3 ms·

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

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?
- keiferski 3y ago
  It doesn't need to be Britannica specifically, just any encyclopedia that isn't subject to the demands of the present. Wikipedia is modified constantly because it's politically relevant on a day-to-day basis. Older books aren't necessarily always more objective, but they tend to have different viewpoints – and being made of paper, the text can't be changed when politically expedient. So if possible, I always recommend people read as wide a selection of information as possible, and maybe my initial suggestion of a specific paper encyclopedia was not actually the best one, and a varied selection of different ones from different eras would actually be better. My basic point is just that Wikipedia is very biased on certain topics and thus treating it as a sacred, complete repository of knowledge to read is not a good idea.
  - solardev 3y ago
    No disagreement there! If I find a topic interesting enough, I'll start with Wikipedia and then usually buy or borrow some books on the topic for detailed study. On more than one occasion, I've then returned to Wikipedia to update it with information from those books. But yeah, definitely it shouldn't be the sole source people use.

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?

keiferski 3y ago
It doesn't need to be Britannica specifically, just any encyclopedia that isn't subject to the demands of the present. Wikipedia is modified constantly because it's politically relevant on a day-to-day basis. Older books aren't necessarily always more objective, but they tend to have different viewpoints – and being made of paper, the text can't be changed when politically expedient. So if possible, I always recommend people read as wide a selection of information as possible, and maybe my initial suggestion of a specific paper encyclopedia was not actually the best one, and a varied selection of different ones from different eras would actually be better. My basic point is just that Wikipedia is very biased on certain topics and thus treating it as a sacred, complete repository of knowledge to read is not a good idea.
- solardev 3y ago
  No disagreement there! If I find a topic interesting enough, I'll start with Wikipedia and then usually buy or borrow some books on the topic for detailed study. On more than one occasion, I've then returned to Wikipedia to update it with information from those books. But yeah, definitely it shouldn't be the sole source people use.