7 ms·

The question is why anyone relies on Wikipedia. As the first draft of history in many cases, and the only draft for vast portion of the public that relies on it

The question is why anyone relies on Wikipedia. As the first draft of history in many cases, and the only draft for vast portion of the public that relies on it, it's an obvious target for propaganda (both organized and ad hoc). Anyone who has tried to edit a page that's politically contentious, or that anyone cares about, knows that what's written depends almost completely on who has the most time and patience. It's an easy, obvious means of manipulation by those who have the resources to do it.

michaelchisari 12y ago
The question is why anyone relies on Wikipedia. Because it's an incredible resource. It's unfortunate that there isn't an embrace of it in schools so that we can teach kids from an early age how to use it properly. For instance, don't use it as a primary source. Evaluate the "talk" pages and history. Consider the controversiality of the subject.
Crito 12y ago
Other convenient sources of information are typically no less riddled with propaganda. If you had no idea who Eric Garner was, where else would you begin your investigation? That's a serious question; if there is a better alternative I'd like to know about it.
- hackuser 12y ago
  > Other convenient sources of information are typically no less riddled with propaganda Which sources are you talking about?
  - Crito 12y ago
    Cable news? Any online news/link aggregator. Newspapers. Newspapers may have an edge up, but are less convenient than wikipedia. They are also pretty bad at providing concise overviews for somebody who hasn't been following the story since the beginning. This is particularly true when you're looking something up months or years after it happened. For certain issues (and probably this particular one, to be fair) newspapers like the New York Times will often have a webpage dedicated to giving an overview of the entire series of events, but that only gets done in a select few cases. Wikipedia is certainly flawed, but what do you suggest I use instead? Unless you have some actual suggestions, then your complaint isn't really useful. I already know that wikipedia is flawed.
    - hackuser 12y ago
      IMO, most of the serious professional media (i.e., publications like the NY Times; I'm not sure cable news qualifies) is far more reliable than Wikipedia. If someone from the NYPD secretly edited a NY Times article, it would be a shock. At Wikipedia, it's a dog bites man story, with similar things happening every hour of every day. > They are also pretty bad at providing concise overviews for somebody who hasn't been following the story since the beginning I strongly agree and would go further: The Times pages you cite are inadequate to the task. They are stuck in the print media past. They should be updating their own public knowledge base; I think it would generate quite a bit of traffic on its own, and they could link to it from each relevant article to provide context (and save a few redundant paragraphs of writing in each story). Also, the way many reporters write, unaware of key developments, history, or issues, they could use it internally. I'd much rather read the Washington Post's knowledge base page on ISIS than Wikipedia's, for example. > what do you suggest I use instead? Unless you have some actual suggestions, then your complaint isn't really useful. I already know that wikipedia is flawed. It may be so flawed as to be useless, at least for any situation where accurate information is valuable to you. A lack of accurate information does not make false information a useful alternative. I do think Wikipedia is good for the links and references. By the way, for everything but current events and pop culture, Encyclopedia Britannica is excellent. Concise, authored by actual experts, and usually well-written. "In matters of science the authority of thousands is not worth the humble reasoning of one single person." - Galileo (maybe apocryphal)
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
untog 12y ago
The question is why anyone relies on Wikipedia. What would you suggest as an alternative?
- leephillips 12y ago
  Writings of domain experts who are not anonymous. Newspapers with good reputations.
  - untog 12y ago
    In the case of this example, where would I go to get an overview of the Eric Garner case? Newspapers tend to report day to day news, not give overviews. How do I know who is a domain expert? How do I verify that?
    - sparkzilla 12y ago
      Although we don't have many posts about Garner, my site, Newslines, attempts to build up a news archive about people, companies and news events that is free from the many biases that cause trouble in Wikipedia. http://newslines.org/eric-garner/ http://newslines.org/eric-garner/
  - kenjackson 12y ago
    It's hard to find domain experts and newspapers that print about the sheer amount of content that is in Wikipedia. For example, this article on display resolutions. Are there many domain experts who keep a page regularly updated or newspapers that write up to date articles on it? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_display_resolution http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_display_resolution
  - dragonwriter 12y ago
    > Writings of domain experts who are not anonymous. Newspapers with good reputations. Those are good secondary sources. Tertiary sources like Wikipedia aggregate information from and references to secondary sources. They aren't really substitutes for each other, in either direction.
leephillips 12y ago
It's obviously folly to rely on the text of Wikipedia entries, which, aside from being liable to contain any arbitrary content at any time that you happen to read them, are hotbeds of plagiarism. But it's an excellent source of references and a convenient repository of public domain or CC images. Also, articles on technical subjects tend to be useful, aside from the plagiarism problem.
- hackuser 12y ago
  > articles on technical subjects tend to be useful, aside from the plagiarism problem Except when they contain serious errors and omissions, and which articles are those? Nobody knows, except someone already expert in that area. For example, I would have no idea there were problems in these mathematics articles: http://wikipediocracy.com/2013/10/20/elementary-mathematics-on-wikipedia-2/ http://wikipediocracy.com/2013/10/20/elementary-mathematics-...
frostmatthew 12y ago
> The question is why anyone relies on Wikipedia There have been numerous studies[1][2][3][4][5][6] which have consistently shown Wikipedia as a reliable source of information. Nobody is suggesting it's 100% accurate, but it's accurate enough that it shouldn't be dismissed as unreliable. [1] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4530930.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4530930.stm [2] http://chnm.gmu.edu/essays-on-history-new-media/essays/?essayid=42 http://chnm.gmu.edu/essays-on-history-new-media/essays/?essa... [3] http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0106930 http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.... [4] http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=978177 http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=978177 [5] http://www.pcauthority.com.au/Feature/93908,wikipedia-uncovered.aspx/6 http://www.pcauthority.com.au/Feature/93908,wikipedia-uncove... [6] http://www.techradar.com/news/internet/web/wikipedia-vs-encyclopaedia-a-question-of-trust-316163 http://www.techradar.com/news/internet/web/wikipedia-vs-ency...
