6 ms·

Most of my life I have been told: "do not rely on Wikipedia, it is inaccurate". And I get it, it's true if you're going through academia... But. Compare to the

Most of my life I have been told: "do not rely on Wikipedia, it is inaccurate". And I get it, it's true if you're going through academia... But. Compare to the rest of the internet. Compare to every single propaganda website. Text on Wikipedia has one of the highest chances of being true by default. If a random website contradicts Wikipedia one shouldn't trust that website. I'm sick of people comparing Wikipedia to peer reviewed journals... When instead people get their knowledge from tabloids, random newspapers, individuals getting mad in youtube videos, and websites like Facebook. If Facebook claims to know more about the world than Wikipedia, it should factcheck itself.

epgui 4y ago
Anyone who says you shouldn't rely on wikipedia because it's inaccurate is confused about what wikipedia is, and what encyclopedias are supposed to be used for. The lesson teachers should have been teaching was that you shouldn't cite the thing in a scholarly work as if it was a primary (or even secondary) source. Just like you shouldn't cite the Encyclopedia Britannica, or any other encyclopedia, in a paper.
- somenameforme 4y ago
  You seem to be falsely equating the Wiki model, with the Encyclopedia model. Encyclopedias could be, and regularly were, referenced as factual and primary sources. The reason is that encyclopedias in the past were predominately written by subject matter experts. As an example writers for Britannica included no less than Milton Friedman, Carl Sagan, Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, and even Leon Trotsky to go in a different direction. [1] Wikipedia, by contrast, is written by whoever can engage in the Wiki-world equivalent of getting the most likes. And its writers are whoever wins what is effectively a glorified Reddit-like upvote system. Ostensibly this is balanced against the fact that editors cannot themselves work as primary sources on Wikipedia: Einstein himself would not be allowed to write about physics on Wikipedia, but this also means Joe Editor also can't write as a primary source. Instead everything is exclusively sourced from other sites. The problem is that this is where bias comes into play. If Joe Editor wants to publish that 2+2=5 in the mathematics section and he can find an article on The Verge claiming so, then he can do so. If somebody wants to correct him, and he doesn't want to change, then edit wars begin. And in these cases, the truth itself is secondary to more normal aspects of social media. This is where Wikipedia fails. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encyclop%C3%A6dia_Britannica#Contributors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encyclop%C3%A6dia_Britannica#C...
  - carschno 4y ago
    I don't deny that intentional or unintentional misinformation occurs on Wikipedia. However, that does not qualify as an argument against Wikipedia as a reliable source as a whole, in particular in comparison to most other sources, including many TV channels, newspapers and tabloids. In fact, many if not most Wikipedia pages are written by subject matter experts too (to be defined weet that that means). In spite of occasional quality concerns, Wikipedia is one of the most trustworthy sources on the internet. That does not mean you should blindly believe everything you read there, as for any other source. Also, as stated by others, it is not a scholarly source nor a scientific publication.
  - elsjaako 4y ago
    I don't really disagree but I want to note that most of Wikipedia hasn't been subject to an edit war. So most of Wikipedia isn't decided by Wikipedia's ritual, but just by whoever put in the effort to write it.
    - hobofan 4y ago
      > just by whoever put in the effort to write it Which is about as bad. This can directly translate to "the only person that put effort into writing it, no matter how competent they are in the subject".
  - Kim_Bruning 4y ago
    I'll just address just one of your points for now: For as long as possible people held off any kind of voting, instead using a rough consensus system. This was chosen because voting would lead to too much inaccuracy. I know about this because at one point I researched how and why the system was working, and helped write some of the documentation on it. My question to you is where, when, and/or why you think the system looks like reddit voting, as you claim? I would be rather sad if it has broken down of late. note 1: Ironically, the No Original Research [3] rule came about to counter claims of unreliability. I doagree with you that -while it does set a lower limit on reliability- it also sets an upper limit. Besides your objections, it also removes a channel for establishing priority [1], and makes it harder for experts to contribute from memory. [2]. note 2: Wikipedia actually incorporates the 11th edition of Encyclopedia Britannica as the basis for a number of articles [4] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Lost_functionalities#Ability_to_establish_priority https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Lost_functionalities... