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The 'Undue Weight' of Truth on Wikipedia

220 points by peroo 15y ago

ZeroGravitas 15y ago
This follows the standard format of these complaints. If you read through it believing the author is a true expert then it seems like Wikipedia is crazy. If you read through it believing the author is a crank, then Wikipedia is doing a fine job. I'm not even sure the guy isn't a crank, but if he isn't he needs to understand that Wikipedia needs a system that takes cranks into account. If he's simply a false positive on the crank detector because it turns out that everyone else is actually wrong about this historical event then he'd have to demonstrate that the cost of false positives outweigh the good to effect a change, not just go in a huff because his pet subject isn't presented in the way he would like in Wikipedia.
- bendauphinee 15y ago
  Quote: "as I had cited the documents that proved my point, including verbatim testimony from the trial published online by the Library of Congress" His opinion in this matter isn't as relevant as the fact that he cited actual testimony. That alone should lend enough weight to the edit that it should not have been reverted simply b/c of the Wikipedia "undue weight" policy.
  - Symmetry 15y ago
    Evaluating primary sources isn't a perfectly simple and straightforward exercise, and cranks generally have facts that they can point to to "prove" that their view. I expect that with selective enough citation I could create a fairly convincing (to a layman) argument for quite a wide variety of points of view.
    - CPlatypus 15y ago
      Comparing primary sources is indeed not straightforward, but this is primary vs. secondary. If a book makes a claim that is directly contradicted by the author's own source then not much expertise is required to see that preferring the "child" over the "parent" would be absurd.
  - sp332 15y ago
    His opinion in this matter isn't as relevant as the fact that he cited actual testimony. Actually if you look at the page, he only cited his own blog post. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Haymarket_affair&diff=prev&oldid=265741836#.22No_Evidence.22 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Haymarket_af... (His blog post cited those other sources, but that doesn't really add to WP.)
- darasen 15y ago
  There is no expertise involved. The page made a statement that was factually false. This was a fact that is easy to check as the wrong "fact" of no evidence is obviously ( yes, obviously has a prosecutor ever gone to court with zero evidence to present?) wrong and a matter of public record. To say a fact is subjective to popular, to say nothing of demonstrably wrong, opinion is the completely antithetical to the goal of being an encyclopedia.
  - ZeroGravitas 15y ago
    I know nothing about the historical case itself, but I do know that show trials (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Show_trial http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Show_trial) can and do happen. In that case people can be tried and convicted without evidence. So what you consider trivially true, is trivially false. So we're back to a complex debate in which one person is questioning what they readily admit as the accepted version of events. That's all very noble, but I don't expect Wikipedia or anyone else to just roll over at the first sign of a "debunking" of a controversial event.
    - darasen 15y ago
      I understand what you are trying to say however, you are incorrect. The specific case cited being that the original article made the statement "The prosecution, led by Julius Grinnell, did not offer evidence connecting any of the defendants with the bombing. ... ". This statement while presented as a fact is factually untrue. there is no uncertainty involved. One could argue the quality or value of said evidence but can not deny that said evidence was presented. Regarding what I consider to be "trivially true" is true. The show trials article itself does not contain a single example of a U.S. court case where the prosecution has "gone to court with zero evidence to present".
      - ZeroGravitas 15y ago
        Reading the article again, the issue seems to be not very subtle semantics. The student asks how the trial could have happened "without evidence" full stop, Wikipedia made the much weaker claim that there was no "evidence connecting any of the defendants with the bombing". They apparently got convicted for "not preventing" the bombing while being organizers of the rally, which you could easily do without being connected to it, and so no proof of that was required. (You could also read the sentence as meaning presenting no convincing evidence, but that amount of weaseling isn't even needed).
- shallowwater 15y ago
  I also checked out the talk page, and if I didn't know the author was an expert, I would also have assumed he was a crank. He approached editing Wikipedia on a lark and failed to offer sources in an acceptable format. No wonder he got smacked down. He cited a blog post for a historical event!
jellicle 15y ago
If you think of Wikipedia as a summary of what old-school mass media says about a subject, rather than being the truth or complete or informative or useful, then all these contradictions disappear.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
  - username3 15y ago
    Wikipedia should have NPOV articles and forked POV versions. I'd read diffs comparing the main NPOV and POV versions. This would make disputes easier to resolve. We could have a branched view of the article from all POVs. Wikipedia should be more like GitHub.
    - herge 15y ago
      The discussion page should fill that requirement, where anyone can discuss POVs and less mainstream views on a topic.
      - username3 15y ago
        Issues and discussions get lost and repeated in the discussion page. We need more structure like an issues page and pull requests.
    - ErrantX 15y ago
      The crux of most POV disputes revolve around arguing what the NPOV actually is! So unfortunately I'm not sure that would really solve the issue. I suspect that attempting to do as you suggest would mostly lead to the spawning of more arguments ;) And at what point do you judge the point of view too marginal to be worth a fork? The point behind NPOV is not to avoid showing any opinion - but to show a balanced set of opinions, giving most exposure to the most widely accepted ones. In practice Wikipedia has already been "forked" by some POV's. For example Conservapedia, I believe, is quite active. It would certainly be interesting if someone put together a tool to compare several different Wiki's articles side by side. (FWIW I think we treat marginal issues very badly by stamping them out of content at every opportunity. Case in point is the 9/11 article which for a long time resisted mentioning that conspiracy theories about the atrocity existed... even to the extent of rejecting a "See Also" link to the article on the topic.)
AndrewDucker 15y ago
This is exactly what Wikipedia should be doing. They cannot know what the truth is, they can only provide a summary of existing sources.
- CPlatypus 15y ago
  There's nobody I'd trust less than a Wikipedia editor to act as the arbiter of truth, but they could still do better. Wikipedía could adopt a policy of preferring primary sources over secondary, which would still keep out the "teach the controversy" cranks who are the obvious reason for the "undue weight" criterion without affecting well researched rebuttals of conventional folly. They consciously choose to do the exact opposite, preferring popular opinion to actual verifiability, and IMO that's wrong.
  - starwed 15y ago
    Wikipedia has explicitly adopted the opposite policy, and they didn't do so arbitrarily. In specific cases it might seem stupid, but I think in general it makes sense. It goes hand in hand with the "no original research" policy. (Like everything in wikipedia that policy can be misapplied by small minded people, though.)
