18 ms·

Every now and then I like to read through Wikipedia pages for things I know more than the average person on. It keeps me skeptical of the things I read on there

by aimor 4y ago

Every now and then I like to read through Wikipedia pages for things I know more than the average person on. It keeps me skeptical of the things I read on there. For people unfamiliar with a subject (students) I think Wikipedia pages are misleading, poorly organized, and sometimes wrong. That doesn't make Wikipedia useless, but the author's best advice is to use Wikipedia as a map to other sources of information. I don't think Wikipedia has a path forwards for fixing the quality of its articles. In my opinion it requires every page being rewritten by an expert with a single voice, as a traditional encyclopedia would have, which is the exact opposite of Wikipedia's core. Though I did check, and they have more than enough cash to write a traditional encyclopedia.

akolbe 4y ago
"The apparent accuracy of a Wikipedia article is inversely proportional to the depth of the reader's knowledge of the topic." – Kozierok's First Law
encylopinion 4y ago
I stopped using Wikipedia a while ago. Its math and science content is too nonsensical to be useful. I occasionally read a history article, maybe once every 6 months. But history from things happening hundreds to thousands of years ago, predating modern media... sorry historians, it might as well be fiction. I'm sure someone has thought long and hard about why the content is losing quality.
- hutzlibu 4y ago
  "Its math and science content is too nonsensical to be useful." Can you name a example? I found them to be generally of higher quality than controversial topics. So maybe not always with the best didactic approach, but usually a good start. And then I follow the links, if I want to dive in deep. Wikipedia is useful for me, for quickly checking something. Not scientifically dive into a deep topic.
  - thebooktocome 4y ago
    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partial_differential_equation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partial_differential_equatio... Repetitive content, written at several levels simultaneously, weird fixations on tangential topics.
    - scythe 4y ago
      >written at several levels simultaneously, I don't understand why this bothers people. If something on Wikipedia is above or below my level, I just skip it. It takes all of three seconds to recognize. I've consistently found it to be a great starting point for self-study in all sorts of math.
      - thebooktocome 4y ago
        A novice isn’t always going to know the difference between something they could understand with effort and something they don’t have the context to understand. It’s an incredibly common cause of anxiety in math education, and even if you’re not personally affected by it others may be.
        hutzlibu 4y ago
        For sure, but Wikipedia aims to be a Encyclopedia and not a math course. Now it surely would be nice, if it could work more like it. That wikipedia knows my skill set and automatically hides or show additional paragraphs in certain topics etc. or even the paragraph in a simpler language etc. But this a bit more ambitious - and not really achievable with the current approach. So if I want a math course, I search for a math course.
        scythe 4y ago
        >It’s an incredibly common cause of anxiety in math education I question whether this can be a root cause of anxiety. Simply not understanding stuff does not normally cause anxiety. Most people don't get anxious looking at, for example, Chinese characters. On the other hand, imputing that something should be frightening can actually cause a fear response: https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1993-20380-001 https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1993-20380-001 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030105110600024X https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030105110... https://www.nature.com/articles/nn1968 https://www.nature.com/articles/nn1968 Teaching students that incomprehensible math should frighten them doesn't seem like a good approach. There are no grades or critical teachers when you're passively reading a Wikipedia article.
- jacobolus 4y ago
  The problem with math and science content is that there are many possible audiences with many possible backgrounds, and such content tends to require substantial prerequisite knowledge. So when you have a source edited by anyone, you end up with a hodgepodge of different material aimed at different audiences with different expectations of background. It takes a lot of effort and expertise to rewrite this mishmash into a clear and coherent narrative. This is a much harder problem for an encyclopedia than for a textbook chapter or a journal paper, because each article is supposed to (somewhat) stand alone and be both broadly accessible and somewhat comprehensive. For a textbook chapter you can systematically build up prerequisite knowledge from earlier chapters and you can assume that students will spend significant time and effort working problems and will have some expert guidance and support if they get stuck. For a journal article you can assume readers have deep subject-matter expertise, e.g. have a PhD in the field. In both of those cases you can leave out most information about the topic as clearly out of scope. Traditional encyclopedias typically punt by just not including much technical detail at all. (Some Wikipedia articles also do this.) * * * As a basic example, let’s think about what might be included in an article about “circle”. You can look at this from a kindergartener’s point of view, or a high school geometry student’s, or an ancient astronomer’s, or a physicist’s, or a signal processing engineer’s, or a 19th century projective geometer’s, or a complex analyst’s, or a group theorist’s, or an algebraic geometer’s, or a topologist’s, or a number theorist’s, or an ergodic theorist’s, etc. Some of these audiences are easy enough to satisfy, but to provide deep comprehensive coverage of the way a fundamental concept like the circle is related to every mathematical field is going to take careers worth of background. Which parts to attempt, which parts to skip, and how to organize them is a very challenging set of editorial choices.
- Uyuxo 4y ago
  "But history from things happening hundreds to thousands of years ago, predating modern media... sorry historians, it might as well be fiction." What? I'm confused on what you're saying here. Are you stating there are no primary sources on history from more than a few hundred years ago? All history is made up? I'm sure there are poor quality historical articles, but I wouldn't go so far to call all history "fiction".
  - reaperducer 4y ago
    Some people actually think this way. I once worked with someone in an important position in a major media organization who believed nothing was recorded before the printing press, and was quite vocal about it. He quite strongly believed that everything else was made up. I always wanted to ask him what he thought about Egyptian hieroglyphs, but he was too far above my pay grade to approach or challenge.
  - brnaftr361 4y ago
    History is very much an interpretive science. You can infer a lot of things from a site that predates written history. One of the salient examples were some severely deformed bodies found ritually positioned with assumed valuables. And that's all the context you get, and now you have to frame it with anthropologically modern references polluted with ideologies like Hobbes/Rousseau while conjointly projecting Holmberg's mistake into the past when the concept of "marginal" people didn't exist. There's a lot of errors that can arise and a lot of features that can metamorphose into only a distant conception of what once was. And even then, records are questioned. Sometimes period historians really had to stick their necks out to speak the truth (and in the most literal sense) so direct impressions we have of certain elements of history may be reasonably called into question. And there are numerous historians that are known to have fabricated elements.
- pseudostem 4y ago
  As someone who reads a lot of history, please head over to r/AskHistorians It has very strong moderation, and low quality answers are deleted. Their papers cite methods and hypothesis which removes a lot of "fiction" from the equation. Also, they get quoted in mainstream media too. The content quality is out of this world.
- paganel 4y ago
  Ignoring the very controversial topics, like Israel and Palestine or the current war in Ukraine, Wikipedia can be a very good starting point when it comes to history. The entries are not exhaustive nor are all of them very scientific-sounding, but at least the basic facts which we sort of know of are there.
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  Books are still where the good stuff's at. Even some periodicals. Not sure what went wrong with the Internet but it's not living up to the early hype, and doesn't really even seem to be heading the right direction.
  - winphone1974 4y ago
    I'm confused by what you think the internet is, and this hype you feel it's failing?
    - yamtaddle 4y ago
      Are you not familiar with the hype that it'd become the end-all-be-all repository of human knowledge? It's been talked about that way since at least the 90s. It's not uncommon to see people on this site post sentiments that it has achieved that—in some fields, kinda, in many others you can barely scratch the surface before you have to hit a library (probably a university library, and you may need ILL) to keep going, or if you're very lucky the book you need exists in digital form and you can buy or pirate a copy, but the "open Web" simply does not have the info you want, and even if it does have it, it's a crap-shoot whether it's presented and organized at least as well as some print version you could get instead.