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Lost_functionalities#Improving_an_article_from_memory_or_logic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Lost_functionalities... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_research https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_research [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encyclop%C3%A6dia_Britannica_Eleventh_Edition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encyclop%C3%A6dia_Britannica_E...
- kshacker 4y ago
  It is as they say "perfect being the enemy of good". There are just too many people who create this perception because of their one off bad experience. Given the Wikipedia model of open edits, they should go fix it rather than create a perception of it being bad. Of course edit may not be possible in contentious subjects but most of us know that.
oarabbus_ 4y ago
>If Facebook claims to know more about the world than Wikipedia, it should factcheck itself. This seems like a misunderstanding of what the AI is doing. It does not "know about the world" or assert knowledge of any kind of truth, other than to check a citation given in a wikipedia article, and attempt to verify the reference actually contains said information. For example, if I edited a wiki article to state "over 12 million people visit Hacker News every hour" and linked a random HN article claiming nothing of the sort, this AI would attempt to parse my citation and if it was successful determine the reference didn't support the claim.
- laserbeam 4y ago
  I understand what the AI model claims to want to do. And I can see how Wikipedia can be a decent testbed for the model. But the title "factcheck wikipedia" is not what the model does. At best the model would make bad actors game references the same way people game page rank on google. Sure, deterrent, meh.
  - visarga 4y ago
    "Reference check" is a better way to describe what it does. Under the hood I think it does the classical natural language inference task. There are benchmarks, datasets and papers on this topic. https://paperswithcode.com/task/natural-language-inference https://paperswithcode.com/task/natural-language-inference
charlieyu1 4y ago
Wikipedia has a lot of propaganda, often heavily monitored by eager moderators who may or may not have their own agenda. But no way I’d trust Facebook on this.
- quenix 4y ago
  > Wikipedia has a lot of propaganda Any particular examples?
  - 0xy 4y ago
    Pretty much any article on gender claims it's a social construct using citations from "sources" like Mother Jones and fringe extremist social sciences professors. Biology is barely a consideration. If you look at articles on IQ, the entire page claims any link between IQ and race, which has been repeatedly proven in countless independent studies over decades, is wrong and that all IQ differences are environment, a lie that seems blatantly political. These pages are locked to anyone except the usual few Wikipedia elites with an agenda.
  - npteljes 4y ago
    Particularly this section :P https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Propaganda https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Propaganda Conservapedia, while not my choice as a source of truth, has a long list of what they find wrong with Wikipedia https://www.conservapedia.com/Examples_of_Bias_in_Wikipedia https://www.conservapedia.com/Examples_of_Bias_in_Wikipedia RationalWiki also has a section dedicated to this phenomenon, including multiple points of view: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Wikipedia#Bias_in_Wikipedia https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Wikipedia#Bias_in_Wikipedia
antifa 4y ago
In the context of debates, the person who needed to resort to saying "Wikipedia is an unreliable resource" misses the point that Wikipedia is still orders of magnitude more reliable than the claims of some random debate person.
skissane 4y ago
I am interested in philosophy. Wikipedia’s articles on the topic are very uneven - some are okay, others are really bad. There are two freely accessible online philosophy encyclopaedias written by actual philosophy academics - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (IEP) - both are miles better than Wikipedia. (IEP tends to be more accessible for beginners - some of Stanford’s articles can get quite esoteric and technical.) Another very good philosophy encyclopedia is Routledge’s, albeit it is not freely available online (or at least, not legally). Why rely on Wikipedia when there are much more reliable and higher quality alternatives?