    - CPlatypus 15y ago
      The "no original research" policy is fine when it prevents self-citation, but when it prevents citation of little-read but thoroughly credible third-party sources such as court transcripts that's a different matter.
      - tptacek 15y ago
        No, it's really not. The proper venue for interpretation of little-read primary sources like court transcripts is a book or journal article, not an encyclopedia.
        CPlatypus 15y ago
gallerytungsten 15y ago
There are a number of people who apparently monitor Wikipedia relentlessly, lest the truth appear. In general, they seem to be motivated by their devotion to the Big Lie, extremist political agendas, and general crankiness.
twelvechairs 15y ago
Key sentence: "my citations to the primary documents were insufficient" While I agree that the wikipedia gestapo are often overzealous with reverting good edits - it basically requires a case-by-case basis of deciding what 'facts' are, which is never easy. If his 'primary sources' are better than the secondary sources that say the opposite, then talk sense to the person who is doing the reversion, or raise it with someone higher - don't just continuously attempt edit-wars...
- ErrantX 15y ago
  In fairness, he didn't attempt to edit war (only making the changes once) - he just gave up the discussion very quickly and didn't argue the point.
  - twelvechairs 15y ago
    "So I removed the line.... Within minutes my changes were reversed. " "I tried to edit the page again. Within 10 seconds..." "Tempted to win simply through sheer tenacity, I edited the page again. My triumph was even more fleeting than before. "
    - ErrantX 15y ago
      He made three different changes to different pieces of content. I see how he doesn't get that across well in the article, though.
zqfm 15y ago
He left out the part where the editor said "I think we probably need to take another look at Schaack as you suggest. I, too, hope we can incorporate your insights into the article. That's why I'm going to read your book." From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:MesserKruse http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:MesserKruse
maeon3 15y ago
Wikipedia will be destroyed when governments figure out that they can control what is and is not "authorized popular truth". Wikipedia doesn't stand up for truth, it only seeks to be based upon the data sources, even when we all know they are officially verified government propaganda. That's why history books in middle school are completely screwed up with lies. You can't empirically test history. If wikipedia is to survive it will have to make a principled stand against official propaganda machines, official government sources and popular truth, myth and political agendas.
autarch 15y ago
I think the overall problem is that wikipedia attempts to substitute policy for expertise. As other have pointed out, wikipedia has to deal with lots of bad edits from people who are not motivated by a pursuit of facts or truth. To deal with this, they've come up with a set of policies that the editors seem to enforce fairly rigidly. This does an okay job of preventing the wackos from taking over. Unfortunately, since the editors often lack the subject expertise to distinguish cranks from experts, these policies end up making it harder for experts to contribute in some cases.
- starwed 15y ago
  I used to try to work a bit on physics articles. That actually wasn't the problem there -- the problem is that there are so many cranks, and they (being cranks) are so insistent on their incorrect views that it becomes a constant, tiring battle preventing any real work from being done. The only rational course is, once it has been established that you're dealing with a crank, to completely disengage and smack them down with the official policy. (They never have any reliable sources/citations to support their edits.) It's tempting (since they are usually provably, mathematically wrong) to try to convince them of their errors, but experience shows that never works. I saw a lot of people just burn themselves out doing that -- in this case, expertise was being driven away by reluctance to rely on policy.
- tptacek 15y ago
  It is indeed very annoying for experts to contribute to Wikipedia. They probably shouldn't. Instead, they should do what experts do best, and Wikipedia should do what encyclopedias do best: to wit, experts should conduct research to generate new primary sources or write books to generate new secondary sources, and Wikipedia should continue finding secondary sources to summarize.
  - phren0logy 15y ago
    That seems like a real shame, and an unnecessary repetition of work. Surely there's some way to verify expertise and provide expert commentary with supporting links to primary sources, even if it doesn't mean editing the entry directly? Perhaps a side-bar? I'm sure this would lead to arguments about how to verify expertise, but even if it only started with unimpeachable credentials that would seem like a start. Tell me very clearly who is providing the commentary, and I can decide myself if it's credible. I feel like I'm rambling a bit, but really this seems like a wasted opportunity. Why recreate Wikipedia from whole cloth when it already has so much? I suppose that given the way it's licensed, you could always fork it...
scott_s 15y ago
Looking at the Talk page itself (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Haymarket_affair&diff=prev&oldid=265741836 http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Haymarket_aff..., at the bottom, thanks zqfm), it was not clear to me reading his Chronicle article that he did not cite the primary sources in Wikipedia. Rather, in Wikipedia, he cites his own blog post, and in that blog post, he cites primary sources. As ZeroGravitas points out, consider the case of a crank who links to his own blog as a source, and that blog post cites primary evidence. The Wikipedia editors now have a job that is identical to academic peer-review. I don't think that should be their job.
- angersock 15y ago
  The Wikipedia editors now have a job that is identical to academic peer-review. I don't think that should be their job. Then why have editors? God forbid that, if you take on the mantle of vetting articles, you actually exert some intellectual effort.
  - scott_s 15y ago
    Because now Wikipedia editors are required to have the same expertise in each subject as academics who spend their careers in those subjects. I submit that model is clearly not sustainable, and quite different from not expecting them to expend intellectual effort. Wikipedia is not a place for original research for exactly this reason. Once something has gone through peer review, and is published somewhere, then it can be used in Wikipedia. I think that's reasonable. Wikipedia editors are then relying on a particular subject's community of experts instead of having to be those experts themselves. I think it's also important to note that this model is the same as any other encyclopedia.
    - angersock 15y ago
      Wikipedia would seem like a great place for original research, right? It's trivial to get people to check over claims, and you have a place to discuss issues (Talk pages), and the person doing the research can cite their references right there and get called out on it if they don't.
joelmichael 15y ago
Looks like Wikipedia has been corrected as a result of this article. Well done to the author, and shame on those who try to distort the truth.
- voyou 15y ago
  And well done to the Wikipedia editors, who didn't include the updated information in the article until it had gone through the academic publishing process and so been vetted by experts in the field.
tptacek 15y ago
Worth noting: the Haymarket Riot article on Wikipedia is a designated "Good Article". "GA" is a big deal. It's been on the front page of the site. Among other things, that implies that there are people specifically watching that article; changes to it can reasonably expect more scrutiny.