      - melagonster 4y ago
        at least most of new research article is online, although we still have problems with publish company, but everything is towards to better way. e.g., Germany government and now maybe White House are standing at side support open every article.
  - dublin 4y ago
    But real books on real topics have been getting purged from libraries (especially school libraries) for well over a decade now. In many school districts, older books containing actual truths, are destroyed rather than marked as removed from circulation and re-sold. Some libraries I know of locally purged almost all of their books on "old, white" history, and replaced them with "more modern" bullshit works by "CRT" writers. To the point of this article, much of this is driven by the teachers, who say they will not accept sources that might have "social biases" (as if it were possible for any book to not have those!) The library then purges those books because "no one has checked them out in a couple of years". The sad thing is that almost 100% of books being added to the libraries fall into just a few categories: Books promoting or "celebrating" perverted sex of any and all kinds (including pretty much all "youth fiction"), Manga, or "Graphic Novels" (let's face it, some have good artwork, but are really just nicely bound and printed comic books, usually with little to no redeeming educational value.) Sadly, I don't know a single person under 30 who has a clue how to actually use a library to find real sources - they all just default to Googling. The web is amazing, but what's NOT on it is staggering, and of amazing quality and scholarship (which is itself a lost art...) More worryingly, I've seen a LOT of valuable content vanish from the search engines, which just shoves that content right down the memory hole, using the same flawed logic as those high school librarians - no one's asked for it recently. We lose access to and context for valuable information when our search engines (it's all about the money from hits and eyeballs) only keep what is "popular". Alas, we've replaced Carnegie Libraries with Kardashian libraries, to our great loss...
- winphone1974 4y ago
  So you stopped using it, but now use it less, and you read history articles that are fiction because they're so old, but the quality had declined recently? Pick a lane.
  - random314 4y ago
    Also maths and science is "too nonsensical".
bombcar 4y ago
The biggest problem is students don't care. It's why encyclopedias had to be "banned" from reports when I was a student; the teacher wanted us to actually do some modicum of research beyond rewriting an encyclopedia article. Both were still a decent place to start, but they're both often only "right" from a certain point of view.
onetimeusename 4y ago
I agree about pages being poorly organized. It's what happens when dozens if not hundreds of people edit a page. Some pages probably have orders of magnitude more edits/editors making changes. It destroys the flow between sentences when people fixate on small edits. That's generally not the case though, I have seen many high quality pages which tend to have a few, knowledgeable editors who watch it.
EGreg 4y ago
I have found the opposite… there is hardly a consistsntly more organized and accurate source that is accessible to the public, but I would be glad to hear what it is if you have one in mind. Wikipedia is far more trustworthy than local news channels even about recent events, and everything is sources (casualty count: who said it etc.)
- sk55 4y ago
  I think Wikipedia is a great start to finding content at a general level. Though, vertical specific niches often have better sources of information. For e.g. Examine.com currently seems better for nutrition and supplement information. Or even an old school reference book like The Art of Computer Programming by Donald Knuth is better for algorithms.
  - EGreg 4y ago
    I disagree that the old school books are better. It is like saying MacOS 7 is better than today’s Linux that has many people fixing bugs and expanding its features over the years
  - bawolff 4y ago
    > Or even an old school reference book like The Art of Computer Programming by Donald Knuth is better for algorithms. It is rediculous to compare an encyclopedia like wikipedia to an advanced text like Knuth. They aren't trying to do the same thing.
  - untech 4y ago
    Wikipedia is how you find a reference like The Art of Computer Programming for a given subject.
- concordDance 4y ago
  > Wikipedia is far more trustworthy than local news channels even about recent events, and everything is sources (casualty count: who said it etc.) That's more due to the very low quality of news.
nkingsy 4y ago
We are all watching user-generated content destroy the very concept of truth, and Wikipedia is example A1. There is no solution. Perhaps truth was always an illusion, but the illusion has been destroyed and it is unravelling society. A consensus of reputation used to govern these things, but now reputation means almost nothing and there are no mechanisms for consensus on the web. Attempts at consensus are all based in censorship and what remains of reputation is a perverted proxy for "ability to get attention".
- kube-system 4y ago
  "Consensus of experts" and "consensus of internet users" can also be two entirely different things.
- wpietri 4y ago
  I don't see any particular reason to think that Wikipedia is worse than what existed prior. What exemplar from, say, 1980, do you think was better in terms of information quality? I'm thinking back to going in to a library, where a given topic would generally have 0-3 books. Books often put together by a single person, a person often chosen because of personal relationships with a publisher, plus that publisher's intent to turn a profit. Or opening up a daily newspaper, where I might get a few paragraphs on a topic, written by one person and edited by a couple more, all paid for by an ad-supported company run by people who often had local political connections. There may be no mechanism for consensus on the web, but Wikipedia certainly has one, one that has worked reasonably well for 20 years at this point.
  - nkingsy 4y ago
    It worked for a time and now it is dying at the hands of bad-faith actors who have worked within their mechanism.
    - wpietri 4y ago
      That's an interesting claim. Where's your evidence? I'll also note you must have missed my question, as I don't think you have answered it.
squeaky-clean 4y ago
Wikipedia is all about the citations. 90% of my Wikipedia edits are either adding citations or [Citation Needed] if I couldn't find a source for an uncited claim. There are some math and physics articles that can go 10 paragraphs without a single citation. They'd be great blog posts or chapters in a book. But they're poor quality Wikipedia articles.
- MajimasEyepatch 4y ago
  I've definitely read some Wikipedia pages on niche technical topics in my field that were clearly written by someone with _some_ degree of expertise (maybe a grad student) but with no understanding of the purpose, standards, and style of Wikipedia. The voice is often all over the place.
  - nerdponx 4y ago
    I've seen this too. Sometimes they seem like they are copied and pasted from whatever the person already happened to be writing when they came across the Wikipedia page.
  - ilyanep 4y ago
    A large number of my larger edits are fixing up voice / tone to make an article read more like an encyclopedia and less like an excited blog post.
  - prova_modena 4y ago
    Yeah absolutely. I've seen non-wiki-savvy experts do these kind of edits, get reverted, and stop editing wikipedia forever because the whole experience left a sour taste in their mouth. I recently found the essay below targeted to exactly that audience, it's super useful to helping experts who want to contribute. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Expert_editors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Expert_editors
    - s0rce 4y ago
      I tried to upload an image that I took (as part of my graduate studies) but was previously published by media outlets and the whole situation really turned me off wikipedia. I think the image is still there though!
GCA10 4y ago
Well said. It's especially frustrating to come across what I'll call "Mudslide Pages" for prominent entities. These consist of a decade or more of minor news items, piled atop one another. No effort to distill key elements of these entities' impact -- let alone the how and why of what they do. It's just endless what and when. So on top-tier companies, the pages are cluttered with details of brief moves in and out of old headquarters buildings -- plus long-ago product rollouts and cancellations -- plus stock-market zigzags in 2013, 2015, etc. For authors/artists, each work is treated in isolation, without an effort to define their style and how it evolved. There's no natural entry path for a subject expert to step in and make it all coherent. Instead, the mudslides just keep coming.
- abudabi123 4y ago
  What if the Wikipedia can be received in the raw and taste tested cooked? The latter captures the reflection from a subject expert aided by a panel of four judges who happen to be interested learners getting the sealegs to become experts in their own right eventually and the project is funded by a grant and prestige for the expert. There is a timeline of expert review recorded and commentary.
- nerdponx 4y ago
  This is different, because I think often those pages are written by the individuals themselves, or representatives for the companies.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    I think it's more that's it's super-easy to add some factoid whether or not it really adds to the article in question. See what happens whenever a "notable" section gets started in some article in a community of any size.
