6 ms·

Evidence says Wikipedia is accurate, reliable. When will we take it seriously?

46 points by ctrlmeta 4y ago

CodeSgt 4y ago
Wikipedia is already taken seriously enough by most people under the age of 50 that I know. That said, it does still have issues and by its very nature is prone to organized disinformation campaigns. Yes, it will be corrected in time, but if timed correctly it could be too late. Imagine this: A post on social media site X goes viral. The post makes some wildly divisive claim about an American political figure. The claim is untrue, but the posts virality leads many to believe it. Simultaneously, a group of dedicated attackers change the political figures wiki page to match the disinformation in the viral post, keeping it like that until the posts virality cools down. The Wikipedia article gets linked in the comments of the post. The hundreds of thousands of people who saw that post at its peak all now believe the false claim. The malicious actor benefits.
- hulitu 4y ago
  > Wikipedia is already taken seriously enough by most people under the age of 50 that I know. Seriously , yes, enough , no. And i would say people under the age of 18 and their teachers take Wikipedia as a serious source. There are some good articles on Wikipedia but the majority is lacking quality.
- Akronymus 4y ago
  Then media outlets start picking up on it and include it in their reporting, then reporting on reporting happens and so on, then someone adds it to wikipedia with the news source, and then that gets uaed as a reference without saying so. Then those new artikles get added to the wiki and it becomes an established fact.
  - akolbe 4y ago
    Wikipedia has a list of cases where this precise sequence of events occurred: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_citogenesis_incidents#Known_incidents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_citogenesis_...
peanut_worm 4y ago
It can be taken seriously enough but I can also change Suleiman the Magnificent’s birthplace to Nairobi and no one will notice for a week. Wikipedia should publish curated “editions” like a traditional encyclopedia.
- duckmysick 4y ago
  I assume curating would mean freezing and cross-checking each article. This would take a while (I imagine years) and by the time it's done the information would be outdated.
- esperent 4y ago
  > I can also change Suleiman the Magnificent’s birthplace to Nairobi and no one will notice for a week. Have you actually tried doing something like that? You might be surprised how fast it gets reverted.
  - akolbe 4y ago
    I think it's a case of a million people trying, and 99% being reverted. Which sounds great, until you realise that it means ten thousand bits of nonsense aren't spotted. Case in point: https://www.dailydot.com/unclick/amelia-bedelia-wikipedia-hoax/ https://www.dailydot.com/unclick/amelia-bedelia-wikipedia-ho...
  - peanut_worm 4y ago
    Yes. I have had edits stay for months.
    - akolbe 4y ago
      This one stayed for ten years: https://wikipediocracy.com/2022/08/11/wikipedias-credibility-is-toast/ https://wikipediocracy.com/2022/08/11/wikipedias-credibility...
- marginalia_nu 4y ago
  I don't think vandalism is the big problem. It's not hard to find articles that are written with some agenda, either product advertisement or political motives, but presented with the same objective encyclopedic tone as the rest. This article is a pretty good example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pair_programming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pair_programming The entire article is basically an advertisement for the idea, citing a handful of fairly old studies, including prominently a fairly odd one in its own section: "In an online survey of pair programmers from 2000, 96% of programmers stated that they enjoyed work more while pair programming than programming alone. Furthermore, 95% said that they were more confident in their work when they pair programmed. [...]" Just... stop and think about that survey for a moment. At a glance you might not catch it, but they basically asked people who prefer pair programming whether they prefer pair programming, and discovered that yeah, almost all of them did. Both the "indicators of non-performance" and "pairing variations" also seem oddly out of place in a wiki article.
JoeAltmaier 4y ago
You get burned even once, you get wary.
PopAlongKid 4y ago
[from the article] >I suspect in part because many gatekeepers of knowledge – journalists, scientists, teachers, the Encyclopedia Britannica – simply don’t like the idea that anonymous amateurs are competing on their domain. Similar comment, and additional recent discussion, here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32793755 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32793755
- akolbe 4y ago