- roc 15y ago
  Indeed it's very hard to get worked up over the author's intended issue ("undue weight", minority truth vs majority falsehood) without seeing the actual edits in context. If the author was essentially trying to unwrite the popular account, rather than supplementing it with a well-sourced minority view, the wiki editors actions become far more understandable. Also, if he were throwing his credentials around as a substitute for clear and concise citation, the wiki editors' actions, again, become more understandable.
- ErrantX 15y ago
  You're thinking of "Featured Article" - those get onto the front page. It is a bit of an odd process but, basically, "Good Article" consists of a semi-formal review of the article by an uninvolved editor to assess it for neutrality, completeness and language (etc.). "Featured Article" is a more involved formal review involving multiple editors. It's those that get then picked for appearance on the main page. The intended progression for an article is supposed to be something like: Peer Review, Good Article review, Featured Article review.
  - tptacek 15y ago
    I know about GA & FA, and that FA is a bigger deal. I disagree that GA isn't a big deal, having watched people try to GA good-looking articles and fail. I should have been clearer: this article was on the front page repeatedly, but not necessarily because it was a GA.
    - ErrantX 15y ago
      Ah, sorry, I misread your comment :) (Agreed over GA, wasn't intended to belittle it!)
snorkel 15y ago
Instead of fighting over the semantics of a single sentence why not instead elaborate on the evidence presented by the prosecution, then later discuss if the semantics of that summary sentence contradict the other information in the same article?
morpher 15y ago
One of the editors gave a form in which the newer research could be presented that was in compliance with their policy (the green sky blue sky example). Why didn't the author make an edit of his form? Something like: "Although most historians agree that little evidence was presented... newer research suggests..." It would get the new point across while keeping the prior, possibly fallacious, but accepted viewpoint visible.
username3 15y ago
Ask HN: Is anyone working on this problem? any startups?
- sp332 15y ago
  Citizendium was supposed to recruit experts to write articles, it's basically dead. http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/10/five-year-old-wikipedia-fork-is-dead-in-the-water.ars http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/10/five-year-ol... Google's Knol would have avoided a bunch of procedural mess, but it's been shuttered. http://techcrunch.com/2008/07/23/googles-knol-the-monetizable-wikipedia/ http://techcrunch.com/2008/07/23/googles-knol-the-monetizabl...
  - tokenadult 15y ago
    Thanks for mentioning that Knol has been shuttered. The TechCrunch link you kindly shared announces the launch of Knol, but I found the link http://techcrunch.com/2011/11/22/google-announces-plans-to-shutter-knol-friend-connect-and-more/ http://techcrunch.com/2011/11/22/google-announces-plans-to-s... that mentions Google abandoning Knol.
mwexler 15y ago
I can imagine this back in the day. "Though almost every scholar agrees that the earth (though flat) is the center of the universe, some people do persist in saying that the earth is not only in orbit around the sun, but is also round. Most of these minority claims rely on "mathematics" and other potentially incorrect "proofs" of their theorems." I am reminded of the "paradigm shift" approach to the history of science, as flawed as it may be to some (look it up, sigh, on wikipedia). It implies that the dominant point of view is held as fact until a preponderance of evidence shifts the minority view from "flawed" to "edge cases" to "the new paradigm". Then it cycles again. What was the sworn truth with history behind it is now the "old paradigm" and disregarded. For wikipedia, I've never felt there to be a requirement for "article completeness", just an eye to be "well rounded", and so it often feels that whatever the dominant paradigm is currently will be the primary driver of inclusion and presence in an article. Wikipedia is in that interesting tension between sticking to it's original mission, which was pretty wonderful, and potentially becoming more, but at the risk of becoming useless. For all it's flaws, I still think the world is better with it than without it, and at some point, I suspect a way to let folks contribute more original research and have it coexist on wikipedia will evolve.
DarkShikari 15y ago
This is exactly how Wikipedia is supposed to work. If you come up with a new theory that disagrees with scholarly/scientific consensus, an encyclopedia is not the place to publish it. You publish it in a journal; if it becomes a consensus, or at least generates significant serious response in that community, then it will be documented in an encyclopedia. If every single crank theory was accepted into Wikipedia, you'd have a wiki consisting entirely of holocaust denialism, homeopathy, Electric Universe, and woo-peddling. Wikipedia is not in the business of deciding what's true and what isn't; that's what the academic community is for.
- TwoBit 15y ago
  I mostly agree. This writer went about it the wrong way. Just because this author had personally determined that history books were wrong doesn't give him the right to unilaterally change Wikipedia. He needs to gather academic weight on his side. If he's correct then it should be fairly easy to accomplish. Of course the Wikipedia admins were buttheads and weren't constructive at all.
  - mistercow 15y ago
    >He needs to gather academic weight on his side. If he's correct then it should be fairly easy to accomplish. Well, not necessarily. Unfortunately consensus is hard to change, even if it's wrong. But you still have to try. If everyone who thought the consensus was wrong edited Wikipedia to reflect their opinion, the result would be a less accurate encyclopedia.
- moldbug 15y ago
  Is there a specific reason you assume the academic community is doing a good job at this? Consider the case in point. The myth the Chronicle author was refuting was a political myth: that the Haymarket defendants were innocent men railroaded by a biased prosecutor who was not "credible." This myth had been repeated by generations of pro-labor historians with a big ol' axe to grind. As for the anti-labor historians? Oh wait, there aren't any anti-labor historians. At least, if by "historian" you mean "individual funded by the US Government to teach history." Thus, Wikipedia is simply recording in its pages the depressing result of a political power struggle in academia. Now that labor has become the establishment, an honest historian who is not pro or anti labor, just interested in the past, can discover from primary sources that gee whiz, the prosecution actually had a case. It's 2012 so he won't be purged for this. On the other hand, it's not clear how he's supposed to purge all his axe-grinding colleagues who continue insisting that the sky is green. Academia is just a thing called "academia." Science is just a thing called "science." The Soviet Union had both. Ours are better than the Soviet Union's, but they're still de facto government agencies. Jeebus didn't come down yesterday and make our government systematically infallible. Imagine Wikipedia in the Soviet Union. Would you want it to be a crowdsourced version of the Great Soviet Encylopedia? Or would you want it to do a little better? Wikipedia has done a great job of being a tertiary source, mostly. That doesn't mean it can't have higher ambitions for the future. When I stop being a child, I put aside childish things. It's childish to assume that "reliable sources" are reliable just because everyone says they are. Is Wikipedia all grown up now? If so, maybe it should at least think about starting to address its utterly circular definition of a reliable source. If there is no conceivable mechanism to distinguish between homeopathy and medicine, how do our existing mechanisms work? Are these mechanisms unique? Are they perfect? Can they be duplicated, improved, advanced?
