It’s a shame.
- irrational 5y ago
  This has been my experience also. These people get a mediocum of power and let it go to their heads.
- ratww 5y ago
  It’s not even just controversial topics or politics: people try to control the pettiest things. I used to be active there, and it was a struggle to add “timelines” of band members to some old rock acts even though it was already in place in most of the site, because a classic-rock fan disliked them. There is also one specific user who gets to pick who is metal and who isn’t, and reverts addition to lists for bands who aren’t “metal enough” for him like Rammstein or Nu-Metal. Even with sources and pushback from other moderators, it’s hard to compete with people with an agenda and a lot of time.
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
> “Why don’t you just fix it?” I try, but it’s hard when I have a busy day and my edit will be reverted within minutes by a full-time Wikipedian / Expert Wikipedia Rules Lawyer and self-appointed lord of said article. Reddit has fallen to this same problem with subreddit moderators. A subreddit moderator can remove posts and comments they don't want anyone to see. A lot of the popular subreddits and many of the more obscure subreddits are moderator-crafted echo chambers. Some moderators have unbelievable amounts of free time to observe the subreddit and surgically remove discussions they disagree with. Worse, it's all invisible. These subreddits become an extension of what the moderators want without the moderators having to show their actions at all. When you visit a subreddit, you could be reading a carefully constructed echo chamber of a single moderator and have no idea. I think the Reddit situation would be very different if it had a "showdead" style option that let readers see removed comments.
- path411 5y ago
  Problem is moderators can straight up ban you from posting anymore comments in a sub, and most do if they delete one of your comments. Try to talk about politics in any political tangent subreddit long enough and you will eventually get the boot because no sane person lines up with 100% perfect match to a certain political viewpoint
- CRConrad 5y ago
  At least Wikipedia has its edit history. Or is that also editable by "Wikipedia Gods" nowadays?
- brightball 5y ago
  Yep. There’s clearly a reward structure being created to silence contrary information.
- dylan604 5y ago
  > a "showdead" style option that let readers see removed comments. If it had this option, why even allow the moderation at all?
  - 5y ago
aww_dang 5y ago
At this point I rarely consider directly editing an article. If it seems that the edit would be palatable to the prevailing dogma I suggest it on the talk page. This allows whichever editor to claim it as their own and phrase it accordingly.
yakubin 5y ago
Wikipedia pages are also subject to PR fights and lobbying: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22653716 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22653716>
unreal37 5y ago
Google trusts Wikipedia. And that's sort of the problem with this case. Google was showing this guys picture on the search results page in an infobox as a serial killer.
jimmont 5y ago
People need to stop blindly trusting. ~ I simply dropped the last word. Just a thought.
FourthProtocol 5y ago
I've had a few experiences with Wikipedia that left me with a sour taste. I can't remember details but there was a pretty big error on the Lancia page that I fixed, which somebody at Wikipedia changed back. This wasn't the first time but it was so long ago I can't remember what else I corrected. Upshot was reverting to my old Microsoft Encarta disks, until I discovered Britannica. €100 a year and I have it all, and it's all from an organization that stakes its reputation on accuracy. Even more useful now that my boy benefits.
- leephillips 5y ago
  This is the reason that Wikipedia turned out to be the exact type of failure that it was widely predicted to become. The crowd-sourcing concept leads to a diffusion of responsibility. A similar effect leads to thoughtless mob action in real crowds.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

brightball 5y ago

Completely agree with this. Some of the locked topics are the worst too. They end up locked because people are fighting to include more information that’s not being allowed. It’s a huge problem.

jerry1979 5y ago

Would you happen to know if anyone is cataloging these false facts?

howenterprisey 5y ago

>my edit will be reverted within minutes Post a link. I'm doing some research on this. Ideally we'd get rid of the ability to revert people most of the time, and only let people improve the edit by adding sources and such.

akolbe 5y ago

Absolutely right. What doesn't help here is when the Wikimedia PR machine minimizes and whitewashes problems, as it did in the Wikimedia blog post about this incident, making everyone think that Wikipedia is of uniformly stellar quality, better than Britannica and all the rest of it ... When the reality is that Wikipedia quality can and does vary tremendously from one article to the next, even from one paragraph to the next, and reader caution is always indicated. (For six or seven years, this specific article contained two different birth dates—one in the infobox, one in the lead paragraph. Nobody noticed or cared. Then someone picked up on the discrepancy and made both dates the same—wrong.)

caseysoftware 5y ago

Wikipedia is steadily trending towards Gell Man Amnesia at scale for any remotely contentious topic.

notriddle 5y ago
Considering how Wikipedia considers newspapers to be reliable sources, this should be expected.
- Ekaros 5y ago
  Certain newspapers, but not all... Specially if they don't lean the way most prolific author on article wants.
blondin 5y ago
this is concerning. i can't say we can predict where all this is going or what will come out of this case. but wikipedia seems to have too much power over what constitute the "truth". i recently read a book on cognitive science that has most of their sources from wikipedia.

rtpg 5y ago

I mean your criticism in the abstract applies to basically any source. The argument is very general and applies to everything out there! Hell, for contentious articles given you have antagonistic co-authors it’s more likely to be fact checked than in the Wapo “2 Pinocchios” echo chamber. Words are written by people…

