Wiki was getting popular when I was in college over 10 years ago. I recall a history professor telling me not to use Wikipedia as source. I am like, okay, I will just use the source wiki uses, which are pretty solid in my opinion. Wiki came a long way.
Yeah, it’s important to remember that wikipedia, itself, isn’t a source, it’s a summary of different sources. It’s a great resource to find sources and get an overview of a topic, though.
Wikipedia does a pretty decent job of eventually being correct, at any given time it can be outrageously inaccurate. Its good to not just use wikipedia entrys and use the sources that are linked there. By using the sources that are cited you are helping to keep wiki trustworthy and helps avoid you using bad information.
It works well to manage the integrity of wiki. I think being able to intuitively navigate between entries by a variety of metrics like edits that have remained unedited the longest/shorest, newest/oldest, etc would be a very good addition to wiki.
Some kind of webarchive of wiki sources would also be amazing so that if the sources disappear or change over time there is a connection to what it was at the time it originally/previously was used as a source on wiki.
And maybe some of this already exists and im just not very good at getting my 4dollars a month worth :P
As long as you verify the source still exists. There are so many dead links on Wikipedia.
Archive.org bots replace dead links with working alternatives a lot nowadays. All the more reason to support that modern museum
Please dig a little bit deeper. You may end up with a stack of links to 404 sites instead of actual sources. Just because you copied a citation from WP doesn’t mean the source actually exists, let alone contains the information you seek.
In that case, try using an archived version of the webpage, for example at the Wayback Machine
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Nah, you can’t. It’s still a great resource, but you always gotta read it critically.
The thing is that it is very easy to read Wikipedia critically, since it lists every single source they get info from at the bottom of the page.
And here I am fixing missing sources on some wiki articles just yesterday.
Someone has to do the job for everyone else can enjoy it.
Thank you very much for your service my friend.
Haha you’re welcome. I just wished that the original authors would be more careful about providing sources for claims or statements.
I feel like news sources used to link to their sources too, but now it seems to be an infinite chain of links to their own articles, never directly taking you to the first hand source of information (unless they are the source).
The thing is, if the place you’re getting your information from doesn’t list it’s sources, you can’t trust it. Whenever I’m researching a thing on the internet and I find an article or a paper, I don’t just stop there, I check where they got their info, then I find that source and read it. I follow it all the way back until I find the primary source.
Like the other day I was writing a paper about a particular court case. In the opinions, as in most cases, they use precedent and cite prior cases. So I found the other cases that referred to the thing I was writing about, and it turns out they were also just using prior cases. I had to go 6 deep before I found them referencing the actual constitution for one of them. On another I found it interesting that the most recent use case was so far removed from what the original one was about and it was could probably be questionable to even use it as precedent if they had used the original instead of another case.
Anyway, the point is, always check sources. If anyone says anything on the internet, assume it’s just their opinion until you check and follow the sources…
And very often it’s dead links or sources that don’t say what the article pretends…
That’s why you don’t use Wikipedia as your primary source, you follow the citations. Of course, if you can’t verify that it’s accurate information, don’t report it, but it can be used as a jump off to find a legitimate source if the information you cant immediately verify is useful.
Love reading any article then opening the talk tab for the civil war of edits proposed.
Wikipedia is an excellent starting point for information - but saying you can absolutely trust it hell no.
Yup, tried to correct something about a motorcycle manufacturer (no road legal model between year A and Z), linked to another Wikipedia article proving what I was saying (road legal modelS in year W to Y, just before Z), the next day the page was back to its previous version. I linked to the article about the road legal model they pretended didn’t exist and they just edited the page back to its previous version…
How dare you hurt another editor’s feelings with your facts!
It’s like chatGPT then!
at least Wikipedia is human-curated.
- With the exception of any article that’s even slightly political.
Even for political content it’s damn good. Every time someone on Lemmy points to an explicit article of bias, it falls into one of 3 categories:
- Slightly unfair bias, but still largely true
- Article is correct, Lemmy cannot provide a reliable source proving otherwise
- Article is incorrect, reliable source found, article amended
The third case happened once in an article about a UN Resolution on North Korea, and it was because the original article source was slightly misinterpreted. But yea, basically what I’m trying to say is if a “political article” is “wrong” but you can’t prove it, it’s not the political article that’s wrong but you.