beefman 15y ago
I'm amazed at the general support among comments here so far for the 'tertiary source' argument. Encyclopedias have always been written by experts -- usually one expert per article. Wikipedia itself has a template, 'This article is in need of input from an expert on the subject'. But this isn't even right, because Wikipedia is a not an encyclopedia. It's like Johnson & Johnson saying Q-tips are for applying makeup or detailing cars and shouldn't be put in the ear. 99% of people who buy Q-tips put them in their ears. 99% of true claims on Wikipedia are contributed by experts and are either unreferenced, cite a source that doesn't really support them, a source at the other end of a broken link that nobody's read, or a source that doesn't meet the guidelines this historian was held to. Career editors spend more time checking for citations than checking citations. And they spend more time checking for citations when they personally don't believe a claim. The policies are applied hypocritically, with the result that opinions of non-experts outweigh the opinions of experts. The only thing limiting the damage has been the relatively small number of career editors. With massive decline in casual participation in recent years, this balance is starting to shift. I just noticed recently that career editors have started to tag mathematics articles. We should be honest that the encyclopedia contrivance is really just a way to avoid flame wars, and is an imperfect one, especially when editors 'merge with their cover story' and blindly enforce it. Wikipedia will be its best when it is recognized for what it is: a truth engine, a first source, and a very important public good. Editing Wikipedia needs to be about more than writing long policy documents and bludgeoning contributors with them. It is an important form of scholarship. The project could benefit greatly by a reputation model more subtle than "barnstars", such as [1]. But a fancy reputation model alone isn't enough. The culture of Wikipedia is in trouble and needs to be revitalized. [1] http://www2007.org/papers/paper692.pdf http://www2007.org/papers/paper692.pdf
- derleth 15y ago
  > a truth engine I don't know what that is, but I think if it ever existed it would be in the service of something foul and malign. Humans have facts. Humans have evidence. Humans even, in mathematics alone, have proofs. Humans do not have truth. Woe betide anyone who thinks we do.
niels_olson 15y ago
Start pulling the string on this, and it looks like there's a potentially borderline admin, Gwen Gale,(1-3) at the heart of this, and the Chronicle article is just what boiled over into the slightly more real world of academia. It appears the bureaucrats at the Foundation have take notice.(4) I'm a little disappointed they haven't caught onto the involvement of the admin in question, and especially by Tim Starling's somewhat euphemistic allusion to the problem as "inertia". This "inertia" is nicely described by the histogram of new admins. Those who seized power in the middle of the last decade are running with it. (5) (1) http://gwen-gale-heidi-wyss-tinpot-auteur.blogspot.com/ http://gwen-gale-heidi-wyss-tinpot-auteur.blogspot.com/ (2) http://english.sxu.edu/sites/kirstein/archives/1443 http://english.sxu.edu/sites/kirstein/archives/1443 (3) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Gwen_Gale http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Gwen_Gale (4) http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/wiki/foundation/271257 http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/wiki/foundation/271257 (5) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Successful_requests_for_adminship http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Successful_requests_f...
- scott_s 15y ago
  I really want to avoid falling down this rabbit hole, but sources 1 and 2 pinged my crackpot-detector. That doesn't mean they necessarily are, but I am not willing to accept the notion, at face value, that Gwen Gale is the problem.
  - niels_olson 15y ago
    You're right. I should have just linked to the google search. https://www.google.com/search?q=gwen+gale https://www.google.com/search?q=gwen+gale
arguesalot 15y ago
Many of you may know Scholarpedia (http://www.scholarpedia.org/ http://www.scholarpedia.org/) in which articles are primarily written by an expert. Unfortunately that leads to many articles being incomplete, biased , slow to update or simply non existent because the invited author does not have the time to compile an encyclopedia entry for free.
lucb1e 15y ago
Similar experiences here. In one case I even got corrected by a bot... I don't know if all the millions Wikipedia slurps up from their donations go to AI research, but I actually think the bot was wrong.
2muchcoffeeman 15y ago
John Siracusa was complaining about the same thing recently. He also argues that it is possible to create a wiki where truth is more important than verifiability. Hypercritical #53: Brad Pitt Gets to Contribute http://5by5.tv/hypercritical/53 http://5by5.tv/hypercritical/53
smsm42 15y ago
I have adopted the following policy about Wikipedia, and I think it reflects current state of affairs: 1. It is a decent repository for bare facts that can be easily verified elsewhere, but assembled there in convenient form. E.g. if you need to know the population of Nepal, Wikipedia article about Nepal is a good way to go, even though multiple other sources are available. 2. It is a decent source of links for more complex material - e.g., if you want to get a quick idea about what suprematism is, without knowing anything about it, and how to start researching the topic, you can use Wikipedia article, extract such keywords as "visual art", "Malevich", "russian avant-garde", etc. and take it from there if you're interested. 3. It is a somewhat useful, but a dangerous source about any concepts that are in any way controversial - you should verify all claims and read all links, but you can use it as an assembly of links and keywords, without assigning too much importance to any narrative. 4. It is absolutely useless for understanding any seriously controversial topic, as at best controversial articles would selectively present facts, reflecting biases of the writers, at worst - explicitly promote specific approach to the topic, which will be ruthlessly enforced by either the mob of opinionated editors or the wiki bureaucracy masterfully exploited by biased insiders. To the defense of Wikipedia, some mainstream encyclopedic sources, especially ones published in non-free countries, suffer from even worse bias problems. I don't think there's a solution for this, except using one's own mind and take everything told to you with a grain of salt and check it when possible. Obviously, the topic described in the article falls into the third or fourth category, and so expecting Wikipedia to have anything but bare facts (like dates when it happened, names of the participants, etc.) right would be a bet, and not a safe one. In most cases it'd be whatever the random Wikipedia "guardian" or anonymous mob of agenda-bearers wants it to be. Sometimes the experts make the fuss that hits some popular media and particular article gets better, but most would give up and decide not to waste their time.
jrockway 15y ago
Yes. Wikipedia is not for original research. Do the research, publish it, and then update Wikipedia.
pkamb 15y ago
Academics vs. Wikipedia Grammaticians: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Fitts%27s_law#Grammar_edit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Fitts%27s_law#Grammar_edit
known 15y ago
"The truth is more important than the facts." --Frank Lloyd Wright. But unfortunately for Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Consensus http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Consensus is more important than facts/truth.