- NavinF 4y ago
  I've noticed a similar phenomenon on pages about machine learning. There are entire sections about now-obsolete ideas that people only talked about for a few months before moving on.
reaperducer 4y ago
Every now and then I like to read through Wikipedia pages for things I know more than the average person on. It keeps me skeptical of the things I read on there. It's always frustrating for me to see things in Wikipedia I know are wrong because I was in the room when a particular decision was made, or because I personally made the decision. I gave up making corrections because they would always get reverted by someone in another country who wasn't even born when the event happened. Simply because there wasn't a random blogger live streaming it, and nobody's written a book about it, my knowledge remains my own. Wikipedia is the ultimate example of deleting the world's history because it can't be linked to.
- Tijdreiziger 4y ago
  Write a blog post or website with your knowledge, then you can reference that from Wikipedia. Wikipedia is explicitly not meant to be a primary source (indeed, no encyclopedia is).
- flaviut 4y ago
  How do we know you're not just making stuff up? If you've got a good answer to that question I'm sure they'd love to hear it and to update their policy. For what it's worth, you can write the information you know in a blog that can be linked back to you personally, and that's an acceptable source to cite.
  - akolbe 4y ago
    Well, blogs generally aren't acceptable sources to cite in Wikipedia. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:Blog https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:Blog Press sources do often have minor or major inaccuracies which can then get perpetuated in Wikipedia. "What people outside do not appreciate is that a newspaper is like a soufflé, prepared in a hurry for immediate consumption. This of course is why whenever you read a newspaper account of some event of which you have personal knowledge it is nearly always inadequate or inaccurate. Journalists are as aware as anyone of this defect; it is simply that if the information is to reach as many readers as possible, something less than perfection has often to be accepted." —David E. H. Jones, in New Scientist, Vol. 26 Wikipedians, for that matter, are aware of this defect too (or ought to be), because a great many press articles about Wikipedia contain absolute clangers.
nathias 4y ago
one simple mechanism would be to freeze the article editing for a bit when it becomes a hot topic in US media
- PopePompus 4y ago
  That is frequently done. A recent example is the article on "recession", which was frozen around the time that the US had two consecutive quarters of negative growth (often used as a definition for a recession). https://www.npr.org/2022/07/29/1114599942/wikipedia-recession-edits https://www.npr.org/2022/07/29/1114599942/wikipedia-recessio... There are differing levels of "frozen", which require differing levels of editor seniority to be allowed to edit.
  - nathias 4y ago
    nice, I had no idea, I just remember seeing the edit wars on some hot topics a while ago
throwaway09223 4y ago
When was the last time you read through a copy of Encyclopedia Britannica? Have you done an apples to apples comparison? No encyclopedia is perfect, but as far as I can tell the "standard" encyclopedias are a lot worse. My grandparents had bought a copy of Britannica decades ago and they had something like 50 years of its yearbooks. I would cite it sometimes and no one at school batted an eye. I remember reading through it and cross-referencing articles against Wikipedia and Wikipedia's accuracy was far superior. The thing to keep in mind is that not only are all encyclopedias fraught with errors, primary sources are often wrong too! The goal isn't perfection, it's transparency -- and Wikipedia in this department is enormously better than any private encyclopedia you'll ever find.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- verisimilitudes 4y ago
  - TrinaryWorksToo 4y ago
    They're about the same accuracy according to this data: https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/study-wikipedia-as-accurate-as-britannica/ https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/study-wikipedia-as-a...
    - akolbe 4y ago
      Well, for a particular set of fairly obscure science articles. It's quite different in the social sciences, for example. What people don't appreciate is that Wikipedia has very different strengths and weaknesses to Britannica. Britannica doesn't contain outright hoaxes and nonsense. Examples: https://www.theregister.com/2017/01/16/wikipedia_16_birthday_fails/ https://www.theregister.com/2017/01/16/wikipedia_16_birthday... https://wikipediocracy.com/2022/08/11/wikipedias-credibility-is-toast/ https://wikipediocracy.com/2022/08/11/wikipedias-credibility... But Britannica can never be as up to date as Wikipedia: https://www.inputmag.com/culture/queen-elizabeth-ii-death-wikipedia-updates https://www.inputmag.com/culture/queen-elizabeth-ii-death-wi... Nor can it cover as many topics as Wikipedia. Wikipedia's quality also depends on the topic area. Hard science and computing tend to be covered more adeptly than philosophy for example. And article quality simply varies much more in Wikipedia. It ranges from some of the finest writing anywhere, rivalling anything in Britannica and surpassing it in up-to-dateness, to complete rubbish and intentionally falsified content.
krastanov 4y ago
Could you give examples of these topics? Most math and physics pages I have seen on wikipedia are about as good as an average textbook. The French wikipedia is way better for math, but the English one is not bad.
jrm4 4y ago
This is literally the worst idea I've ever heard here on HN. Completely guts the core of what makes Wikipedia great. It's not a classic "encyclopedia" and that's GOOD.
DiogenesKynikos 4y ago
Wikipedia is often okay for science articles. I find many of the mathematics articles to be difficult to read. I'll look at a mathematics concept that I think I understand (or even use often), and it will be written in jargon that is completely incomprehensible to me. However, where Wikipedia really has a problem is in contemporary politics. Anything that is even remotely political is probably controlled by one or another clique of editors. There are opposing cliques that battle over every Israel-Palestine article, or over whether to use the Serbian or Croatian name for village X that existed 200 years ago, or about whether hummus is Lebanese or Syrian or Israeli or Levantine. There are also subjects in which one clique has gained complete dominance and is able to completely control a whole topic area. If you start looking at the edit histories and talk pages of articles on one topic, you'll come to realize how influential relatively small numbers of motivated (and sometimes coordinated, though this is against Wikipedia's rules) editors can be. That's why I'd take anything that's even remotely politically contentious on Wikipedia with an enormous grain of salt.
- verisimilitudes 4y ago
  > Wikipedia is often okay for science articles. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woman (4th paragraph)
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - witherk 4y ago
    I have definitely seen some bad science promoted for trans rights. But I don't really think "science" tells us what a women is, that's a social issue.
    - DiogenesKynikos 4y ago
      It's clearly a scientific issue, but also a social issue. There is a scientific definition of what a woman is, and there is a social definition (which is very close to the scientific definition, but which does depend a bit on culture and which can change over time). A lot of the debate comes from people talking past one another, without acknowledging that they're using the same word to discuss different topics.
warner25 4y ago
I'd love to hear the perspective on this from some people (there must be dozens reading Hacker News) who actually have a Wikipedia page about themselves.
- bawolff 4y ago
  Most people are biased about themselves. In particular famous people often want to hide controversy.
  - warner25 4y ago
    Yeah, but things I wonder: Do people learn surprising things about themselves from their own Wikipedia page, like a connection to some event or other person that they previously weren't aware of? Do they find their pages laughably incomplete or inaccurate? If there were a Wikipedia page about me, I can imagine that it would probably highlight some insignificant thing (from my perspective) that got my name into a small town newspaper or school / employer public relations piece while omitting several of the facts from my personal top-5 list (in importance) about my own life.
    - aimor 4y ago
      I suppose if I ever get my own Wikipedia page the first thing I should do is publish an autobiography.
jancsika 4y ago
> Every now and then I like to read through Wikipedia pages for things I know more than the average person on. It keeps me skeptical of the things I read on there. I wrote a dissertation on Conlon Nancarrow's Player Piano Study No. 36. Skimming the facts in the article on Conlon Nancarrow, everything looks to be both true and relevant to Nancarrow's life and musical output. I could make a few small improvements. E.g., the proportions of tempos among the twelve voices in Study No. 37 are taken from a peculiar tuning system that apparently only appears in Cowell's New Musical Resources. Making that connection would tie in nicely to the previous section that mentions the influence of Cowell's book on Nancarrow. (I believe that connection is made in Kyle Gann's book in case anyone wants to go ahead and make that edit.) > That doesn't make Wikipedia useless, but the author's best advice is to use Wikipedia as a map to other sources of information. As an expert on Conlon Nancarrow's music, I approve of using the Wikipedia article about him as a useful and accurate starting point for learning about his life and music. Until I read a citation on a current Wikipedia article in your area of expertise that has factually inaccurate information in it, I can only reserve judgment on your opinion about Wikipedia's veracity.