Edit: ITT - People upset with my analysis, but not willing to provide sources to the articles they disagree with
Wikipedia has a claimed positive-bias, in which negative things are often left out of the article. This is more true the lower profile the page is.
And Wikipedia has an overall left-bias, because of the demographic of contributors.
And Wikipedia has an overall left-bias, because of the demographic of contributors.
FROM YOUR LINK
Until 2021, we rated Wikipedia as Center, but changed them to Not Rated because the online encyclopedia does not fit neatly into AllSides’ media bias rating methodologies, which were developed specifically for news sites.
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And sometimes it literally is USA propaganda. It’s quite rare, but those articles should get fixed. Changing something like “The guerrilla fighters killed babies” to “The US State Department claimed the guerrilla fighters killed babies, but critics call the claim “wholly unfounded” [source]”.
But yea, as I said, actually a lot more rare than you’d think.
tankies be like
“Wikipedia is unreliable, here’s our wiki where we source reddit comments”
Yo the tankie wiki is fucking hilarious. The USSR page has this gold mine:
“On 8 August 1945, exactly three months after the defeat of Nazi Germany, Soviet troops entered Manchuria and Korea, and Japan surrendered within a week.”
careful! That wiki is managed by the Lemmy Developers, they might BLOCK you
Wikipedia completely slanders people it doesnt like. For example Daniele Ganser who helped to reveal Operation Gladio.
slanders (tells the truth about)
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Nah.
I edited a page for a new OS update that was coming out. The page was FULL of misinformation, and I cleaned it up, linked official documentation as sources, etc.
My edits were reverted by some butt hurt guy who originally wrote the page full of misinformation, 0 sources, and broken English.
I reverted back to mine.
He reverted back to his.
He spammed my profile page calling me names, and then reported me to Wiki admins. I was told not to revert changes or I would be perma-banned. I explained how the original page was broken English, misinformation, and 0 sources were cited. They straight up told me they did NOT care.
Stopped editing wiki pages, and stopped trusting them. They didn’t care about factual information. They just wanted to enforce their reverting rule.
I’d love their perspective on this and the actual messages sent as this isn’t very useful standalone.
Their profile was banned last time I looked about a year ago. My profile I deleted because it was permanently tainted by that asshole spamming my talk page.
I remember posting about it on Reddit back when it happened a few years ago, and everyone in the comments told me how they’ve had similar experiences. Really just made me weary about trusting Wikipedia. I mean sure, if they get the date of a movie wrong that’s fine, but as for more serious topics, I just can’t really trust it.
Even sources can be garbage. I’ve seen plenty of blog spam cited as sources, which means nothing.
Yep, about a decade ago an expert on a subject was talking about it. He corrected a page because the info presented with tons of sources all ended up taking their info from a single unreliable source. He had to edit things multiple times, making sure to follow guidelines, basically creating a new section that condensed his work on the subject to explain the controversy and so on… The page was edited back to its previous version every time because he didn’t have enough local reputation and “older sources are more reliable”…
Could you link us the article?
of course not because its entirely made up.
And what’s your source for that claim you keep making?
what’s the article in question?
His imagination.
It’s not an uncommon tale about Wikipedia, that’s their biggest known issue with getting new blood into the community, which they’ve acknowledged themselves.
What’s your damage?
TBH that doesn’t surprise me… I had a minor spat over the existence of a local supermarket, of all the stupid things… Wiki said it had been refused planning permission and never built. I had shopped in there many times, and could link to many articles about the fully built existing supermarket. I gave up after the second revert because it’s just not worth it.
That’s a shame
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This is the third insightful comment from you on this thread against him. Are you by any chance, the alt of the user who wrote the original article on Wiki of the OS?
there is a bureaucracy for dealing with the situation you described. the other editor gamed it, but if you were right, a little persistence would have left your edits in place.