220 points by peroo 15y ago

This follows the standard format of these complaints. If you read through it believing the author is a true expert then it seems like Wikipedia is crazy. If you read through it believing the author is a crank, then Wikipedia is doing a fine job. I'm not even sure the guy isn't a crank, but if he isn't he needs to understand that Wikipedia needs a system that takes cranks into account. If he's simply a false positive on the crank detector because it turns out that everyone else is actually wrong about this historical event then he'd have to demonstrate that the cost of false positives outweigh the good to effect a change, not just go in a huff because his pet subject isn't presented in the way he would like in Wikipedia.

bendauphinee 15y ago
Quote: "as I had cited the documents that proved my point, including verbatim testimony from the trial published online by the Library of Congress" His opinion in this matter isn't as relevant as the fact that he cited actual testimony. That alone should lend enough weight to the edit that it should not have been reverted simply b/c of the Wikipedia "undue weight" policy.
- Symmetry 15y ago
  Evaluating primary sources isn't a perfectly simple and straightforward exercise, and cranks generally have facts that they can point to to "prove" that their view. I expect that with selective enough citation I could create a fairly convincing (to a layman) argument for quite a wide variety of points of view.
  - CPlatypus 15y ago
    Comparing primary sources is indeed not straightforward, but this is primary vs. secondary. If a book makes a claim that is directly contradicted by the author's own source then not much expertise is required to see that preferring the "child" over the "parent" would be absurd.
- sp332 15y ago
  His opinion in this matter isn't as relevant as the fact that he cited actual testimony. Actually if you look at the page, he only cited his own blog post. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Haymarket_affair&diff=prev&oldid=265741836#.22No_Evidence.22 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Haymarket_af... (His blog post cited those other sources, but that doesn't really add to WP.)
darasen 15y ago
There is no expertise involved. The page made a statement that was factually false. This was a fact that is easy to check as the wrong "fact" of no evidence is obviously ( yes, obviously has a prosecutor ever gone to court with zero evidence to present?) wrong and a matter of public record. To say a fact is subjective to popular, to say nothing of demonstrably wrong, opinion is the completely antithetical to the goal of being an encyclopedia.
- ZeroGravitas 15y ago
  I know nothing about the historical case itself, but I do know that show trials (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Show_trial http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Show_trial) can and do happen. In that case people can be tried and convicted without evidence. So what you consider trivially true, is trivially false. So we're back to a complex debate in which one person is questioning what they readily admit as the accepted version of events. That's all very noble, but I don't expect Wikipedia or anyone else to just roll over at the first sign of a "debunking" of a controversial event.
  - darasen 15y ago
    I understand what you are trying to say however, you are incorrect. The specific case cited being that the original article made the statement "The prosecution, led by Julius Grinnell, did not offer evidence connecting any of the defendants with the bombing. ... ". This statement while presented as a fact is factually untrue. there is no uncertainty involved. One could argue the quality or value of said evidence but can not deny that said evidence was presented. Regarding what I consider to be "trivially true" is true. The show trials article itself does not contain a single example of a U.S. court case where the prosecution has "gone to court with zero evidence to present".
    - ZeroGravitas 15y ago
      Reading the article again, the issue seems to be not very subtle semantics. The student asks how the trial could have happened "without evidence" full stop, Wikipedia made the much weaker claim that there was no "evidence connecting any of the defendants with the bombing". They apparently got convicted for "not preventing" the bombing while being organizers of the rally, which you could easily do without being connected to it, and so no proof of that was required. (You could also read the sentence as meaning presenting no convincing evidence, but that amount of weaseling isn't even needed).
shallowwater 15y ago
I also checked out the talk page, and if I didn't know the author was an expert, I would also have assumed he was a crank. He approached editing Wikipedia on a lark and failed to offer sources in an acceptable format. No wonder he got smacked down. He cited a blog post for a historical event!

jellicle 15y ago

If you think of Wikipedia as a summary of what old-school mass media says about a subject, rather than being the truth or complete or informative or useful, then all these contradictions disappear.

deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
- username3 15y ago
  Wikipedia should have NPOV articles and forked POV versions. I'd read diffs comparing the main NPOV and POV versions. This would make disputes easier to resolve. We could have a branched view of the article from all POVs. Wikipedia should be more like GitHub.
  - herge 15y ago
    The discussion page should fill that requirement, where anyone can discuss POVs and less mainstream views on a topic.
    - username3 15y ago
      Issues and discussions get lost and repeated in the discussion page. We need more structure like an issues page and pull requests.
  - ErrantX 15y ago
    The crux of most POV disputes revolve around arguing what the NPOV actually is! So unfortunately I'm not sure that would really solve the issue. I suspect that attempting to do as you suggest would mostly lead to the spawning of more arguments ;) And at what point do you judge the point of view too marginal to be worth a fork? The point behind NPOV is not to avoid showing any opinion - but to show a balanced set of opinions, giving most exposure to the most widely accepted ones. In practice Wikipedia has already been "forked" by some POV's. For example Conservapedia, I believe, is quite active. It would certainly be interesting if someone put together a tool to compare several different Wiki's articles side by side. (FWIW I think we treat marginal issues very badly by stamping them out of content at every opportunity. Case in point is the 9/11 article which for a long time resisted mentioning that conspiracy theories about the atrocity existed... even to the extent of rejecting a "See Also" link to the article on the topic.)

AndrewDucker 15y ago

This is exactly what Wikipedia should be doing. They cannot know what the truth is, they can only provide a summary of existing sources.