- IncRnd 4y ago
  Wikipedia, in the online encyclopedia Wikipedia.org, specifically mentions this exact issue. [1] The content of any given article may recently have been changed, vandalized, or altered by someone whose opinion does not correspond with the state of knowledge in the relevant fields. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:General_disclaimer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:General_disclaimer
  - prerok 4y ago
    Yes and any reader citing it would be best advised to check the page history and comments section. Teaching that to children would also be a good way of showing and exposing these vandalisms. They might learn to use it better then. Outright discarding one of the best sources of information humanity has ever created is IMHO just plain wrong. I would understand it if this were people writing doctorates but anything below university level should definitely use it.
BrandoElFollito 4y ago
It depends on the topics. I have some knowledge in hard science topics and IT and like you I sometimes read the relevant pages. They are usually great and very accurate. They are also usually in "layers" with more basic information first and then more details. I guess this is because you can hardly argue with an integral, as opposed to who the greatest baseball player was.
jarenmf 4y ago
I have an opposite experience. I'm a scientist and my research topic is accurately depicted in Wikipedia I would say better than any textbook. Of course Wikipedia has to be reductionist, it is not required to provide a full literature review for any topic. If you are doing a PhD-level research, then Wikipedia will fall short of providing the latest and finest details. Other than that, it's more than enough. I also believe it is the duty of experts to contribute to improving Wikipedia (I know many who do).
1vuio0pswjnm7 4y ago
Here is a simple idea that AFAIK has not been tried. Limit "External Links" to only websites found in Google Scholar. More specifically, limit them to only academic sources. (Maybe limiting to .edu or country-specific educational TLDs, e.g., ac.uk, etc. is better. I realise Scholar is hardly a reliable filter for non-commercial sources, given Google's incentives. Remember "Knol".) This could be an option. Maybe an HTTP header sent to Wikipedia: Academic-Only: on The way to "fix the quality of article" is to fix the quality of sources. As it stands, Wikipedia can use any source it finds on the web. (Not to say they do in practice.) That can be an extremely low bar. One can use Wikipedia solely as a path to "External Links" and/or "References". To the extent that articles just take their sentences from References or External Links, any verification needs to be done on the source, not the article. I use Wikipedia as the default search engine in Fennec. On desktop, I search Wikipedia from the command line with a custom script. The forward proxy scrubs the "X-Client-IP" header. Before reading an article, in the event I read the article instead of only using External LInks and references, I always skim the Talk: page. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Criticism_of_Google/Archive_1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Knol/Archive_1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Knol/Archive_1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Knol/Archive_2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Knol/Archive_2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Knol/Archive_3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Knol/Archive_3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Knol/Archive_4 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Knol/Archive_4
- gpm 4y ago
  Unfortunately, I don't think that works at all. Not all universities use education specific TLDs, and not all departments/labs in universities with a domain name under an education specific TLD actually keep there website under that TLD. Completely random example of such a lab (and if you check publications you'll see they host papers under this domain name) https://www.honeylab.org/ https://www.honeylab.org/
  - 1vuio0pswjnm7 4y ago
    Is this domain excluded in Google Scholar searches.
winphone1974 4y ago
But the entire point of Wikipedia is that there is no possible way a traditional gatekeeping expert encyclopedia could be as current or encompassing as a crowd sourced version. Maybe that would be the ideal best solution, but let's not have it stand in the way of progress to a better reality
bergenty 4y ago
What a bunch of bull, use specific examples if you’re trying to make claims like that. I also read articles I’m an expert in and I’m always amazed how complete the articles are.
Glyptodon 4y ago
Eh, I don't think Wikipedia is perfect - and the smaller and less frequented the article the more weird it might be. But most of the time it's mostly going to be right about stuff like who was president in 1887, and have citations to elsewhere, which is a lot more than can be said for the average random Google result. A couple days ago I was kind of annoyed that the article on Greensleeves didn't include lyrics.
koonsolo 4y ago
There was one student in my classroom who was always correcting the teacher. Except for the fact that the teacher was always right and the student wrong. Call me skeptical, but can you provide us with examples where Wikipedia is misleading or wrong?
random314 4y ago
Can you give examples of misleading articles? Are they political or nonpolitical?
chobytes 4y ago
Agreed. My background is in math... and I find math wikipedia to be appealingly low quality. Both for reference and for a general audience.
tracerbulletx 4y ago
What is an example of an article you think is misleading or wrong?
pitchups 4y ago
Not sure what your particular area of expertise is but every time I have browsed Wikipedia for articles related to technical topics including math, programming, AI/ML as well as science, I have found their articles accurate and informative. I also recall a few studies comparing the accuracy of articles on Wikipedia with Encyclopedia Brittanica and journals, which conclude that Wikipedia compares favorably with both (easily found via a google search).
bnralt 4y ago
> For people unfamiliar with a subject (students) I think Wikipedia pages are misleading, poorly organized, and sometimes wrong. This is true even if you're reading works from experts in a field. For instance, Robert Hoyland, Fred Donner, and Patricia Crone (until her death a few years ago) are some of the leading academics in the studies of early historical Islam. However, Donner's review of Hoyland's textbook thought it was misleading[1], Crone's review of Donner's textbook considered it misleading, and Crone's Hagarism is generally not accepted by any current scholar as far as I can tell. That is to say, one needs to be skeptical no matter the source, as well as humble enough to realize that know more than others doesn't necessarily make your understanding more correct. It's also useful to try to understand the disagreements in the field and how they've developed. [1] http://www.middleeastmedievalists.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/UW-23-Donner.pdf http://www.middleeastmedievalists.com/wp-content/uploads/201... [2] https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/israel-middle-east/articles/among-the-believers https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/israel-middle-east/articl...
LtWorf 4y ago
I remember having such an argument with a friend who is vehemently opposed to Wikipedia, because not written by experts, unlike Britannica. I then opened a random page of Britannica, about an opera. And the phonetic pronunciation of the Italian name was incorrect (I'm a native Italian speaker) and it was how a brit might pronounce it. In Wikipedia I would have fixed it. In Britannica the error is probably still there. I presume that since I found an error in the first page I looked at, there probably are many other errors.
- akolbe 4y ago
  Hmm ... there are English pronunciations of foreign words that are considered correct in English, even though they differ from the way the words are pronounced in their original language. In other words, the mispronunciations have become the standard, and the correct pronunciation is considered "wrong" in English. This might have been one of those cases.
  - LtWorf 4y ago
    If your theory was true, the phonetic pronunciation wouldn't have been there.
    - akolbe 4y ago
      I'm intrigued now. :) Was it Turandot? That's one where the pronunciation is controversial, according to Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turandot#Origin_and_pronunciation_of_the_name https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turandot#Origin_and_pronunciat...
      - LtWorf 4y ago
        I said I'm a native italian speaker. -_-' You want to trick me with a french word? As if an italian would be unable to tell a word in italian from one in a different language?
        4y ago
s0rce 4y ago
I've read articles which I'm an expert on and found them generally quite good. Some very niche things often have really limited content but usually not wrong. I've fixed the odd thing here and there.
sanroot99 4y ago
For technical stuffs Wikipedia is great ,and have good resources in further reading sections
franciscop 4y ago
True, but still it's way better than most other sources than the general population has casual access to. Reading some of the general public magazines that include some of those topics is... an interesting experience.

