BanMe@lemmy.world 4 days ago
My historic house has a Wikipedia page, I’ve tried updating it with information I know is accurate (I mean, I live here), but it was always removed. Must have a primary source that’s not “individual research” like, you know, counting the bedrooms or fireplaces.
Which is what lead to me getting our city’s newspaper to interview me, print several facts and stories, and now that published article is a primary source.
During this process I realized that Wikipedia is pretty goddamn serious.
Yeah I was reading about the editing guidelines and they have a principle that surprised me at first:
Basically, you could edit an article with information you know is true (like your bedrooms or fireplaces), but truth is not the criteria that edits get tested upon. It must be verifiable by a source.
Pretty cool that you didn’t just give up and actually got the local newspaper to interview you! That’s awesome!
That is hilarious. At that point if I was annoyed enough, I’d do something like hang a picture in the house taking a dig at Wikipedia and then the interview could mention that and now it could be in the article about the house taking a dig at them.
if I was annoyed enough, I’d do something like hang a picture in the house taking a dig at Wikipedia and then the interview could mention that and now it could be in the article about the house taking a dig at them.
that published article is a primary source.
It’s not a primary source, that’s the whole point. It’s a secondary source, which takes information from the primary source and publishes it with some degree of verification.
The whole ‘no primary sources’ thing is simple if one considers that Trump and Musk are the primary sources on their own doings.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 4 days ago
To a degree. But you also run into the classic XKCD problem of Citogenesis. This isn’t a hypothetical, either.
Had you, for instance, mentioned something you read about your own historical house on Wikipedia in the city’s newspaper, it would now be a cited piece of information that Wikipedia links onto.
There’s also the problem of link rot. When your small town newspaper gets bought up by ClearChannel or Sinclair media and the back archives locked down or purged, the link to the original information can’t be referenced anymore.
That’s before you get into the back-end politics of Wikipedia - a heavy bias towards western media sources, European language publications, and state officials who are de facto “quotable” in a way outsider sources and investigators are not. Architectural Digest is a valid source in a way BanMe’s Architecture Review Blog is not. That has nothing to do with the veracity of the source and everything to do with the history and distribution of the publication.
MrEff@lemmy.world 4 days ago
I have a wiki editor account primarily for updating links on pages. I have also done a handful of minor edits on some obscure pages in my field, but primarily use it to update links and references. Link rot is the worst and I wish more people would help out with it.
NewSocialWhoDis@lemmy.zip 4 days ago
When a link is dead, does Wikipedia allow you to change it to an archived copy of the webpage from before it was taken down?
MrEff@lemmy.world 4 days ago
Not sure. I have typically just done a Google search and refound the link under the same domain but with a different sub routing.
cucumberbob@programming.dev 3 days ago
Even if the link isn’t dead, most citation templates that accept a |url= parameter also accept |archive-url=, |archive-date=, and |url-status=
Also, newly added links are automatically archived on the Wayback Machine iirc.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 3 days ago
It would be nice if Wikipedia automatically integrated with WayBackMachine or some other archive service. Or even directly backed up the information when it was linked.
Xttweaponttx@sh.itjust.works 3 days ago
Really valuable input here, appreciate this comment!