Yes, but people shouldn’t have to jump through hoops to help Wikipedia.
you’re right. when transitioning away from reddit, i took the time to understand how to navigate the wikipedia editor bureaucracy. I understood most of it in a week. now i just monitor a few articles in which i have an interest, and add to that list periodically.
i wish it were easier. MY SUGGESTION is to just go ahead and use the talk page instead of the main article as your first place to make an edit. if it’s a good edit, it’s likely someone else will write the edit themselves. if they don’t and you dont see objetions, that will help your edit stand up if there is an edit war.
Pro wrestling wiki pages used to have entrance themes, finishers and signature moves in the wrestler’s page.
One power-mod removed it and it’s gone.
People suck wiki’s cock on the Internet, but it’s a pretty dogshit site and I wish it dies so that a new and better alternative pops up.
I think assuming a better alternative will appear is a bad idea. Most likely some company sees an opening to control the information and monetize it. They can’t really now because Wikipedia is the default, but I don’t doubt someone would try if they see the hold Wikipedia has falter.
It doesn’t need to die for a new alternative to pop up.
I just doubt any alternative will be as good as the one we have now.
There will always be someone there to take its place. Maybe a more transparent and decentralised alternative like how fan-wikis used to be before Fandom bough them.
So your solution to a problem is one that also has an ownership problem??
Tbh those pieces of trivia don’t feel like encyclopedic information in the first place. A reader need not know specific intro songs to have an encyclopedic overview of wrestling, just that intro songs are often used.
A list containing the specific intro songs is vastly more suited for a fandom repository than an encyclopedia.
I have to disagree. Wrestling is all about the show, so a dedicated table of wrestlers’ entrance themes, finishers and signature moves seems very on-brand for Wikipedia. It’s also unclear if this was just a line item listed on every wrestlers’ individual page or if this was a table, but either seems pretty on brand. Maybe there’s a dedicated page for entrance theme music and a table of who used what song makes sense there?
To reference something I actually know about almost every Wikipedia page for a railroad will include a detailed route map. One could argue that that’s not encyclopedia-like and should be reserved for a travel site or train chasing guide yet here we are
It’s mostly true for articles that do not have large public coverage. Otherwise the number of those who stubbornly fight for the truth will prevail
How dare you trash Wikipedia on Lemmy? Infidel like you should be sent to gulag.
My workplace got a “coronavirus” chat on the corporate chat server. And the known “conspiracy theorist” guy on my team posted a link to some article on some total misinformation mill masquerading as a news source.
I looked up the name of the source on Wikipedia, which said it was a total misinformation mill.
So I linked to the Wikipedia article in the chat.
I work at a fairly big and diverse company, so of course there was more than one conspiracy guy there. It was really surreal watching people who literally think all governments are run by a secret cabal of Democrat extraterrestrial pedophile child-adrenaline junkies attack the trustworthiness of Wikipedia.
Edit: I’d forgotten the name of the “misinformation mill” that originally started that shit storm in the work chat, but I went back and looked it up. It was Project Veritas. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Veritas
RIP in Piss P. Veritas I hope hell is hot for you on the way down
They still exist. They just do not have James O’Keefe who was shit canned.
Wait, James OKeefe was always a can of shit
99% of people bashing Wikipedia do so because they read that they’re delusional about something.
Source: have read >100 Wikipedia bashings that answered follow-up questions.
Wikipedia is the only piece of the internet I would save from apocalipse. Like, seriously.
Yeah, I have Wikipedia saved to a portable hard drive… Just in case
I don’t know if you’re making fun of me, but, seriously, for me Wikipedia is an enormously valuable resource, much more than, for instance, YouTube (which I use, maybe, twice per year).
There is a lot of People with a copy of Wikipedia, it only takes 8GB. Just for the case something happens. I dont think he is making fun of you.
Some folks enjoy reading articles. Some folks enjoy to watch, listen and read (captions) at the same time. Some folks rather ask around and learn through conversations.
I’ve understood that it’s generally easier to learn new things when you use many different channels (audio, imagery etc). To many people but not to all.
Wasn’t making fun of you, just agreeing with you and telling you my fix
How much data does it use?
According to my app, the whole English Wikipedia with pictures weighs 102.62GB, down to 60,06GB without.