epgui 4y ago

Anyone who says you shouldn't rely on wikipedia because it's inaccurate is confused about what wikipedia is, and what encyclopedias are supposed to be used for. The lesson teachers should have been teaching was that you shouldn't cite the thing in a scholarly work as if it was a primary (or even secondary) source. Just like you shouldn't cite the Encyclopedia Britannica, or any other encyclopedia, in a paper.

somenameforme 4y ago
You seem to be falsely equating the Wiki model, with the Encyclopedia model. Encyclopedias could be, and regularly were, referenced as factual and primary sources. The reason is that encyclopedias in the past were predominately written by subject matter experts. As an example writers for Britannica included no less than Milton Friedman, Carl Sagan, Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, and even Leon Trotsky to go in a different direction. [1] Wikipedia, by contrast, is written by whoever can engage in the Wiki-world equivalent of getting the most likes. And its writers are whoever wins what is effectively a glorified Reddit-like upvote system. Ostensibly this is balanced against the fact that editors cannot themselves work as primary sources on Wikipedia: Einstein himself would not be allowed to write about physics on Wikipedia, but this also means Joe Editor also can't write as a primary source. Instead everything is exclusively sourced from other sites. The problem is that this is where bias comes into play. If Joe Editor wants to publish that 2+2=5 in the mathematics section and he can find an article on The Verge claiming so, then he can do so. If somebody wants to correct him, and he doesn't want to change, then edit wars begin. And in these cases, the truth itself is secondary to more normal aspects of social media. This is where Wikipedia fails. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encyclop%C3%A6dia_Britannica#Contributors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encyclop%C3%A6dia_Britannica#C...
- carschno 4y ago
  I don't deny that intentional or unintentional misinformation occurs on Wikipedia. However, that does not qualify as an argument against Wikipedia as a reliable source as a whole, in particular in comparison to most other sources, including many TV channels, newspapers and tabloids. In fact, many if not most Wikipedia pages are written by subject matter experts too (to be defined weet that that means). In spite of occasional quality concerns, Wikipedia is one of the most trustworthy sources on the internet. That does not mean you should blindly believe everything you read there, as for any other source. Also, as stated by others, it is not a scholarly source nor a scientific publication.
- elsjaako 4y ago
  I don't really disagree but I want to note that most of Wikipedia hasn't been subject to an edit war. So most of Wikipedia isn't decided by Wikipedia's ritual, but just by whoever put in the effort to write it.
  - hobofan 4y ago
    > just by whoever put in the effort to write it Which is about as bad. This can directly translate to "the only person that put effort into writing it, no matter how competent they are in the subject".
- Kim_Bruning 4y ago
  I'll just address just one of your points for now: For as long as possible people held off any kind of voting, instead using a rough consensus system. This was chosen because voting would lead to too much inaccuracy. I know about this because at one point I researched how and why the system was working, and helped write some of the documentation on it. My question to you is where, when, and/or why you think the system looks like reddit voting, as you claim? I would be rather sad if it has broken down of late. note 1: Ironically, the No Original Research [3] rule came about to counter claims of unreliability. I doagree with you that -while it does set a lower limit on reliability- it also sets an upper limit. Besides your objections, it also removes a channel for establishing priority [1], and makes it harder for experts to contribute from memory. [2]. note 2: Wikipedia actually incorporates the 11th edition of Encyclopedia Britannica as the basis for a number of articles [4] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Lost_functionalities#Ability_to_establish_priority https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Lost_functionalities... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Lost_functionalities#Improving_an_article_from_memory_or_logic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Lost_functionalities... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_research https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_research [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encyclop%C3%A6dia_Britannica_Eleventh_Edition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encyclop%C3%A6dia_Britannica_E...
kshacker 4y ago
It is as they say "perfect being the enemy of good". There are just too many people who create this perception because of their one off bad experience. Given the Wikipedia model of open edits, they should go fix it rather than create a perception of it being bad. Of course edit may not be possible in contentious subjects but most of us know that.

oarabbus_ 4y ago

>If Facebook claims to know more about the world than Wikipedia, it should factcheck itself. This seems like a misunderstanding of what the AI is doing. It does not "know about the world" or assert knowledge of any kind of truth, other than to check a citation given in a wikipedia article, and attempt to verify the reference actually contains said information. For example, if I edited a wiki article to state "over 12 million people visit Hacker News every hour" and linked a random HN article claiming nothing of the sort, this AI would attempt to parse my citation and if it was successful determine the reference didn't support the claim.

laserbeam 4y ago
I understand what the AI model claims to want to do. And I can see how Wikipedia can be a decent testbed for the model. But the title "factcheck wikipedia" is not what the model does. At best the model would make bad actors game references the same way people game page rank on google. Sure, deterrent, meh.
- visarga 4y ago
  "Reference check" is a better way to describe what it does. Under the hood I think it does the classical natural language inference task. There are benchmarks, datasets and papers on this topic. https://paperswithcode.com/task/natural-language-inference https://paperswithcode.com/task/natural-language-inference

charlieyu1 4y ago

Wikipedia has a lot of propaganda, often heavily monitored by eager moderators who may or may not have their own agenda. But no way I’d trust Facebook on this.

quenix 4y ago
> Wikipedia has a lot of propaganda Any particular examples?
- 0xy 4y ago
  Pretty much any article on gender claims it's a social construct using citations from "sources" like Mother Jones and fringe extremist social sciences professors. Biology is barely a consideration. If you look at articles on IQ, the entire page claims any link between IQ and race, which has been repeatedly proven in countless independent studies over decades, is wrong and that all IQ differences are environment, a lie that seems blatantly political. These pages are locked to anyone except the usual few Wikipedia elites with an agenda.
- npteljes 4y ago
  Particularly this section :P https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Propaganda https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Propaganda Conservapedia, while not my choice as a source of truth, has a long list of what they find wrong with Wikipedia https://www.conservapedia.com/Examples_of_Bias_in_Wikipedia https://www.conservapedia.com/Examples_of_Bias_in_Wikipedia RationalWiki also has a section dedicated to this phenomenon, including multiple points of view: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Wikipedia#Bias_in_Wikipedia https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Wikipedia#Bias_in_Wikipedia

antifa 4y ago

In the context of debates, the person who needed to resort to saying "Wikipedia is an unreliable resource" misses the point that Wikipedia is still orders of magnitude more reliable than the claims of some random debate person.

skissane 4y ago

I am interested in philosophy. Wikipedia’s articles on the topic are very uneven - some are okay, others are really bad. There are two freely accessible online philosophy encyclopaedias written by actual philosophy academics - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (IEP) - both are miles better than Wikipedia. (IEP tends to be more accessible for beginners - some of Stanford’s articles can get quite esoteric and technical.) Another very good philosophy encyclopedia is Routledge’s, albeit it is not freely available online (or at least, not legally). Why rely on Wikipedia when there are much more reliable and higher quality alternatives?