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The English Wikipedia might (or might not) have achieved this but certainly the Croatian and Polish were caught to be heavily influenced by right wing extremist
by _ugfj 3y ago
The English Wikipedia might (or might not) have achieved this but certainly the Croatian and Polish were caught to be heavily influenced by right wing extremists, the Hungarian was not yet because no one gives a damn.
But my recipe of adding anything to Wikipedia still stands, I adopted it from an article added by Hungarian nationalists: while you must source things, the quality of the source is not checked. So take an obscure book, obviously not in English and claim your fact comes from it. No one will try to dig up a small run German book decades or even hundreds of years old to verify. Or will be able to.
The thing is, the people Wikipedia successfully did drive out are actual experts -- or rather they never came. The no credentials are accepted policy makes sure the experts stay away in droves. Imagine someone putting in decades of work to gain expertise in a field being told they need to argue with a neckbeard with too much time on their hands. No thanks.
- The_Colonel 3y ago> while you must source things, the quality of the source is not checked. So take an obscure book, obviously not in English and claim your fact comes from it Agreed, this is a problem esp. on smaller Wikipedias. > The no credentials are accepted policy makes sure the experts stay away in droves. Perhaps partially true, but without this policy there would be basically no Wikipedia. There are projects requiring credentials like Citizendium where experts don't have to fear being bothered by neckbeards, but they're basically dead.
- chx 3y agoYou need to apply this sensibly: if a subject matter expect challenges a source that needs to carry more weight than a rando dragging any random crap into wikipedia. Have a process etc. I am not asking for experts to be given free reign -- what they add should be sourced etc but they need to be able to apply checks.
- The_Colonel 3y agoI worked on one of the non-english Wikipedias for a couple of years, and it kinda worked like that. There were subject-matter experts (often people who had their own Wikipedia pages for their scientific work) and their opinions carried (informally) higher weight than those of randos. Wikipedia isn't completely anonymous in the sense that people contributing to a similar area know each other (not personally) and will often defer to a person with clearly higher qualifications. That doesn't mean the system is perfect and there are cases where it doesn't work out well. But it's not really true that on Wikipedia, an opinion of a rando is taken as equal of an established authority in the field.
- concinds 3y ago> The no credentials are accepted policy makes sure the experts stay away in droves. Imagine someone putting in decades of work to gain expertise in a field being told they need to argue with a neckbeard with too much time on their hands. No thanks. It's the unalterable division of labor. Scientists are experts, science journalists are clueless. You'll never get the first group to take up the job of the second group because they have way better, more interesting, more important things to do. Same with Wikipedia, even if experts were sought out, they wouldn't want to edit it.
- jowea 3y agoHow do you explain Stanford's Encyclopedia of Philosophy then? You'd only need a small fraction of the experts in any topic to write an article on the topic.
- Alpha3031 3y agoThe Conversation (the news outlet) also shows that scientists are interested in informing the public of their work. Communication is something of a different area of expertise to actually doing science though.