- hackuser 12y ago
  > it's accurate enough that it shouldn't be dismissed as unreliable Which articles, or which statements in which articles, are reliable and which are unreliable? Which have false statements and which significant ommissions? The problems is, you don't know which articles or statements you can depend on unless you have expertise in that area.
  - splawn 12y ago
    "The problems is, you don't know which articles or statements you can depend on unless you have expertise in that area." How is that not true of most sources? EDIT:s/any/most/
    - hackuser 12y ago
      >> "The problems is, you don't know which articles or statements you can depend on unless you have expertise in that area." > How is that not true of most sources? I'm not sure how to take your statement. It clearly is not true of many sources. Some sources have proven expertise (something Wikipedia effectively never has), some have a proven track record of reliability. Reliability isn't binary, either 100% or nothing (or random). Analogously, all people lie to some degree but clearly some I trust and some I do not.
vezzy-fnord 12y ago
Wikipedia itself isn't bad. The issue is that as a result of its structure and Wikimedia's various overlapping efforts, a lot of people simply don't recall that encyclopedias aren't meant to be a universal resource for detailed research (but rather introductory), and worse they don't tend to follow references or citations. Resources for obtaining special-purpose knowledge have just about been washed up in favor of skimming Wikipedia's generalities, which may foster incomplete or incorrect understanding of complex topics, in turn leading to memes that people regurgitate in other contexts. In this way Wikipedia has the potential of becoming Minitrue. I've pondered on the implications of systemically planting subtle factual distortions in tens of thousands of articles over periods of time, but since you hear about some edit war or pompous bureaucrat imposing their agenda every other day, it might already be happening in a less dramatic fashion.
- sparkzilla 12y ago
  One of the major problems that is that Wikipedia is not just an encyclopedia, but is also used as a news archive. These two different products have different audiences and should have different features. For example, an encyclopedia usually is a fact-checked summary of events, whereas a news archive is a stream of all news events, that doesn't require factchecking. Much of the complaints above arise from powerful groups in Wikipedia trying to control the fact-checking aspect of the site, when all most people need is the news archive part. My site, Newslines, is an attempt to build a new archive without Wikipedia's biases. You may be interested in this analysis: http://newslines.org/blog/wikipedias-13-deadly-sins/ http://newslines.org/blog/wikipedias-13-deadly-sins/
bcg1 12y ago
I think that's the point though... Wikipedia at least attempts to solve the byzantine general problem by allowing anyone to edit/review articles... I doubt the same could be said for Encyclopedia Britannica (which I suspect had more than just a little pro-British propaganda in it when it was published). At least with Wikipedia there is some transparency into the editorial process. By the way, get your shit together NYPD. Use a VPN next time you fascist dinosaurs.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- hackuser 12y ago
  > Encyclopedia Britannica (which I suspect had more than just a little pro-British propaganda when it was published). I don't see any basis in your statement in your post or in reality. AFAIK Britannica has been owned by Americans for over a century. It's propagandists include Albert Einstein, Henry Ford, Lord Kelvin, T.E. Lawrence, Douglas McArthur, Bertrand Russell, Carl Sagan, etc. Would you rather read Einstein's article on Space-Time or the one by random members of the public?
  - bcg1 12y ago
    My apologies, sometimes I forget we all come from different backgrounds. But if you start by reading Cecil Rhodes' will and think through what that might mean, you might start to understand why I think it doesn't matter if it is an American company or not.
shawnhermans 12y ago
> Anyone who has tried to edit a page that's politically contentious, or that anyone cares about, knows that what's written depends almost completely on who has the most time and patience. [Citation Needed]
compbio 12y ago
I saw Wikipedia grow from a playful listing of facts and "did you know?"'s to what it is today. I came to rely on the Wikipedia facts and trust was very high. It took joining and partaking in the creation of a "politically contentious" article when I realized just how organized, blatant and scary these propaganda efforts are. You have it easier when you are a crackpot, than when you play by the rules and source all facts, because then you force them to earn their pay using more drastic measures. Yet, I can recommend this revelation to everyone. See also another scuffle which relates to these current wiki-astroturfing campaigns: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_of_Scientology_editing_on_Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_of_Scientology_editing_o... Also remember that Wikipedia is in a lot of countries. Some of those countries have governments and companies which are more blatant or forceful dealing with unpleasant information in the open than say, an American company. It is also easier for those editors to form cliques.
InclinedPlane 12y ago
The underlying assumption here is that there's some better source of truth. That, say, the news media or what-have-you are less prone to the same sorts of corruptions and errors. That belief is a myth based on our need to feel trust in those institutions, it has little basis in reality. The fact is that these sorts of issues are just as prevalent with the media, with the educational establishment, and so on, we just generally haven't been as cognizant of them.
- hackuser 12y ago
  > The fact is that these sorts of issues are just as prevalent with the media, with the educational establishment, and so on, we just generally haven't been as cognizant of them. What is the basis of this fact? Yes, there is bias everywhere, but it's not at all binary, 0 or 100% bias. Everyone has violence in them, but they won't all kill you.
  - InclinedPlane 12y ago
    Are you seriously asking me for proof that bias or corruption exists in the media? Are you honestly that naive or unsophisticated? I mean, is this good enough? http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/11/opinion/the-news-we-kept-to-ourselves.html http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/11/opinion/the-news-we-kept-t... The media is one of the faultiest institutions in history. It suffers from biases pulling it in every direction, not the least of which is the bias to protect "access", as the story I linked illustrates. Point being, the idea that it's easy to find sources of information which are more reliable than wikipedia mostly rests on a false idea of how faulty, biased, incomplete, and in some cases outright corrupt every other source of information tends to be.

