Comment on weaponized nerdery
gayhitler420@lemm.ee 8 months agoWoah.
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?
DrSteveBrule@mander.xyz 8 months ago
It depends on the website. A Twitter post with no source? Untrustworthy. Wikipedia page with plenty of sources to back up the article? I would default to saying trustworthy, but of course I would still have to check the sources myself. Wikipedia is a tool. It connects you to outside sources of info. It has the reputation of being reliable enough to get trustworthy info in its summaries. As I’ve already stated before, mistakes have been made though.
gayhitler420@lemm.ee 8 months ago
you: information on wikipedia shouldn’t be taken at face value… it’s good to not blindly put your trust in whatever you read from it…
also you: I would default to saying trustworthy…
🤔
DrSteveBrule@mander.xyz 8 months ago
You’re missing a lot of other points I’ve made. Let me ask you then what is a reliable source of information? You’re skepticism implies nothing is trustworthy if you have to verify information with various sources. Do you only trust what you can observe first hand?
gayhitler420@lemm.ee 8 months ago
I promise you, I am not missing any other point you have made. my intent with selectively quoting was to go ahead and knock the legs out from under all the other stuff that rests upon those two statements in order to save us the back and forth of big walls of text.
My skepticism absolutely does not imply that nothing is trustworthy when it has to be verified. It explicitly applies to a website (Wikipedia) which maintains an extensive record of ways in which it has been shown to be systematically untrustworthy.
Within the scope of this discussion, it’s not important what sources of information I would consider trustworthy, we’re only talking about Wikipedia, a source that has a long history of being untrustworthy. We are talking about Wikipedia because it is the subject of the ops post which compares it to the library of Alexandria.