There’s also a mini version that weighs 58,29GB but I don’t know what it contains
Wikipedia 1m Top Articles weighs 43,53GB
Any idea how the 8gb from another comment might be achieved?
Edit: I guess zipping it should work pretty well
TBH I have no idea
I just took a look at what my app is saying, but I didn’t dig into it
It’s probably only the text. Images and videos weigh a lot more than text.
According to my app, the whole English Wikipedia with pictures weighs 102.62GB, down to 60,06GB without.
60GB is still more than 8GB
I remember in the mid-aughts my brother hacked his iPod — the wheel kind, this was pre-iPhone — to hold the entirety of the text of English Wikipedia at the time.
What if you need to remember how to procreate? I hear there are a number of informative videos about how to out there.
But there aren’t on YouTube :-P
IIRC this happens in the show or book of Station Eleven where a kid saves Wikipedia offline on his PS Vita (somehow) and it’s the only version of it out there post-apocalypse.
I bought an app by Wikimedia CH that allows to download the whole thing. It’s called Kiwix.
you “bought” kiwix? AFAIK it’s free
There is a paid version on the Mac AppStore to support the project
It would also be nice to have a p2p service still up in the internet apocalypse to share all the things we have left.
Could work like the underground networks in Cuba (I say underground but apparently there’s wires everywhere?)
And interestingly it’s trustable because it’s got no central authority core that can be corrupted
Except there are defacto central authorities governing certain pages.
Not only that there’s a turf war going on for control of them.
Certain ahem religious organizations monitor a variety of pages and snipe any changes they disagree with. Businesses are doing it too.
And certain politicians
Which religious orgs?
Probably all of them… Just a guess though.
I haven’t participated in wikipedia enough to see how these turf wars play out. I’ve heard that, unsurprisingly, there are groups that control pages, some opposed and some unopposed. It’s a really interesting thing to me.
I’m afraid of politics, generally speaking. But I bet it would be interesting to be a part of all that.
I think the word you’re looking for is “trustworthy” but yes.
I consider it a separate concept.
yeah, apart from the admins that have absolute authority over everything and can do whatever the hell they want and make up arbitrary rules that disqualify your perfectly valid sources.
that doesn’t happen
There definitely are editors who game the rules. And they are enough of a problem that sometimes rules need to be modified specifically to handle them.
you seem to be conflating editors with admins.
Elon Musk Offers to Also Ruin Wikipedia https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/elon-musk-wikipedia-twitter-x-encyclopedia-1234861220/
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Definitely not wiremin! it’s scam
Look at their website, they keep babbling about their “protocol”, but all you can find about this supposed protocol is marketing speak, no real technical specification or paper, no code, nothing. How does this thing actually run? Nobody knows.
It’s proprietary, which alone is enough reason to run away from it. And seeing that the dev’s email is gmail, we can be sure they don’t give a fuck about privacy or decentralization.
It seems that this decentralized style starts to be a new trend?
First this Fediverse/Lemmy I heard about. Then The Matrix (messaging platform). And now these Mastodon & WreMin.
Well, if that prevents or slows down the corrupted law of enshittification, then I’m approving it!
is wiremin using activitypub?
I don’t know myself. I just heard about it. Haven’t studied it at all.
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Hardly a loophole - Wikipedia’s greatest strength is as an aggregator of reliable information, and using Wikipedia’s sources is how people SHOULD use it. They just taught you how to use it.
Damn, this is genious. My future kids are going to learn so much cool stuff branded as “loopholes”.
Yup. My friend is a high school teacher, and he did the same thing to his class - told them not to use Wikipedia, but that Wikipedia sources were fine, and the kids did actual research.
“Turns out if you willingly focus on the fear, it diminishes. Neat little loophole”
That is a nice one! Brb, going to internalize it for
my own sakethe theoretical children.
Educators HATE this weird loophole!
Schools aren’t with it. I was told in the 90s that cursive was the future. We had already progressed beyond word processors and they are having us learn fucking loopy letters.
Uni wasn’t much better. Found myself over thirty years behind industry when I got out.
I think it might depend on the field of study and location, but schools are often a little on the conservative side. Even so “loopholes” as best practices is arguably even better.
It’s basic research and writing. You should absolutely teach your kids common sense practices.