michaelchisari 12y ago

The question is why anyone relies on Wikipedia. Because it's an incredible resource. It's unfortunate that there isn't an embrace of it in schools so that we can teach kids from an early age how to use it properly. For instance, don't use it as a primary source. Evaluate the "talk" pages and history. Consider the controversiality of the subject.

Crito 12y ago

Other convenient sources of information are typically no less riddled with propaganda. If you had no idea who Eric Garner was, where else would you begin your investigation? That's a serious question; if there is a better alternative I'd like to know about it.

hackuser 12y ago
> Other convenient sources of information are typically no less riddled with propaganda Which sources are you talking about?
- Crito 12y ago
  Cable news? Any online news/link aggregator. Newspapers. Newspapers may have an edge up, but are less convenient than wikipedia. They are also pretty bad at providing concise overviews for somebody who hasn't been following the story since the beginning. This is particularly true when you're looking something up months or years after it happened. For certain issues (and probably this particular one, to be fair) newspapers like the New York Times will often have a webpage dedicated to giving an overview of the entire series of events, but that only gets done in a select few cases. Wikipedia is certainly flawed, but what do you suggest I use instead? Unless you have some actual suggestions, then your complaint isn't really useful. I already know that wikipedia is flawed.
  - hackuser 12y ago
    IMO, most of the serious professional media (i.e., publications like the NY Times; I'm not sure cable news qualifies) is far more reliable than Wikipedia. If someone from the NYPD secretly edited a NY Times article, it would be a shock. At Wikipedia, it's a dog bites man story, with similar things happening every hour of every day. > They are also pretty bad at providing concise overviews for somebody who hasn't been following the story since the beginning I strongly agree and would go further: The Times pages you cite are inadequate to the task. They are stuck in the print media past. They should be updating their own public knowledge base; I think it would generate quite a bit of traffic on its own, and they could link to it from each relevant article to provide context (and save a few redundant paragraphs of writing in each story). Also, the way many reporters write, unaware of key developments, history, or issues, they could use it internally. I'd much rather read the Washington Post's knowledge base page on ISIS than Wikipedia's, for example. > what do you suggest I use instead? Unless you have some actual suggestions, then your complaint isn't really useful. I already know that wikipedia is flawed. It may be so flawed as to be useless, at least for any situation where accurate information is valuable to you. A lack of accurate information does not make false information a useful alternative. I do think Wikipedia is good for the links and references. By the way, for everything but current events and pop culture, Encyclopedia Britannica is excellent. Concise, authored by actual experts, and usually well-written. "In matters of science the authority of thousands is not worth the humble reasoning of one single person." - Galileo (maybe apocryphal)