by aimor 4y ago

akolbe 4y ago

"The apparent accuracy of a Wikipedia article is inversely proportional to the depth of the reader's knowledge of the topic." – Kozierok's First Law

encylopinion 4y ago

I stopped using Wikipedia a while ago. Its math and science content is too nonsensical to be useful. I occasionally read a history article, maybe once every 6 months. But history from things happening hundreds to thousands of years ago, predating modern media... sorry historians, it might as well be fiction. I'm sure someone has thought long and hard about why the content is losing quality.

hutzlibu 4y ago
"Its math and science content is too nonsensical to be useful." Can you name a example? I found them to be generally of higher quality than controversial topics. So maybe not always with the best didactic approach, but usually a good start. And then I follow the links, if I want to dive in deep. Wikipedia is useful for me, for quickly checking something. Not scientifically dive into a deep topic.
- thebooktocome 4y ago
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partial_differential_equation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partial_differential_equatio... Repetitive content, written at several levels simultaneously, weird fixations on tangential topics.
  - scythe 4y ago
    >written at several levels simultaneously, I don't understand why this bothers people. If something on Wikipedia is above or below my level, I just skip it. It takes all of three seconds to recognize. I've consistently found it to be a great starting point for self-study in all sorts of math.
    - thebooktocome 4y ago
      A novice isn’t always going to know the difference between something they could understand with effort and something they don’t have the context to understand. It’s an incredibly common cause of anxiety in math education, and even if you’re not personally affected by it others may be.
      - hutzlibu 4y ago
        For sure, but Wikipedia aims to be a Encyclopedia and not a math course. Now it surely would be nice, if it could work more like it. That wikipedia knows my skill set and automatically hides or show additional paragraphs in certain topics etc. or even the paragraph in a simpler language etc. But this a bit more ambitious - and not really achievable with the current approach. So if I want a math course, I search for a math course.
      - scythe 4y ago
        >It’s an incredibly common cause of anxiety in math education I question whether this can be a root cause of anxiety. Simply not understanding stuff does not normally cause anxiety. Most people don't get anxious looking at, for example, Chinese characters. On the other hand, imputing that something should be frightening can actually cause a fear response: https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1993-20380-001 https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1993-20380-001 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030105110600024X https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030105110... https://www.nature.com/articles/nn1968 https://www.nature.com/articles/nn1968 Teaching students that incomprehensible math should frighten them doesn't seem like a good approach. There are no grades or critical teachers when you're passively reading a Wikipedia article.
jacobolus 4y ago
The problem with math and science content is that there are many possible audiences with many possible backgrounds, and such content tends to require substantial prerequisite knowledge. So when you have a source edited by anyone, you end up with a hodgepodge of different material aimed at different audiences with different expectations of background. It takes a lot of effort and expertise to rewrite this mishmash into a clear and coherent narrative. This is a much harder problem for an encyclopedia than for a textbook chapter or a journal paper, because each article is supposed to (somewhat) stand alone and be both broadly accessible and somewhat comprehensive. For a textbook chapter you can systematically build up prerequisite knowledge from earlier chapters and you can assume that students will spend significant time and effort working problems and will have some expert guidance and support if they get stuck. For a journal article you can assume readers have deep subject-matter expertise, e.g. have a PhD in the field. In both of those cases you can leave out most information about the topic as clearly out of scope. Traditional encyclopedias typically punt by just not including much technical detail at all. (Some Wikipedia articles also do this.) * * * As a basic example, let’s think about what might be included in an article about “circle”. You can look at this from a kindergartener’s point of view, or a high school geometry student’s, or an ancient astronomer’s, or a physicist’s, or a signal processing engineer’s, or a 19th century projective geometer’s, or a complex analyst’s, or a group theorist’s, or an algebraic geometer’s, or a topologist’s, or a number theorist’s, or an ergodic theorist’s, etc. Some of these audiences are easy enough to satisfy, but to provide deep comprehensive coverage of the way a fundamental concept like the circle is related to every mathematical field is going to take careers worth of background. Which parts to attempt, which parts to skip, and how to organize them is a very challenging set of editorial choices.
Uyuxo 4y ago
"But history from things happening hundreds to thousands of years ago, predating modern media... sorry historians, it might as well be fiction." What? I'm confused on what you're saying here. Are you stating there are no primary sources on history from more than a few hundred years ago? All history is made up? I'm sure there are poor quality historical articles, but I wouldn't go so far to call all history "fiction".
- reaperducer 4y ago
  Some people actually think this way. I once worked with someone in an important position in a major media organization who believed nothing was recorded before the printing press, and was quite vocal about it. He quite strongly believed that everything else was made up. I always wanted to ask him what he thought about Egyptian hieroglyphs, but he was too far above my pay grade to approach or challenge.
- brnaftr361 4y ago
  History is very much an interpretive science. You can infer a lot of things from a site that predates written history. One of the salient examples were some severely deformed bodies found ritually positioned with assumed valuables. And that's all the context you get, and now you have to frame it with anthropologically modern references polluted with ideologies like Hobbes/Rousseau while conjointly projecting Holmberg's mistake into the past when the concept of "marginal" people didn't exist. There's a lot of errors that can arise and a lot of features that can metamorphose into only a distant conception of what once was. And even then, records are questioned. Sometimes period historians really had to stick their necks out to speak the truth (and in the most literal sense) so direct impressions we have of certain elements of history may be reasonably called into question. And there are numerous historians that are known to have fabricated elements.
pseudostem 4y ago
As someone who reads a lot of history, please head over to r/AskHistorians It has very strong moderation, and low quality answers are deleted. Their papers cite methods and hypothesis which removes a lot of "fiction" from the equation. Also, they get quoted in mainstream media too. The content quality is out of this world.
paganel 4y ago
Ignoring the very controversial topics, like Israel and Palestine or the current war in Ukraine, Wikipedia can be a very good starting point when it comes to history. The entries are not exhaustive nor are all of them very scientific-sounding, but at least the basic facts which we sort of know of are there.
yamtaddle 4y ago
Books are still where the good stuff's at. Even some periodicals. Not sure what went wrong with the Internet but it's not living up to the early hype, and doesn't really even seem to be heading the right direction.
- winphone1974 4y ago
  I'm confused by what you think the internet is, and this hype you feel it's failing?
  - yamtaddle 4y ago
    Are you not familiar with the hype that it'd become the end-all-be-all repository of human knowledge? It's been talked about that way since at least the 90s. It's not uncommon to see people on this site post sentiments that it has achieved that—in some fields, kinda, in many others you can barely scratch the surface before you have to hit a library (probably a university library, and you may need ILL) to keep going, or if you're very lucky the book you need exists in digital form and you can buy or pirate a copy, but the "open Web" simply does not have the info you want, and even if it does have it, it's a crap-shoot whether it's presented and organized at least as well as some print version you could get instead.
    - melagonster 4y ago
      at least most of new research article is online, although we still have problems with publish company, but everything is towards to better way. e.g., Germany government and now maybe White House are standing at side support open every article.
- dublin 4y ago
  But real books on real topics have been getting purged from libraries (especially school libraries) for well over a decade now. In many school districts, older books containing actual truths, are destroyed rather than marked as removed from circulation and re-sold. Some libraries I know of locally purged almost all of their books on "old, white" history, and replaced them with "more modern" bullshit works by "CRT" writers. To the point of this article, much of this is driven by the teachers, who say they will not accept sources that might have "social biases" (as if it were possible for any book to not have those!) The library then purges those books because "no one has checked them out in a couple of years". The sad thing is that almost 100% of books being added to the libraries fall into just a few categories: Books promoting or "celebrating" perverted sex of any and all kinds (including pretty much all "youth fiction"), Manga, or "Graphic Novels" (let's face it, some have good artwork, but are really just nicely bound and printed comic books, usually with little to no redeeming educational value.) Sadly, I don't know a single person under 30 who has a clue how to actually use a library to find real sources - they all just default to Googling. The web is amazing, but what's NOT on it is staggering, and of amazing quality and scholarship (which is itself a lost art...) More worryingly, I've seen a LOT of valuable content vanish from the search engines, which just shoves that content right down the memory hole, using the same flawed logic as those high school librarians - no one's asked for it recently. We lose access to and context for valuable information when our search engines (it's all about the money from hits and eyeballs) only keep what is "popular". Alas, we've replaced Carnegie Libraries with Kardashian libraries, to our great loss...
winphone1974 4y ago
So you stopped using it, but now use it less, and you read history articles that are fiction because they're so old, but the quality had declined recently? Pick a lane.
- random314 4y ago
  Also maths and science is "too nonsensical".