My SO is a little scared I will push too much information on them (I have a degree in geek), so I thought more of the pedagogic value of calling something a loophole/hack/cheat etc…
I agree with that. Word it how they respond to it.
Yes. That’s how you use an encyclopedia.
Big brain move: Tell your students about this neat loophole, gets them started on actual research.
(Ideally - I’d be lying if I said I’ve never used a quote from Wikipedia citing the stated source without actually reading it [usually at 5 am for papers due in two hours], but more often than not Wikipedia was the signpost for the rabbit hole)
The Tab “Talk” gives you a lot more to learn on some pages, take a look !
Yet if you ever try to edit a page, the “Talk” tab is filled with the most pretentious protectionist people. You can add helpful context or missing information with sources to the wiki, and it will get deleted simply because you haven’t spent months cozying up to the greaseball who sits on that specific wiki entry as if they possess it.
there is a bureaucratic machine for dealing with this kind of problem
But what do we do if every level of that machine is completely controlled by those people?
it’s not. there are boards on Wikipedia specifically for calling in neutral editors.
Just call then out on it in talk by mentioning why you would add it.
Alternatively make an upgraded English-only wiki alternative with way larger article max sizes so we can finally evolve it past 2005. And start using YouTube links and not (just) a native video player. And start quoting/including entire chapters from relevant books.
The problem with using YT videos is that they are transitory. Also, you’re then subjecting your reader to somebody else’s advertisements for their gain.
Only if the source checks out
Does anyone know if there is a way to see which wiki articles are edited the most? I don’t mean new topics or edits because there’s a lot of new info. I mean potential back-and-forth edits where there is disagreement on facts (or one viewpoint denies a fact, etc.).
If that exists, I’d be curious to know what articles they are (obviously probably religion or politics). On the other side, those articles that have remained unedited for a long time are probably pretty rock solid, assuming they also get traffic.*
*I’m literally thinking out loud here and am sure there are many other factors to consider
Maybe if you keep refreshing this search wiki filtered by talk
Thanks, I think this is effectively the metric I want. Just have to combine it somehow (if possible) with traffic info by page.
I always trust the streets. People lie. Governments lie. News lies. But the streets. The streets never lie.
Gotta be careful roaming the streets, tho.
I been listening to these streets for years man and there’s one thing I’ve learned: streets ain’t sayin shit
I do for economic data. I really don’t care what funny numbers the White House and shills put out.
Except not really.
Lol, everything is sourced.
No. There are plenty of articles with the “needs citations” tag.
But even of the ones that are? A LOT of people never actually read the sources and you have plenty of wild claims that are not at all supported by their citation. Plenty of “celebrities” have even talked about how it was a huge hassle to get something changed because the lie was cited… with something unrelated.
“a huge hassle”
Step 1. Remove the unfounded claim
Step 2. Go to the talk page explaining why you removed it
Step 3. If someone puts it back, edit war them, tag needs citation, call them out in the talk page, get the article locked by an admin, etc etc etc. These things happen all the time, and 95% of the time it gets corrected as long as someone gives a damn
plenty of wild claims not at all supported by their citation
Can you show some examples of this?
Nice.
Lol this guy is getting ready to edit some articles.
A lot of the political entries are written with a bent towards being sympathetic with leftists.
The Kyle Rittenhouse article spends a lot of time on how Rittenhouse ‘appeared in conservative media’ or ‘appeared with conservative personalities’ which is a pretty weird thing to say, if you don’t already understand the political undertones of the Kenosha riot.
When you click the article for the Kenosha riot, it’s titled ‘civil unrest in Kenosha’ and focusses a lot on what a reader would perceive as positive aims of the riot. Protesting racism and police brutality, and doesn’t focus at all on the crime, danger, guns, vandalism, arson, etc
That article mentions BLM and when you read that article it makes sure to state that BLM protests were ‘largely peaceful’ and totally misses the amount of deaths and destruction that had happened at them.
The BLM article, if written like the Rittenhouse article, should focus a fair amount in the organizations ties to Marxism, the overthrowing of capitalism and colonialism, but doesn’t.
Wikipedia articles are written and edited and maintained to push a narrative.