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

untog 12y ago

The question is why anyone relies on Wikipedia. What would you suggest as an alternative?

leephillips 12y ago
Writings of domain experts who are not anonymous. Newspapers with good reputations.
- untog 12y ago
  In the case of this example, where would I go to get an overview of the Eric Garner case? Newspapers tend to report day to day news, not give overviews. How do I know who is a domain expert? How do I verify that?
  - sparkzilla 12y ago
    Although we don't have many posts about Garner, my site, Newslines, attempts to build up a news archive about people, companies and news events that is free from the many biases that cause trouble in Wikipedia. http://newslines.org/eric-garner/ http://newslines.org/eric-garner/
- kenjackson 12y ago
  It's hard to find domain experts and newspapers that print about the sheer amount of content that is in Wikipedia. For example, this article on display resolutions. Are there many domain experts who keep a page regularly updated or newspapers that write up to date articles on it? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_display_resolution http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_display_resolution
- dragonwriter 12y ago
  > Writings of domain experts who are not anonymous. Newspapers with good reputations. Those are good secondary sources. Tertiary sources like Wikipedia aggregate information from and references to secondary sources. They aren't really substitutes for each other, in either direction.

leephillips 12y ago

It's obviously folly to rely on the text of Wikipedia entries, which, aside from being liable to contain any arbitrary content at any time that you happen to read them, are hotbeds of plagiarism. But it's an excellent source of references and a convenient repository of public domain or CC images. Also, articles on technical subjects tend to be useful, aside from the plagiarism problem.

hackuser 12y ago
> articles on technical subjects tend to be useful, aside from the plagiarism problem Except when they contain serious errors and omissions, and which articles are those? Nobody knows, except someone already expert in that area. For example, I would have no idea there were problems in these mathematics articles: http://wikipediocracy.com/2013/10/20/elementary-mathematics-on-wikipedia-2/ http://wikipediocracy.com/2013/10/20/elementary-mathematics-...

frostmatthew 12y ago

> The question is why anyone relies on Wikipedia There have been numerous studies[1][2][3][4][5][6] which have consistently shown Wikipedia as a reliable source of information. Nobody is suggesting it's 100% accurate, but it's accurate enough that it shouldn't be dismissed as unreliable. [1] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4530930.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4530930.stm [2] http://chnm.gmu.edu/essays-on-history-new-media/essays/?essayid=42 http://chnm.gmu.edu/essays-on-history-new-media/essays/?essa... [3] http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0106930 http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.... [4] http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=978177 http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=978177 [5] http://www.pcauthority.com.au/Feature/93908,wikipedia-uncovered.aspx/6 http://www.pcauthority.com.au/Feature/93908,wikipedia-uncove... [6] http://www.techradar.com/news/internet/web/wikipedia-vs-encyclopaedia-a-question-of-trust-316163 http://www.techradar.com/news/internet/web/wikipedia-vs-ency...

hackuser 12y ago
> it's accurate enough that it shouldn't be dismissed as unreliable Which articles, or which statements in which articles, are reliable and which are unreliable? Which have false statements and which significant ommissions? The problems is, you don't know which articles or statements you can depend on unless you have expertise in that area.
- splawn 12y ago
  "The problems is, you don't know which articles or statements you can depend on unless you have expertise in that area." How is that not true of most sources? EDIT:s/any/most/
  - hackuser 12y ago
    >> "The problems is, you don't know which articles or statements you can depend on unless you have expertise in that area." > How is that not true of most sources? I'm not sure how to take your statement. It clearly is not true of many sources. Some sources have proven expertise (something Wikipedia effectively never has), some have a proven track record of reliability. Reliability isn't binary, either 100% or nothing (or random). Analogously, all people lie to some degree but clearly some I trust and some I do not.