bombcar 4y ago

The biggest problem is students don't care. It's why encyclopedias had to be "banned" from reports when I was a student; the teacher wanted us to actually do some modicum of research beyond rewriting an encyclopedia article. Both were still a decent place to start, but they're both often only "right" from a certain point of view.

onetimeusename 4y ago

I agree about pages being poorly organized. It's what happens when dozens if not hundreds of people edit a page. Some pages probably have orders of magnitude more edits/editors making changes. It destroys the flow between sentences when people fixate on small edits. That's generally not the case though, I have seen many high quality pages which tend to have a few, knowledgeable editors who watch it.

EGreg 4y ago

I have found the opposite… there is hardly a consistsntly more organized and accurate source that is accessible to the public, but I would be glad to hear what it is if you have one in mind. Wikipedia is far more trustworthy than local news channels even about recent events, and everything is sources (casualty count: who said it etc.)

sk55 4y ago
I think Wikipedia is a great start to finding content at a general level. Though, vertical specific niches often have better sources of information. For e.g. Examine.com currently seems better for nutrition and supplement information. Or even an old school reference book like The Art of Computer Programming by Donald Knuth is better for algorithms.
- EGreg 4y ago
  I disagree that the old school books are better. It is like saying MacOS 7 is better than today’s Linux that has many people fixing bugs and expanding its features over the years
- bawolff 4y ago
  > Or even an old school reference book like The Art of Computer Programming by Donald Knuth is better for algorithms. It is rediculous to compare an encyclopedia like wikipedia to an advanced text like Knuth. They aren't trying to do the same thing.
- untech 4y ago
  Wikipedia is how you find a reference like The Art of Computer Programming for a given subject.
concordDance 4y ago
> Wikipedia is far more trustworthy than local news channels even about recent events, and everything is sources (casualty count: who said it etc.) That's more due to the very low quality of news.

nkingsy 4y ago

We are all watching user-generated content destroy the very concept of truth, and Wikipedia is example A1. There is no solution. Perhaps truth was always an illusion, but the illusion has been destroyed and it is unravelling society. A consensus of reputation used to govern these things, but now reputation means almost nothing and there are no mechanisms for consensus on the web. Attempts at consensus are all based in censorship and what remains of reputation is a perverted proxy for "ability to get attention".

kube-system 4y ago
"Consensus of experts" and "consensus of internet users" can also be two entirely different things.
wpietri 4y ago
I don't see any particular reason to think that Wikipedia is worse than what existed prior. What exemplar from, say, 1980, do you think was better in terms of information quality? I'm thinking back to going in to a library, where a given topic would generally have 0-3 books. Books often put together by a single person, a person often chosen because of personal relationships with a publisher, plus that publisher's intent to turn a profit. Or opening up a daily newspaper, where I might get a few paragraphs on a topic, written by one person and edited by a couple more, all paid for by an ad-supported company run by people who often had local political connections. There may be no mechanism for consensus on the web, but Wikipedia certainly has one, one that has worked reasonably well for 20 years at this point.
- nkingsy 4y ago
  It worked for a time and now it is dying at the hands of bad-faith actors who have worked within their mechanism.
  - wpietri 4y ago
    That's an interesting claim. Where's your evidence? I'll also note you must have missed my question, as I don't think you have answered it.

squeaky-clean 4y ago

Wikipedia is all about the citations. 90% of my Wikipedia edits are either adding citations or [Citation Needed] if I couldn't find a source for an uncited claim. There are some math and physics articles that can go 10 paragraphs without a single citation. They'd be great blog posts or chapters in a book. But they're poor quality Wikipedia articles.

MajimasEyepatch 4y ago
I've definitely read some Wikipedia pages on niche technical topics in my field that were clearly written by someone with _some_ degree of expertise (maybe a grad student) but with no understanding of the purpose, standards, and style of Wikipedia. The voice is often all over the place.
- nerdponx 4y ago
  I've seen this too. Sometimes they seem like they are copied and pasted from whatever the person already happened to be writing when they came across the Wikipedia page.
- ilyanep 4y ago
  A large number of my larger edits are fixing up voice / tone to make an article read more like an encyclopedia and less like an excited blog post.
- prova_modena 4y ago
  Yeah absolutely. I've seen non-wiki-savvy experts do these kind of edits, get reverted, and stop editing wikipedia forever because the whole experience left a sour taste in their mouth. I recently found the essay below targeted to exactly that audience, it's super useful to helping experts who want to contribute. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Expert_editors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Expert_editors
  - s0rce 4y ago
    I tried to upload an image that I took (as part of my graduate studies) but was previously published by media outlets and the whole situation really turned me off wikipedia. I think the image is still there though!

GCA10 4y ago

Well said. It's especially frustrating to come across what I'll call "Mudslide Pages" for prominent entities. These consist of a decade or more of minor news items, piled atop one another. No effort to distill key elements of these entities' impact -- let alone the how and why of what they do. It's just endless what and when. So on top-tier companies, the pages are cluttered with details of brief moves in and out of old headquarters buildings -- plus long-ago product rollouts and cancellations -- plus stock-market zigzags in 2013, 2015, etc. For authors/artists, each work is treated in isolation, without an effort to define their style and how it evolved. There's no natural entry path for a subject expert to step in and make it all coherent. Instead, the mudslides just keep coming.

abudabi123 4y ago
What if the Wikipedia can be received in the raw and taste tested cooked? The latter captures the reflection from a subject expert aided by a panel of four judges who happen to be interested learners getting the sealegs to become experts in their own right eventually and the project is funded by a grant and prestige for the expert. There is a timeline of expert review recorded and commentary.
nerdponx 4y ago
This is different, because I think often those pages are written by the individuals themselves, or representatives for the companies.
- ghaff 4y ago
  I think it's more that's it's super-easy to add some factoid whether or not it really adds to the article in question. See what happens whenever a "notable" section gets started in some article in a community of any size.
NavinF 4y ago
I've noticed a similar phenomenon on pages about machine learning. There are entire sections about now-obsolete ideas that people only talked about for a few months before moving on.

reaperducer 4y ago

Every now and then I like to read through Wikipedia pages for things I know more than the average person on. It keeps me skeptical of the things I read on there. It's always frustrating for me to see things in Wikipedia I know are wrong because I was in the room when a particular decision was made, or because I personally made the decision. I gave up making corrections because they would always get reverted by someone in another country who wasn't even born when the event happened. Simply because there wasn't a random blogger live streaming it, and nobody's written a book about it, my knowledge remains my own. Wikipedia is the ultimate example of deleting the world's history because it can't be linked to.