CPlatypus 15y ago
There's nobody I'd trust less than a Wikipedia editor to act as the arbiter of truth, but they could still do better. Wikipedía could adopt a policy of preferring primary sources over secondary, which would still keep out the "teach the controversy" cranks who are the obvious reason for the "undue weight" criterion without affecting well researched rebuttals of conventional folly. They consciously choose to do the exact opposite, preferring popular opinion to actual verifiability, and IMO that's wrong.
- starwed 15y ago
  Wikipedia has explicitly adopted the opposite policy, and they didn't do so arbitrarily. In specific cases it might seem stupid, but I think in general it makes sense. It goes hand in hand with the "no original research" policy. (Like everything in wikipedia that policy can be misapplied by small minded people, though.)
  - CPlatypus 15y ago
    The "no original research" policy is fine when it prevents self-citation, but when it prevents citation of little-read but thoroughly credible third-party sources such as court transcripts that's a different matter.
    - tptacek 15y ago
      No, it's really not. The proper venue for interpretation of little-read primary sources like court transcripts is a book or journal article, not an encyclopedia.
      - CPlatypus 15y ago

gallerytungsten 15y ago

There are a number of people who apparently monitor Wikipedia relentlessly, lest the truth appear. In general, they seem to be motivated by their devotion to the Big Lie, extremist political agendas, and general crankiness.

twelvechairs 15y ago

Key sentence: "my citations to the primary documents were insufficient" While I agree that the wikipedia gestapo are often overzealous with reverting good edits - it basically requires a case-by-case basis of deciding what 'facts' are, which is never easy. If his 'primary sources' are better than the secondary sources that say the opposite, then talk sense to the person who is doing the reversion, or raise it with someone higher - don't just continuously attempt edit-wars...

ErrantX 15y ago
In fairness, he didn't attempt to edit war (only making the changes once) - he just gave up the discussion very quickly and didn't argue the point.
- twelvechairs 15y ago
  "So I removed the line.... Within minutes my changes were reversed. " "I tried to edit the page again. Within 10 seconds..." "Tempted to win simply through sheer tenacity, I edited the page again. My triumph was even more fleeting than before. "
  - ErrantX 15y ago
    He made three different changes to different pieces of content. I see how he doesn't get that across well in the article, though.

zqfm 15y ago

He left out the part where the editor said "I think we probably need to take another look at Schaack as you suggest. I, too, hope we can incorporate your insights into the article. That's why I'm going to read your book." From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:MesserKruse http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:MesserKruse

maeon3 15y ago

Wikipedia will be destroyed when governments figure out that they can control what is and is not "authorized popular truth". Wikipedia doesn't stand up for truth, it only seeks to be based upon the data sources, even when we all know they are officially verified government propaganda. That's why history books in middle school are completely screwed up with lies. You can't empirically test history. If wikipedia is to survive it will have to make a principled stand against official propaganda machines, official government sources and popular truth, myth and political agendas.

autarch 15y ago

I think the overall problem is that wikipedia attempts to substitute policy for expertise. As other have pointed out, wikipedia has to deal with lots of bad edits from people who are not motivated by a pursuit of facts or truth. To deal with this, they've come up with a set of policies that the editors seem to enforce fairly rigidly. This does an okay job of preventing the wackos from taking over. Unfortunately, since the editors often lack the subject expertise to distinguish cranks from experts, these policies end up making it harder for experts to contribute in some cases.

starwed 15y ago
I used to try to work a bit on physics articles. That actually wasn't the problem there -- the problem is that there are so many cranks, and they (being cranks) are so insistent on their incorrect views that it becomes a constant, tiring battle preventing any real work from being done. The only rational course is, once it has been established that you're dealing with a crank, to completely disengage and smack them down with the official policy. (They never have any reliable sources/citations to support their edits.) It's tempting (since they are usually provably, mathematically wrong) to try to convince them of their errors, but experience shows that never works. I saw a lot of people just burn themselves out doing that -- in this case, expertise was being driven away by reluctance to rely on policy.
tptacek 15y ago
It is indeed very annoying for experts to contribute to Wikipedia. They probably shouldn't. Instead, they should do what experts do best, and Wikipedia should do what encyclopedias do best: to wit, experts should conduct research to generate new primary sources or write books to generate new secondary sources, and Wikipedia should continue finding secondary sources to summarize.
- phren0logy 15y ago
  That seems like a real shame, and an unnecessary repetition of work. Surely there's some way to verify expertise and provide expert commentary with supporting links to primary sources, even if it doesn't mean editing the entry directly? Perhaps a side-bar? I'm sure this would lead to arguments about how to verify expertise, but even if it only started with unimpeachable credentials that would seem like a start. Tell me very clearly who is providing the commentary, and I can decide myself if it's credible. I feel like I'm rambling a bit, but really this seems like a wasted opportunity. Why recreate Wikipedia from whole cloth when it already has so much? I suppose that given the way it's licensed, you could always fork it...

scott_s 15y ago

Looking at the Talk page itself (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Haymarket_affair&diff=prev&oldid=265741836 http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Haymarket_aff..., at the bottom, thanks zqfm), it was not clear to me reading his Chronicle article that he did not cite the primary sources in Wikipedia. Rather, in Wikipedia, he cites his own blog post, and in that blog post, he cites primary sources. As ZeroGravitas points out, consider the case of a crank who links to his own blog as a source, and that blog post cites primary evidence. The Wikipedia editors now have a job that is identical to academic peer-review. I don't think that should be their job.

angersock 15y ago
The Wikipedia editors now have a job that is identical to academic peer-review. I don't think that should be their job. Then why have editors? God forbid that, if you take on the mantle of vetting articles, you actually exert some intellectual effort.
- scott_s 15y ago
  Because now Wikipedia editors are required to have the same expertise in each subject as academics who spend their careers in those subjects. I submit that model is clearly not sustainable, and quite different from not expecting them to expend intellectual effort. Wikipedia is not a place for original research for exactly this reason. Once something has gone through peer review, and is published somewhere, then it can be used in Wikipedia. I think that's reasonable. Wikipedia editors are then relying on a particular subject's community of experts instead of having to be those experts themselves. I think it's also important to note that this model is the same as any other encyclopedia.
  - angersock 15y ago
    Wikipedia would seem like a great place for original research, right? It's trivial to get people to check over claims, and you have a place to discuss issues (Talk pages), and the person doing the research can cite their references right there and get called out on it if they don't.

joelmichael 15y ago

Looks like Wikipedia has been corrected as a result of this article. Well done to the author, and shame on those who try to distort the truth.

voyou 15y ago
And well done to the Wikipedia editors, who didn't include the updated information in the article until it had gone through the academic publishing process and so been vetted by experts in the field.

tptacek 15y ago

Worth noting: the Haymarket Riot article on Wikipedia is a designated "Good Article". "GA" is a big deal. It's been on the front page of the site. Among other things, that implies that there are people specifically watching that article; changes to it can reasonably expect more scrutiny.