vezzy-fnord 12y ago

Wikipedia itself isn't bad. The issue is that as a result of its structure and Wikimedia's various overlapping efforts, a lot of people simply don't recall that encyclopedias aren't meant to be a universal resource for detailed research (but rather introductory), and worse they don't tend to follow references or citations. Resources for obtaining special-purpose knowledge have just about been washed up in favor of skimming Wikipedia's generalities, which may foster incomplete or incorrect understanding of complex topics, in turn leading to memes that people regurgitate in other contexts. In this way Wikipedia has the potential of becoming Minitrue. I've pondered on the implications of systemically planting subtle factual distortions in tens of thousands of articles over periods of time, but since you hear about some edit war or pompous bureaucrat imposing their agenda every other day, it might already be happening in a less dramatic fashion.

sparkzilla 12y ago
One of the major problems that is that Wikipedia is not just an encyclopedia, but is also used as a news archive. These two different products have different audiences and should have different features. For example, an encyclopedia usually is a fact-checked summary of events, whereas a news archive is a stream of all news events, that doesn't require factchecking. Much of the complaints above arise from powerful groups in Wikipedia trying to control the fact-checking aspect of the site, when all most people need is the news archive part. My site, Newslines, is an attempt to build a new archive without Wikipedia's biases. You may be interested in this analysis: http://newslines.org/blog/wikipedias-13-deadly-sins/ http://newslines.org/blog/wikipedias-13-deadly-sins/

bcg1 12y ago

I think that's the point though... Wikipedia at least attempts to solve the byzantine general problem by allowing anyone to edit/review articles... I doubt the same could be said for Encyclopedia Britannica (which I suspect had more than just a little pro-British propaganda in it when it was published). At least with Wikipedia there is some transparency into the editorial process. By the way, get your shit together NYPD. Use a VPN next time you fascist dinosaurs.

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
hackuser 12y ago
> Encyclopedia Britannica (which I suspect had more than just a little pro-British propaganda when it was published). I don't see any basis in your statement in your post or in reality. AFAIK Britannica has been owned by Americans for over a century. It's propagandists include Albert Einstein, Henry Ford, Lord Kelvin, T.E. Lawrence, Douglas McArthur, Bertrand Russell, Carl Sagan, etc. Would you rather read Einstein's article on Space-Time or the one by random members of the public?
- bcg1 12y ago
  My apologies, sometimes I forget we all come from different backgrounds. But if you start by reading Cecil Rhodes' will and think through what that might mean, you might start to understand why I think it doesn't matter if it is an American company or not.

shawnhermans 12y ago

> Anyone who has tried to edit a page that's politically contentious, or that anyone cares about, knows that what's written depends almost completely on who has the most time and patience. [Citation Needed]

compbio 12y ago

I saw Wikipedia grow from a playful listing of facts and "did you know?"'s to what it is today. I came to rely on the Wikipedia facts and trust was very high. It took joining and partaking in the creation of a "politically contentious" article when I realized just how organized, blatant and scary these propaganda efforts are. You have it easier when you are a crackpot, than when you play by the rules and source all facts, because then you force them to earn their pay using more drastic measures. Yet, I can recommend this revelation to everyone. See also another scuffle which relates to these current wiki-astroturfing campaigns: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_of_Scientology_editing_on_Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_of_Scientology_editing_o... Also remember that Wikipedia is in a lot of countries. Some of those countries have governments and companies which are more blatant or forceful dealing with unpleasant information in the open than say, an American company. It is also easier for those editors to form cliques.

InclinedPlane 12y ago

The underlying assumption here is that there's some better source of truth. That, say, the news media or what-have-you are less prone to the same sorts of corruptions and errors. That belief is a myth based on our need to feel trust in those institutions, it has little basis in reality. The fact is that these sorts of issues are just as prevalent with the media, with the educational establishment, and so on, we just generally haven't been as cognizant of them.

hackuser 12y ago
> The fact is that these sorts of issues are just as prevalent with the media, with the educational establishment, and so on, we just generally haven't been as cognizant of them. What is the basis of this fact? Yes, there is bias everywhere, but it's not at all binary, 0 or 100% bias. Everyone has violence in them, but they won't all kill you.
- InclinedPlane 12y ago
  Are you seriously asking me for proof that bias or corruption exists in the media? Are you honestly that naive or unsophisticated? I mean, is this good enough? http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/11/opinion/the-news-we-kept-to-ourselves.html http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/11/opinion/the-news-we-kept-t... The media is one of the faultiest institutions in history. It suffers from biases pulling it in every direction, not the least of which is the bias to protect "access", as the story I linked illustrates. Point being, the idea that it's easy to find sources of information which are more reliable than wikipedia mostly rests on a false idea of how faulty, biased, incomplete, and in some cases outright corrupt every other source of information tends to be.