Comment on weaponized nerdery
gayhitler420@lemm.ee 9 months agoWikipedia’s reliability in it’s own words - check out the holocaust misinformation from last year!
US congressional staff editing controversies as documented by and presented in wikipedia
A ten year long hoax running until two years ago
Wikipedia’s own list of its controversies - pay special attention here to the 2023 exposure of an administrator pretending to be a spanish folk singer as a sockpuppet of another administrator who was banned in 2015 for making “promotional edits”.
I want to be clear: i do not feel that wikipedia isn’t reliable. I can clearly observe that wikipedia is unreliable.
DrSteveBrule@mander.xyz 9 months ago
Info on Wikipedia shouldn’t be taken at face value, check the sources given! A lot of the examples you gave likely didn’t have any citation. The blame for misinformation partly lies with the people accepting information with no sources given. Also, any example of known misinformation just means that it has been caught and corrected. Everyone should know wikipedia is not right 100% of the time but it is always getting better. There millions of articles and I don’t think the examples you listed should lead anyone to believe it is overall unreliable. It is good however to not blindly put your trust in whatever you read from it, and if you do come across something that isn’t correct, you have the opportunity to fix it.
SnipingNinja@slrpnk.net 9 months ago
They used Wikipedia to prove that Wikipedia is untrustworthy
DrSteveBrule@mander.xyz 9 months ago
The first paragraph of the first link they posted says that wikipedia’s reliability has been generally praised over the last 10 years.
survivalmachine@beehaw.org 9 months ago
So would you now agree with the original comment that said Wikipedia is not a reliable SOURCE of accurate information? It’s a great starting point and a potential resource that can be used as a bibliography of possible sources, but it’s never a good source itself. Even as a bibliography, you have to consider whether the available references for an article are biased – they don’t always paint a fair picture.
DrSteveBrule@mander.xyz 9 months ago
Yes I agree with that. I think there was an issue with establishing what “source” meant in the given context. I wouldn’t say the text of a single wikipedia article is a reliable source by itself, however that doesn’t discredit the reliability of accurate information on Wikipedia in my opinion. If you stripped a textbook of it’s listed citations and credited authors, then you can’t really verify the information in it either.
gayhitler420@lemm.ee 9 months ago
That’s wild.
If you knew a person who shouldn’t be taken at face value and whose claims had to be verified, what word would you use to describe them? Would that word be reliable? Trustworthy?
DrSteveBrule@mander.xyz 9 months ago
Wikipedia isn’t a person though. It’s a website of articles that summarizes topics and ideally lists sources that contain the info within it. I agree a person that sounds like that is untrustworthy, but that doesn’t mean anything on the topic of wikipedia.
gayhitler420@lemm.ee 9 months ago
Woah.
So, like, if you knew of a website which shouldn’t be taken at face value and whose claims had to be verified, what word would you use to describe it? would that word be reliable? Trustworthy?