DenverCoder99 5y ago
It's not just that Wikipedia is vulnerable to human error just like anything else, it seems to be driven by activists. Larry Sanger, one of Wikipedia's co-founders, has been trying to warn people that his own creation has been bastardized. I still use Wikipedia for pure STEM subjects, but beyond that, I wouldn't trust it.
- MereInterest 5y ago
  Even for pure STEM subjects, the further you go into esoterica, the less checking there can be on it. I remember one instance, mainly because it added an hour or two to a problem set in grad school. (Apologies for any errors, as it's been the better part of a decade since then.) Wikipedia gave simplified formulas for the asymptomatic forms of the modified Bessel functions, and each formulas they gave were correct. However, each simplification used a different branch cut, so subtracting two of the asymptomatic forms wouldn't give the correct result. Tracing back that error, and why I was consistently off by a factor of 2*pi took a long time.
- cronix 5y ago
  Here's a pretty good interview Larry did on Tim Pools show about 7 months ago, outlining just how bad it is. It's a topical show and not 100% focused on Larry though. Tim also outlines how hard it is to correct factually inaccurate information on what people write about him in his wiki entry (stating he created a "blimp" etc). Also goes into the fake, circular references and activists gaming the system. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWQaVx5mGco https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWQaVx5mGco
- rtpg 5y ago
  I fail to see how this effect would be less pronounced than, say, newspaper editors determining the overall voice of how they cover things. Im not declaring that Wikipedia is objective, but I don’t honestly believe it’s worse than other sources of info (beyond like… really digging into a primary source of a subject? And even then)

WhyNotHugo 5y ago

> “Why do you still use Wikipedia?” It has mistakes, just like any other human-made source of knowledge too. it's not like we have a god-given encyclopedia which is known to be completely right. I can use Google, DDG, or the library instead of wikipedia, and there's also chances that the sources there are mistaken or outdated too.

superdisk 5y ago

> full-time Wikipedian / Expert Wikipedia Rules Lawyer and self-appointed lord of said article. So absolutely true. These people are insufferable. Any time I've made a non-trivial edit to Wikipedia I usually end up clashing with these people. It really sucks because a lot of the time, they don't argue in good faith, and throw every rule in the book at you to get their way, while hiding behind a facade of impartial rule-abiding. So frustrating, and has drastically lowered my confidence in Wikipedia. Also, it's fun to note the "lords" of various general topics. Find an article about a person in the right-wing political sphere and you're very likely to find the same small set of "Wikipedian" toadies ruling over it with an iron fist. I'm sure the same goes for many other topics that aren't about politics.

lutoma 5y ago
It's particularly bad in the German Wikipedia. Compared to the situation there the English language version is downright welcoming.
- mbirth 5y ago
  Yes, our “Blockwärter” do this for a decade now. If they don’t know something, it doesn’t exist and also isn’t “relevant” enough for Wikipedia. It’s a shame.
irrational 5y ago
This has been my experience also. These people get a mediocum of power and let it go to their heads.
ratww 5y ago
It’s not even just controversial topics or politics: people try to control the pettiest things. I used to be active there, and it was a struggle to add “timelines” of band members to some old rock acts even though it was already in place in most of the site, because a classic-rock fan disliked them. There is also one specific user who gets to pick who is metal and who isn’t, and reverts addition to lists for bands who aren’t “metal enough” for him like Rammstein or Nu-Metal. Even with sources and pushback from other moderators, it’s hard to compete with people with an agenda and a lot of time.

PragmaticPulp 5y ago

> “Why don’t you just fix it?” I try, but it’s hard when I have a busy day and my edit will be reverted within minutes by a full-time Wikipedian / Expert Wikipedia Rules Lawyer and self-appointed lord of said article. Reddit has fallen to this same problem with subreddit moderators. A subreddit moderator can remove posts and comments they don't want anyone to see. A lot of the popular subreddits and many of the more obscure subreddits are moderator-crafted echo chambers. Some moderators have unbelievable amounts of free time to observe the subreddit and surgically remove discussions they disagree with. Worse, it's all invisible. These subreddits become an extension of what the moderators want without the moderators having to show their actions at all. When you visit a subreddit, you could be reading a carefully constructed echo chamber of a single moderator and have no idea. I think the Reddit situation would be very different if it had a "showdead" style option that let readers see removed comments.

path411 5y ago
Problem is moderators can straight up ban you from posting anymore comments in a sub, and most do if they delete one of your comments. Try to talk about politics in any political tangent subreddit long enough and you will eventually get the boot because no sane person lines up with 100% perfect match to a certain political viewpoint
CRConrad 5y ago
At least Wikipedia has its edit history. Or is that also editable by "Wikipedia Gods" nowadays?
brightball 5y ago
Yep. There’s clearly a reward structure being created to silence contrary information.
dylan604 5y ago
> a "showdead" style option that let readers see removed comments. If it had this option, why even allow the moderation at all?
- 5y ago

aww_dang 5y ago

At this point I rarely consider directly editing an article. If it seems that the edit would be palatable to the prevailing dogma I suggest it on the talk page. This allows whichever editor to claim it as their own and phrase it accordingly.

yakubin 5y ago

Wikipedia pages are also subject to PR fights and lobbying: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22653716 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22653716>

unreal37 5y ago

Google trusts Wikipedia. And that's sort of the problem with this case. Google was showing this guys picture on the search results page in an infobox as a serial killer.

jimmont 5y ago

People need to stop blindly trusting. ~ I simply dropped the last word. Just a thought.

FourthProtocol 5y ago

I've had a few experiences with Wikipedia that left me with a sour taste. I can't remember details but there was a pretty big error on the Lancia page that I fixed, which somebody at Wikipedia changed back. This wasn't the first time but it was so long ago I can't remember what else I corrected. Upshot was reverting to my old Microsoft Encarta disks, until I discovered Britannica. €100 a year and I have it all, and it's all from an organization that stakes its reputation on accuracy. Even more useful now that my boy benefits.

leephillips 5y ago
This is the reason that Wikipedia turned out to be the exact type of failure that it was widely predicted to become. The crowd-sourcing concept leads to a diffusion of responsibility. A similar effect leads to thoughtless mob action in real crowds.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]