Tijdreiziger 4y ago
Write a blog post or website with your knowledge, then you can reference that from Wikipedia. Wikipedia is explicitly not meant to be a primary source (indeed, no encyclopedia is).
flaviut 4y ago
How do we know you're not just making stuff up? If you've got a good answer to that question I'm sure they'd love to hear it and to update their policy. For what it's worth, you can write the information you know in a blog that can be linked back to you personally, and that's an acceptable source to cite.
- akolbe 4y ago
  Well, blogs generally aren't acceptable sources to cite in Wikipedia. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:Blog https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:Blog Press sources do often have minor or major inaccuracies which can then get perpetuated in Wikipedia. "What people outside do not appreciate is that a newspaper is like a soufflé, prepared in a hurry for immediate consumption. This of course is why whenever you read a newspaper account of some event of which you have personal knowledge it is nearly always inadequate or inaccurate. Journalists are as aware as anyone of this defect; it is simply that if the information is to reach as many readers as possible, something less than perfection has often to be accepted." —David E. H. Jones, in New Scientist, Vol. 26 Wikipedians, for that matter, are aware of this defect too (or ought to be), because a great many press articles about Wikipedia contain absolute clangers.

nathias 4y ago

one simple mechanism would be to freeze the article editing for a bit when it becomes a hot topic in US media

PopePompus 4y ago
That is frequently done. A recent example is the article on "recession", which was frozen around the time that the US had two consecutive quarters of negative growth (often used as a definition for a recession). https://www.npr.org/2022/07/29/1114599942/wikipedia-recession-edits https://www.npr.org/2022/07/29/1114599942/wikipedia-recessio... There are differing levels of "frozen", which require differing levels of editor seniority to be allowed to edit.
- nathias 4y ago
  nice, I had no idea, I just remember seeing the edit wars on some hot topics a while ago

throwaway09223 4y ago

When was the last time you read through a copy of Encyclopedia Britannica? Have you done an apples to apples comparison? No encyclopedia is perfect, but as far as I can tell the "standard" encyclopedias are a lot worse. My grandparents had bought a copy of Britannica decades ago and they had something like 50 years of its yearbooks. I would cite it sometimes and no one at school batted an eye. I remember reading through it and cross-referencing articles against Wikipedia and Wikipedia's accuracy was far superior. The thing to keep in mind is that not only are all encyclopedias fraught with errors, primary sources are often wrong too! The goal isn't perfection, it's transparency -- and Wikipedia in this department is enormously better than any private encyclopedia you'll ever find.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
verisimilitudes 4y ago
- TrinaryWorksToo 4y ago
  They're about the same accuracy according to this data: https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/study-wikipedia-as-accurate-as-britannica/ https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/study-wikipedia-as-a...
  - akolbe 4y ago
    Well, for a particular set of fairly obscure science articles. It's quite different in the social sciences, for example. What people don't appreciate is that Wikipedia has very different strengths and weaknesses to Britannica. Britannica doesn't contain outright hoaxes and nonsense. Examples: https://www.theregister.com/2017/01/16/wikipedia_16_birthday_fails/ https://www.theregister.com/2017/01/16/wikipedia_16_birthday... https://wikipediocracy.com/2022/08/11/wikipedias-credibility-is-toast/ https://wikipediocracy.com/2022/08/11/wikipedias-credibility... But Britannica can never be as up to date as Wikipedia: https://www.inputmag.com/culture/queen-elizabeth-ii-death-wikipedia-updates https://www.inputmag.com/culture/queen-elizabeth-ii-death-wi... Nor can it cover as many topics as Wikipedia. Wikipedia's quality also depends on the topic area. Hard science and computing tend to be covered more adeptly than philosophy for example. And article quality simply varies much more in Wikipedia. It ranges from some of the finest writing anywhere, rivalling anything in Britannica and surpassing it in up-to-dateness, to complete rubbish and intentionally falsified content.

krastanov 4y ago

Could you give examples of these topics? Most math and physics pages I have seen on wikipedia are about as good as an average textbook. The French wikipedia is way better for math, but the English one is not bad.

jrm4 4y ago

This is literally the worst idea I've ever heard here on HN. Completely guts the core of what makes Wikipedia great. It's not a classic "encyclopedia" and that's GOOD.

DiogenesKynikos 4y ago

Wikipedia is often okay for science articles. I find many of the mathematics articles to be difficult to read. I'll look at a mathematics concept that I think I understand (or even use often), and it will be written in jargon that is completely incomprehensible to me. However, where Wikipedia really has a problem is in contemporary politics. Anything that is even remotely political is probably controlled by one or another clique of editors. There are opposing cliques that battle over every Israel-Palestine article, or over whether to use the Serbian or Croatian name for village X that existed 200 years ago, or about whether hummus is Lebanese or Syrian or Israeli or Levantine. There are also subjects in which one clique has gained complete dominance and is able to completely control a whole topic area. If you start looking at the edit histories and talk pages of articles on one topic, you'll come to realize how influential relatively small numbers of motivated (and sometimes coordinated, though this is against Wikipedia's rules) editors can be. That's why I'd take anything that's even remotely politically contentious on Wikipedia with an enormous grain of salt.

verisimilitudes 4y ago
> Wikipedia is often okay for science articles. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woman (4th paragraph)
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- witherk 4y ago
  I have definitely seen some bad science promoted for trans rights. But I don't really think "science" tells us what a women is, that's a social issue.
  - DiogenesKynikos 4y ago
    It's clearly a scientific issue, but also a social issue. There is a scientific definition of what a woman is, and there is a social definition (which is very close to the scientific definition, but which does depend a bit on culture and which can change over time). A lot of the debate comes from people talking past one another, without acknowledging that they're using the same word to discuss different topics.

warner25 4y ago

I'd love to hear the perspective on this from some people (there must be dozens reading Hacker News) who actually have a Wikipedia page about themselves.

bawolff 4y ago
Most people are biased about themselves. In particular famous people often want to hide controversy.
- warner25 4y ago
  Yeah, but things I wonder: Do people learn surprising things about themselves from their own Wikipedia page, like a connection to some event or other person that they previously weren't aware of? Do they find their pages laughably incomplete or inaccurate? If there were a Wikipedia page about me, I can imagine that it would probably highlight some insignificant thing (from my perspective) that got my name into a small town newspaper or school / employer public relations piece while omitting several of the facts from my personal top-5 list (in importance) about my own life.
  - aimor 4y ago
    I suppose if I ever get my own Wikipedia page the first thing I should do is publish an autobiography.

jancsika 4y ago

> Every now and then I like to read through Wikipedia pages for things I know more than the average person on. It keeps me skeptical of the things I read on there. I wrote a dissertation on Conlon Nancarrow's Player Piano Study No. 36. Skimming the facts in the article on Conlon Nancarrow, everything looks to be both true and relevant to Nancarrow's life and musical output. I could make a few small improvements. E.g., the proportions of tempos among the twelve voices in Study No. 37 are taken from a peculiar tuning system that apparently only appears in Cowell's New Musical Resources. Making that connection would tie in nicely to the previous section that mentions the influence of Cowell's book on Nancarrow. (I believe that connection is made in Kyle Gann's book in case anyone wants to go ahead and make that edit.) > That doesn't make Wikipedia useless, but the author's best advice is to use Wikipedia as a map to other sources of information. As an expert on Conlon Nancarrow's music, I approve of using the Wikipedia article about him as a useful and accurate starting point for learning about his life and music. Until I read a citation on a current Wikipedia article in your area of expertise that has factually inaccurate information in it, I can only reserve judgment on your opinion about Wikipedia's veracity.