roc 15y ago
Indeed it's very hard to get worked up over the author's intended issue ("undue weight", minority truth vs majority falsehood) without seeing the actual edits in context. If the author was essentially trying to unwrite the popular account, rather than supplementing it with a well-sourced minority view, the wiki editors actions become far more understandable. Also, if he were throwing his credentials around as a substitute for clear and concise citation, the wiki editors' actions, again, become more understandable.
ErrantX 15y ago
You're thinking of "Featured Article" - those get onto the front page. It is a bit of an odd process but, basically, "Good Article" consists of a semi-formal review of the article by an uninvolved editor to assess it for neutrality, completeness and language (etc.). "Featured Article" is a more involved formal review involving multiple editors. It's those that get then picked for appearance on the main page. The intended progression for an article is supposed to be something like: Peer Review, Good Article review, Featured Article review.
- tptacek 15y ago
  I know about GA & FA, and that FA is a bigger deal. I disagree that GA isn't a big deal, having watched people try to GA good-looking articles and fail. I should have been clearer: this article was on the front page repeatedly, but not necessarily because it was a GA.
  - ErrantX 15y ago
    Ah, sorry, I misread your comment :) (Agreed over GA, wasn't intended to belittle it!)

snorkel 15y ago

Instead of fighting over the semantics of a single sentence why not instead elaborate on the evidence presented by the prosecution, then later discuss if the semantics of that summary sentence contradict the other information in the same article?

morpher 15y ago

One of the editors gave a form in which the newer research could be presented that was in compliance with their policy (the green sky blue sky example). Why didn't the author make an edit of his form? Something like: "Although most historians agree that little evidence was presented... newer research suggests..." It would get the new point across while keeping the prior, possibly fallacious, but accepted viewpoint visible.

username3 15y ago

Ask HN: Is anyone working on this problem? any startups?

sp332 15y ago
Citizendium was supposed to recruit experts to write articles, it's basically dead. http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/10/five-year-old-wikipedia-fork-is-dead-in-the-water.ars http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/10/five-year-ol... Google's Knol would have avoided a bunch of procedural mess, but it's been shuttered. http://techcrunch.com/2008/07/23/googles-knol-the-monetizable-wikipedia/ http://techcrunch.com/2008/07/23/googles-knol-the-monetizabl...
- tokenadult 15y ago
  Thanks for mentioning that Knol has been shuttered. The TechCrunch link you kindly shared announces the launch of Knol, but I found the link http://techcrunch.com/2011/11/22/google-announces-plans-to-shutter-knol-friend-connect-and-more/ http://techcrunch.com/2011/11/22/google-announces-plans-to-s... that mentions Google abandoning Knol.

mwexler 15y ago

I can imagine this back in the day. "Though almost every scholar agrees that the earth (though flat) is the center of the universe, some people do persist in saying that the earth is not only in orbit around the sun, but is also round. Most of these minority claims rely on "mathematics" and other potentially incorrect "proofs" of their theorems." I am reminded of the "paradigm shift" approach to the history of science, as flawed as it may be to some (look it up, sigh, on wikipedia). It implies that the dominant point of view is held as fact until a preponderance of evidence shifts the minority view from "flawed" to "edge cases" to "the new paradigm". Then it cycles again. What was the sworn truth with history behind it is now the "old paradigm" and disregarded. For wikipedia, I've never felt there to be a requirement for "article completeness", just an eye to be "well rounded", and so it often feels that whatever the dominant paradigm is currently will be the primary driver of inclusion and presence in an article. Wikipedia is in that interesting tension between sticking to it's original mission, which was pretty wonderful, and potentially becoming more, but at the risk of becoming useless. For all it's flaws, I still think the world is better with it than without it, and at some point, I suspect a way to let folks contribute more original research and have it coexist on wikipedia will evolve.

DarkShikari 15y ago

This is exactly how Wikipedia is supposed to work. If you come up with a new theory that disagrees with scholarly/scientific consensus, an encyclopedia is not the place to publish it. You publish it in a journal; if it becomes a consensus, or at least generates significant serious response in that community, then it will be documented in an encyclopedia. If every single crank theory was accepted into Wikipedia, you'd have a wiki consisting entirely of holocaust denialism, homeopathy, Electric Universe, and woo-peddling. Wikipedia is not in the business of deciding what's true and what isn't; that's what the academic community is for.

TwoBit 15y ago
I mostly agree. This writer went about it the wrong way. Just because this author had personally determined that history books were wrong doesn't give him the right to unilaterally change Wikipedia. He needs to gather academic weight on his side. If he's correct then it should be fairly easy to accomplish. Of course the Wikipedia admins were buttheads and weren't constructive at all.
- mistercow 15y ago
  >He needs to gather academic weight on his side. If he's correct then it should be fairly easy to accomplish. Well, not necessarily. Unfortunately consensus is hard to change, even if it's wrong. But you still have to try. If everyone who thought the consensus was wrong edited Wikipedia to reflect their opinion, the result would be a less accurate encyclopedia.
moldbug 15y ago
Is there a specific reason you assume the academic community is doing a good job at this? Consider the case in point. The myth the Chronicle author was refuting was a political myth: that the Haymarket defendants were innocent men railroaded by a biased prosecutor who was not "credible." This myth had been repeated by generations of pro-labor historians with a big ol' axe to grind. As for the anti-labor historians? Oh wait, there aren't any anti-labor historians. At least, if by "historian" you mean "individual funded by the US Government to teach history." Thus, Wikipedia is simply recording in its pages the depressing result of a political power struggle in academia. Now that labor has become the establishment, an honest historian who is not pro or anti labor, just interested in the past, can discover from primary sources that gee whiz, the prosecution actually had a case. It's 2012 so he won't be purged for this. On the other hand, it's not clear how he's supposed to purge all his axe-grinding colleagues who continue insisting that the sky is green. Academia is just a thing called "academia." Science is just a thing called "science." The Soviet Union had both. Ours are better than the Soviet Union's, but they're still de facto government agencies. Jeebus didn't come down yesterday and make our government systematically infallible. Imagine Wikipedia in the Soviet Union. Would you want it to be a crowdsourced version of the Great Soviet Encylopedia? Or would you want it to do a little better? Wikipedia has done a great job of being a tertiary source, mostly. That doesn't mean it can't have higher ambitions for the future. When I stop being a child, I put aside childish things. It's childish to assume that "reliable sources" are reliable just because everyone says they are. Is Wikipedia all grown up now? If so, maybe it should at least think about starting to address its utterly circular definition of a reliable source. If there is no conceivable mechanism to distinguish between homeopathy and medicine, how do our existing mechanisms work? Are these mechanisms unique? Are they perfect? Can they be duplicated, improved, advanced?