If you agree with the narrative, you probably like that it does this. If you disagree, you probably don’t bother reading Wikipedia very much.
The issue with sources, is that a lot of ‘sources’ for stuff like this are already heavily curated to paint a picture the editors want to put on front street.
And anything that would combat that narrative is just outright banned from the site.
A lot of citations with politically charged topics are just opinions anyway. There is no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ answer or sources on the war between Palestine and isreal, for example. But if Wikipedia editors want to push propaganda for either side over the other, all they have to do is only cite pro-Palestinian or pro-Israeli sources.
This is easily exploitable by editors for whatever narrative they choose to push.
Wikipedia is not an exhaustive gathering of all relevant information, it is a carefully curated propaganda machine for the editors.
Good point. I forgot to mention that Wikipedia editors, for all their flaws, are really good at shutting down hateful right wing bullshit.
So you’d categorize it as hateful right wing bullshit if someone mentions that there as violence or criminal activity at BLM protests?
Why would that be hateful? Or right wing? Or anything other than just a description of what happened?
You can have violence at a largely peaceful protest, as long as it is … largely peaceful.
Which they were, the majority ended peacefully and only a handful were violent.
So what Wikipedia did was state the facts. You can disagree with those facts, but you would be wrong.
Exactly
Well it’s the old fact that reality has a left-wing bias, as someone once put it.
Have you ever looked at the sources? Some pages have some insane blog spam “sources” linked.
That’s a circular argument. If you can’t trust the sources how can you trust the wikipedia article which cites those sources.
You can trust the sources, because unreliable sources can’t be used on Wikipedia: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Perennial_sources
You can check the sources… if the source doesn’t check out… Guess what, Wikipedia has given you all the information you need.
In any discipline some part has to be trusted for the next to follow. It is not circular, it is axiomatic. You can do a Descartes to find a “guarantee of truth”, but there won’t be one. Hence your critique could literally be applied to anything. Check sources and be happy they are freely provided (and donate to Wikipedia).
That’s my point, by mistrusting every other website, OP is violating axioms upon which Wikipedia is built, yet still claiming it’s trustworthy
Ah, I now see better what you meant. That is in part a fun little contradiction, but much of Wikipedia’s sources are books and articles that come in printed form. These are easier than other websites to verify as sources due to their tangible nature.
But it takes more effort to confirm a tangible source than one on the internet?
Not really. Just sail the high seas with Library Genesis or Sci-Hub. The nature of being published is being non-editable, a digital copy is an okay compromise.
EDIT: There is an issue of trust in piracy, though hardly in practice, but Open Access should help with this.
Oh, you’re taking me literally. Sorry I didn’t catch that.
Lawl, 1) 25% of Wikipedia in English is unsourced
lAwL 2) 77% of Wikipedia is written by 1% of its editors
RaWfL 3) once a source is credited once, it isn’t rechecked and can be used as a source on Wikipedia countless times
LmFAo 4) literally anyone saying something does not make it credible or true.
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It could even be someone purposefully poisoning the well
Kinda like how the government hires people to put terrible music over all the UFO footage so we perceive it as crazy people stuff.
Not at all. I’m responding to OP, and while my comment is informative and sourced so that other people can understand it too, I do not care at all that my in-kind response turns some people off.
Lol… kinda reminds of something… Wikipedia?
As scrambled as your brain is, anything could.
my comment is informative and sourced so that other people can understand it too, I do not care at all that my in-kind response turns some people off.
Thanks, trusting wikipedia because it has a “source”(, as if a source meant the truth 🙄,) is super weird, and i’ll also add that a lot of sources are inaccessible anyway, such as those pointing to books. Wikipedia will hopefully(, in part because it’s always a mistake to pretend knowing “the one truth”,) be replaced one day, it’s long overdue.
The inaccessibility of many wiki sources is a very good point, thanks.
I think Wikipedia serves its purpose as a broad strokes indicator of things that are likely significant in some way, but its limitations are as important as its content.
Rolfcopter. This guy doesn’t know how to use Wikipedia.
You probably learned how to use Wikipedia from Wikipedia, that’s how you got so wrong.
Not bad actually https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_and_fact-checking