IncRnd 4y ago
Wikipedia, in the online encyclopedia Wikipedia.org, specifically mentions this exact issue. [1] The content of any given article may recently have been changed, vandalized, or altered by someone whose opinion does not correspond with the state of knowledge in the relevant fields. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:General_disclaimer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:General_disclaimer
- prerok 4y ago
  Yes and any reader citing it would be best advised to check the page history and comments section. Teaching that to children would also be a good way of showing and exposing these vandalisms. They might learn to use it better then. Outright discarding one of the best sources of information humanity has ever created is IMHO just plain wrong. I would understand it if this were people writing doctorates but anything below university level should definitely use it.

BrandoElFollito 4y ago

It depends on the topics. I have some knowledge in hard science topics and IT and like you I sometimes read the relevant pages. They are usually great and very accurate. They are also usually in "layers" with more basic information first and then more details. I guess this is because you can hardly argue with an integral, as opposed to who the greatest baseball player was.

jarenmf 4y ago

I have an opposite experience. I'm a scientist and my research topic is accurately depicted in Wikipedia I would say better than any textbook. Of course Wikipedia has to be reductionist, it is not required to provide a full literature review for any topic. If you are doing a PhD-level research, then Wikipedia will fall short of providing the latest and finest details. Other than that, it's more than enough. I also believe it is the duty of experts to contribute to improving Wikipedia (I know many who do).

1vuio0pswjnm7 4y ago

Here is a simple idea that AFAIK has not been tried. Limit "External Links" to only websites found in Google Scholar. More specifically, limit them to only academic sources. (Maybe limiting to .edu or country-specific educational TLDs, e.g., ac.uk, etc. is better. I realise Scholar is hardly a reliable filter for non-commercial sources, given Google's incentives. Remember "Knol".) This could be an option. Maybe an HTTP header sent to Wikipedia: Academic-Only: on The way to "fix the quality of article" is to fix the quality of sources. As it stands, Wikipedia can use any source it finds on the web. (Not to say they do in practice.) That can be an extremely low bar. One can use Wikipedia solely as a path to "External Links" and/or "References". To the extent that articles just take their sentences from References or External Links, any verification needs to be done on the source, not the article. I use Wikipedia as the default search engine in Fennec. On desktop, I search Wikipedia from the command line with a custom script. The forward proxy scrubs the "X-Client-IP" header. Before reading an article, in the event I read the article instead of only using External LInks and references, I always skim the Talk: page. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Criticism_of_Google/Archive_1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Knol/Archive_1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Knol/Archive_1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Knol/Archive_2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Knol/Archive_2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Knol/Archive_3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Knol/Archive_3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Knol/Archive_4 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Knol/Archive_4

gpm 4y ago
Unfortunately, I don't think that works at all. Not all universities use education specific TLDs, and not all departments/labs in universities with a domain name under an education specific TLD actually keep there website under that TLD. Completely random example of such a lab (and if you check publications you'll see they host papers under this domain name) https://www.honeylab.org/ https://www.honeylab.org/
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 4y ago
  Is this domain excluded in Google Scholar searches.

winphone1974 4y ago

But the entire point of Wikipedia is that there is no possible way a traditional gatekeeping expert encyclopedia could be as current or encompassing as a crowd sourced version. Maybe that would be the ideal best solution, but let's not have it stand in the way of progress to a better reality

bergenty 4y ago

What a bunch of bull, use specific examples if you’re trying to make claims like that. I also read articles I’m an expert in and I’m always amazed how complete the articles are.

Glyptodon 4y ago

Eh, I don't think Wikipedia is perfect - and the smaller and less frequented the article the more weird it might be. But most of the time it's mostly going to be right about stuff like who was president in 1887, and have citations to elsewhere, which is a lot more than can be said for the average random Google result. A couple days ago I was kind of annoyed that the article on Greensleeves didn't include lyrics.

koonsolo 4y ago

There was one student in my classroom who was always correcting the teacher. Except for the fact that the teacher was always right and the student wrong. Call me skeptical, but can you provide us with examples where Wikipedia is misleading or wrong?

random314 4y ago

Can you give examples of misleading articles? Are they political or nonpolitical?

chobytes 4y ago

Agreed. My background is in math... and I find math wikipedia to be appealingly low quality. Both for reference and for a general audience.

tracerbulletx 4y ago

What is an example of an article you think is misleading or wrong?

pitchups 4y ago

Not sure what your particular area of expertise is but every time I have browsed Wikipedia for articles related to technical topics including math, programming, AI/ML as well as science, I have found their articles accurate and informative. I also recall a few studies comparing the accuracy of articles on Wikipedia with Encyclopedia Brittanica and journals, which conclude that Wikipedia compares favorably with both (easily found via a google search).

bnralt 4y ago

> For people unfamiliar with a subject (students) I think Wikipedia pages are misleading, poorly organized, and sometimes wrong. This is true even if you're reading works from experts in a field. For instance, Robert Hoyland, Fred Donner, and Patricia Crone (until her death a few years ago) are some of the leading academics in the studies of early historical Islam. However, Donner's review of Hoyland's textbook thought it was misleading[1], Crone's review of Donner's textbook considered it misleading, and Crone's Hagarism is generally not accepted by any current scholar as far as I can tell. That is to say, one needs to be skeptical no matter the source, as well as humble enough to realize that know more than others doesn't necessarily make your understanding more correct. It's also useful to try to understand the disagreements in the field and how they've developed. [1] http://www.middleeastmedievalists.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/UW-23-Donner.pdf http://www.middleeastmedievalists.com/wp-content/uploads/201... [2] https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/israel-middle-east/articles/among-the-believers https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/israel-middle-east/articl...

LtWorf 4y ago

I remember having such an argument with a friend who is vehemently opposed to Wikipedia, because not written by experts, unlike Britannica. I then opened a random page of Britannica, about an opera. And the phonetic pronunciation of the Italian name was incorrect (I'm a native Italian speaker) and it was how a brit might pronounce it. In Wikipedia I would have fixed it. In Britannica the error is probably still there. I presume that since I found an error in the first page I looked at, there probably are many other errors.

akolbe 4y ago
Hmm ... there are English pronunciations of foreign words that are considered correct in English, even though they differ from the way the words are pronounced in their original language. In other words, the mispronunciations have become the standard, and the correct pronunciation is considered "wrong" in English. This might have been one of those cases.
- LtWorf 4y ago
  If your theory was true, the phonetic pronunciation wouldn't have been there.
  - akolbe 4y ago
    I'm intrigued now. :) Was it Turandot? That's one where the pronunciation is controversial, according to Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turandot#Origin_and_pronunciation_of_the_name https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turandot#Origin_and_pronunciat...
    - LtWorf 4y ago
      I said I'm a native italian speaker. -_-' You want to trick me with a french word? As if an italian would be unable to tell a word in italian from one in a different language?
      - 4y ago

s0rce 4y ago

I've read articles which I'm an expert on and found them generally quite good. Some very niche things often have really limited content but usually not wrong. I've fixed the odd thing here and there.

sanroot99 4y ago

For technical stuffs Wikipedia is great ,and have good resources in further reading sections

franciscop 4y ago

True, but still it's way better than most other sources than the general population has casual access to. Reading some of the general public magazines that include some of those topics is... an interesting experience.