beefman 15y ago

I'm amazed at the general support among comments here so far for the 'tertiary source' argument. Encyclopedias have always been written by experts -- usually one expert per article. Wikipedia itself has a template, 'This article is in need of input from an expert on the subject'. But this isn't even right, because Wikipedia is a not an encyclopedia. It's like Johnson & Johnson saying Q-tips are for applying makeup or detailing cars and shouldn't be put in the ear. 99% of people who buy Q-tips put them in their ears. 99% of true claims on Wikipedia are contributed by experts and are either unreferenced, cite a source that doesn't really support them, a source at the other end of a broken link that nobody's read, or a source that doesn't meet the guidelines this historian was held to. Career editors spend more time checking for citations than checking citations. And they spend more time checking for citations when they personally don't believe a claim. The policies are applied hypocritically, with the result that opinions of non-experts outweigh the opinions of experts. The only thing limiting the damage has been the relatively small number of career editors. With massive decline in casual participation in recent years, this balance is starting to shift. I just noticed recently that career editors have started to tag mathematics articles. We should be honest that the encyclopedia contrivance is really just a way to avoid flame wars, and is an imperfect one, especially when editors 'merge with their cover story' and blindly enforce it. Wikipedia will be its best when it is recognized for what it is: a truth engine, a first source, and a very important public good. Editing Wikipedia needs to be about more than writing long policy documents and bludgeoning contributors with them. It is an important form of scholarship. The project could benefit greatly by a reputation model more subtle than "barnstars", such as [1]. But a fancy reputation model alone isn't enough. The culture of Wikipedia is in trouble and needs to be revitalized. [1] http://www2007.org/papers/paper692.pdf http://www2007.org/papers/paper692.pdf

derleth 15y ago
> a truth engine I don't know what that is, but I think if it ever existed it would be in the service of something foul and malign. Humans have facts. Humans have evidence. Humans even, in mathematics alone, have proofs. Humans do not have truth. Woe betide anyone who thinks we do.

niels_olson 15y ago

Start pulling the string on this, and it looks like there's a potentially borderline admin, Gwen Gale,(1-3) at the heart of this, and the Chronicle article is just what boiled over into the slightly more real world of academia. It appears the bureaucrats at the Foundation have take notice.(4) I'm a little disappointed they haven't caught onto the involvement of the admin in question, and especially by Tim Starling's somewhat euphemistic allusion to the problem as "inertia". This "inertia" is nicely described by the histogram of new admins. Those who seized power in the middle of the last decade are running with it. (5) (1) http://gwen-gale-heidi-wyss-tinpot-auteur.blogspot.com/ http://gwen-gale-heidi-wyss-tinpot-auteur.blogspot.com/ (2) http://english.sxu.edu/sites/kirstein/archives/1443 http://english.sxu.edu/sites/kirstein/archives/1443 (3) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Gwen_Gale http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Gwen_Gale (4) http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/wiki/foundation/271257 http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/wiki/foundation/271257 (5) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Successful_requests_for_adminship http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Successful_requests_f...

scott_s 15y ago
I really want to avoid falling down this rabbit hole, but sources 1 and 2 pinged my crackpot-detector. That doesn't mean they necessarily are, but I am not willing to accept the notion, at face value, that Gwen Gale is the problem.
- niels_olson 15y ago
  You're right. I should have just linked to the google search. https://www.google.com/search?q=gwen+gale https://www.google.com/search?q=gwen+gale

arguesalot 15y ago

Many of you may know Scholarpedia (http://www.scholarpedia.org/ http://www.scholarpedia.org/) in which articles are primarily written by an expert. Unfortunately that leads to many articles being incomplete, biased , slow to update or simply non existent because the invited author does not have the time to compile an encyclopedia entry for free.

lucb1e 15y ago

Similar experiences here. In one case I even got corrected by a bot... I don't know if all the millions Wikipedia slurps up from their donations go to AI research, but I actually think the bot was wrong.

2muchcoffeeman 15y ago

John Siracusa was complaining about the same thing recently. He also argues that it is possible to create a wiki where truth is more important than verifiability. Hypercritical #53: Brad Pitt Gets to Contribute http://5by5.tv/hypercritical/53 http://5by5.tv/hypercritical/53

smsm42 15y ago

I have adopted the following policy about Wikipedia, and I think it reflects current state of affairs: 1. It is a decent repository for bare facts that can be easily verified elsewhere, but assembled there in convenient form. E.g. if you need to know the population of Nepal, Wikipedia article about Nepal is a good way to go, even though multiple other sources are available. 2. It is a decent source of links for more complex material - e.g., if you want to get a quick idea about what suprematism is, without knowing anything about it, and how to start researching the topic, you can use Wikipedia article, extract such keywords as "visual art", "Malevich", "russian avant-garde", etc. and take it from there if you're interested. 3. It is a somewhat useful, but a dangerous source about any concepts that are in any way controversial - you should verify all claims and read all links, but you can use it as an assembly of links and keywords, without assigning too much importance to any narrative. 4. It is absolutely useless for understanding any seriously controversial topic, as at best controversial articles would selectively present facts, reflecting biases of the writers, at worst - explicitly promote specific approach to the topic, which will be ruthlessly enforced by either the mob of opinionated editors or the wiki bureaucracy masterfully exploited by biased insiders. To the defense of Wikipedia, some mainstream encyclopedic sources, especially ones published in non-free countries, suffer from even worse bias problems. I don't think there's a solution for this, except using one's own mind and take everything told to you with a grain of salt and check it when possible. Obviously, the topic described in the article falls into the third or fourth category, and so expecting Wikipedia to have anything but bare facts (like dates when it happened, names of the participants, etc.) right would be a bet, and not a safe one. In most cases it'd be whatever the random Wikipedia "guardian" or anonymous mob of agenda-bearers wants it to be. Sometimes the experts make the fuss that hits some popular media and particular article gets better, but most would give up and decide not to waste their time.

jrockway 15y ago

Yes. Wikipedia is not for original research. Do the research, publish it, and then update Wikipedia.

pkamb 15y ago

Academics vs. Wikipedia Grammaticians: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Fitts%27s_law#Grammar_edit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Fitts%27s_law#Grammar_edit

known 15y ago

"The truth is more important than the facts." --Frank Lloyd Wright. But unfortunately for Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Consensus http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Consensus is more important than facts/truth.