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What does "cite?" mean? Citation, as in you want a citation for this? Wikipedia is a community-operated website that is directly manipulated by people that hav

What does "cite?" mean? Citation, as in you want a citation for this? Wikipedia is a community-operated website that is directly manipulated by people that have real-world incentives for doing so. It's not inaccurate, per se, but commits a lot of "censorship by omission." Britannica or another academic encyclopedia is written by professional academics that specialize in their field. It's honestly a bit scary to me that people think Wikipedia is the be all and end all for information on a subject. There is a lot of information out there that isn't remotely mentioned on Wikipedia.

solardev 3y ago
Sorry, it's just a shorthand (often used on Wikipedia and online forums) for requesting a citation from some respected source that backs up a claim. A lot of studies have been done comparing Wikipedia to other encyclopedias, and it doesn't seem to me like it's broadly worse or better, but often comparable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliability_of_Wikipedia#%3A%7E%3Atext%3DThe_articles_were_compared_for%2Cthe_Britannica_articles_contained_3.?wprov=sfla1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliability_of_Wikipedia#%3A%7... If you have a source suggesting otherwise, could you please share it? If it's just your opinion or anecdotal experience, that's perfectly fine too. I was just curious, as someone who thought this debate was long settled (but apparently not!) ------- Edit: You edited your comment as I was posting. To address your second point about bias and omission, yes, absolutely that happens there. I've had that happen to my own edits there too, when some power hungry admin refused to allow an edit about a topic because it contradicted their personal political views. But I'd still sooner trust a real time encyclopedia that by and large anyone can edit than one maintained by a tiny group of people from the same cultural background. Wikipedia is a good starting place for learning about a topic from different perspectives. It's not the final stop, just the start. Its references are often good next steps. I honestly didn't realize Britannica was still around, but if there's some objective measure of its quality vs Wikipedia that suggests it's worth it, I'd love to see it.
- keiferski 3y ago
  My source is picking up a physical encyclopedia and realizing that it's far less biased and far more comprehensive than Wikipedia. And the experience of knowing much about a topic and reading a Wikipedia article that's obviously biased and written from a particular contemporary 21st century viewpoint. Wikipedia's obsession with "respected sources" is a part of its problem. Instead of evaluating claims independently, it offloads that responsibility to organizations that are known to have made mistakes. This is basic epistemological problem and one that Wikipedia doesn't seem to care about solving. It's honestly laughable to me that people can look at this list and call some of these reliable sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources Beyond that, I have never seen any of these studies explicitly analyze omission as the key differentiator. As I said above, this is really the fundamental problem with Wikipedia. It doesn't aim to be comprehensive and cover all potential aspects and opinions on an issue, it aims to push a certain worldview and dismiss or ignore other ones. This is perhaps not surprising, as every source of information is going to be biased, but I have to push back on the frequent insistence that Wikipedia is somehow neutral or beyond these criticisms.
  - solardev 3y ago
    I rather like the model of "encyclopedia as a collection of viewpoints" rather than "arbiter of truthiness", personally. Wikipedia tries (though sometimes fails) to show the controversies in a field. Many of the studies in that list explicitly mention omissions, actually. Nobody claims that Wikipedia is without bias or perfectly comprehensive, just that on average it doesn't seem to be much better or worse than Britannica and similar. That's been my personal experience too, as someone who grew up with Britannica, World Book, Encarta, and later Wikipedia. Britannica was written in heavier prose, but I don't remember any of them to be especially better than any other, except that Wikipedia had a lot more coverage of topics that would've never made it into a print encyclopedia. But anyway, I understand your point, even if I haven't experienced it myself. I thought they stopped publishing Britannica. If it's still around, I'll have to check out a copy the next time I'm in a library (while those themselves still exist, lol). ---- Edit: It looks like the print version stopped in 2010, 14 years ago? A lot has changed since then. They still have an online version though. Is that what you're referring to, or do you think even the 14 year old print version is better than Wikipedia?

solardev 3y ago

Sorry, it's just a shorthand (often used on Wikipedia and online forums) for requesting a citation from some respected source that backs up a claim. A lot of studies have been done comparing Wikipedia to other encyclopedias, and it doesn't seem to me like it's broadly worse or better, but often comparable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliability_of_Wikipedia#%3A%7E%3Atext%3DThe_articles_were_compared_for%2Cthe_Britannica_articles_contained_3.?wprov=sfla1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliability_of_Wikipedia#%3A%7... If you have a source suggesting otherwise, could you please share it? If it's just your opinion or anecdotal experience, that's perfectly fine too. I was just curious, as someone who thought this debate was long settled (but apparently not!) ------- Edit: You edited your comment as I was posting. To address your second point about bias and omission, yes, absolutely that happens there. I've had that happen to my own edits there too, when some power hungry admin refused to allow an edit about a topic because it contradicted their personal political views. But I'd still sooner trust a real time encyclopedia that by and large anyone can edit than one maintained by a tiny group of people from the same cultural background. Wikipedia is a good starting place for learning about a topic from different perspectives. It's not the final stop, just the start. Its references are often good next steps. I honestly didn't realize Britannica was still around, but if there's some objective measure of its quality vs Wikipedia that suggests it's worth it, I'd love to see it.

keiferski 3y ago
My source is picking up a physical encyclopedia and realizing that it's far less biased and far more comprehensive than Wikipedia. And the experience of knowing much about a topic and reading a Wikipedia article that's obviously biased and written from a particular contemporary 21st century viewpoint. Wikipedia's obsession with "respected sources" is a part of its problem. Instead of evaluating claims independently, it offloads that responsibility to organizations that are known to have made mistakes. This is basic epistemological problem and one that Wikipedia doesn't seem to care about solving. It's honestly laughable to me that people can look at this list and call some of these reliable sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources Beyond that, I have never seen any of these studies explicitly analyze omission as the key differentiator. As I said above, this is really the fundamental problem with Wikipedia. It doesn't aim to be comprehensive and cover all potential aspects and opinions on an issue, it aims to push a certain worldview and dismiss or ignore other ones. This is perhaps not surprising, as every source of information is going to be biased, but I have to push back on the frequent insistence that Wikipedia is somehow neutral or beyond these criticisms.
- solardev 3y ago
  I rather like the model of "encyclopedia as a collection of viewpoints" rather than "arbiter of truthiness", personally. Wikipedia tries (though sometimes fails) to show the controversies in a field. Many of the studies in that list explicitly mention omissions, actually. Nobody claims that Wikipedia is without bias or perfectly comprehensive, just that on average it doesn't seem to be much better or worse than Britannica and similar. That's been my personal experience too, as someone who grew up with Britannica, World Book, Encarta, and later Wikipedia. Britannica was written in heavier prose, but I don't remember any of them to be especially better than any other, except that Wikipedia had a lot more coverage of topics that would've never made it into a print encyclopedia. But anyway, I understand your point, even if I haven't experienced it myself. I thought they stopped publishing Britannica. If it's still around, I'll have to check out a copy the next time I'm in a library (while those themselves still exist, lol). ---- Edit: It looks like the print version stopped in 2010, 14 years ago? A lot has changed since then. They still have an online version though. Is that what you're referring to, or do you think even the 14 year old print version is better than Wikipedia?