  The "Why I hate Wikipedia" YouTube video discussed at the other thread you link was made by YouTuber and journalist J. J. McCullough. You wanna see something funny? This discussion is from 2008: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/J.J._McCullough https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletio... The J. J. McCullough biography was created and deleted a total of five times on Wikipedia (with two different spellings of J.J.): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/J.J._McCullough_(2nd_nomination) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletio... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/J.J._McCullough_(3rd_nomination) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletio... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/J._J._McCullough https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletio... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/J._J._McCullough_(2nd_nomination) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletio... I believe he may not be telling the whole story in that video.
beardyw 4y ago
Something close to the truth is the best we will ever know.
bacchusracine 4y ago
Hahahhahaha....evidence they say....hahahahahah. Exhibit A: https://www.vice.com/en/article/pkgbwm/chinese-woman-fake-russian-history-wikipedia https://www.vice.com/en/article/pkgbwm/chinese-woman-fake-ru...
- chasebro 4y ago
  What a great example of how accurate Wikipedia is, someone went to extreme lengths to falsify information, they were discovered and their edits reverted, as happens in most cases
  - akolbe 4y ago
    Well, yes, after ten years, just as in the case of the toaster. And the translations of her Featured Article in three other Wikipedia language versions had STILL not been corrected last time I looked.
  - Spooky23 4y ago
    As a joke, some of my colleagues created a fake persona for another colleague after obtaining an old picture of him in punk rocker garb from college. It was a long con, they created a fake band, added references to various obscure pages, etc. ultimately a page was created with the photo posted that followed every Wikipedia policy except for being false. I’m sure people are doing that professionally. The problem with Wikipedia is that it’s awesome except for when it isn’t. The weakness of the system is that it depends on arbitrary standards of notability and online reference. Not novel problems but you need to have a different kind of critical eye than other platforms.
    - akolbe 4y ago
      Then there was the case of the man whose image was used for two years to illustrate the Wikipedia article on a serial killer. https://www.vice.com/en/article/5dgpnq/wikipedia-and-google-identified-wrong-man-as-a-serial-killer-for-years https://www.vice.com/en/article/5dgpnq/wikipedia-and-google-...
    - 4y ago
freedude 4y ago
The interesting thing about truth is that it is binary by its nature. Something is either true or false. There is no "My Truth" or "Your Truth" as the public school system would corrupt you into believing but there is only "The Truth". Since you cannot account for a random person telling the truth without recourse, there is no implicit trust in Wikipedia. The lie in the world is that people are basically good. No, people are basically greedy of fame and fortune. People want and they mostly want the wrong things at the wrong times and for the wrong reasons. Given these facts trust cannot be implied if reputation and gain are not inherent in the founding of the trust. Zero trust is even worse because now you have nothing. Wikipedia is untrustworthy at best and is only useful as a stepping stone to the truth not as a source and certainly not as an immutable source.
- armchairhacker 4y ago
  Truth is rarely binary , it’s nuanced and detailed and when you convert it into a simple statement you inject your own opinion. The world isn’t black and white. For example, you’re right that people are naturally greedy, but most are also naturally altruistic. Many people are kind to strangers, and provide help as long as it doesn’t get in their way. Most Wikipedia authors want the popularity which is why they publish, but they’re not publishing the wrong information (esp. because it’s more likely to be removed). Wikipedia is for the most part trustworthy because there are a lot of people who have dedicated themselves to providing “truth”, and while these people each have their own biases especially wrt controversial articles, the factual content is agreed on and so that it what ultimately gets published.
  - _aavaa_ 4y ago
    What you are describing is "consensus" among those with the power to veto or edit articles.
isaacfrond 4y ago
I volunteered for a while on vandalism watch. You would not believe the onslaught of vandalism that is occurring continuously, around the clock. It is only through its dedicated volunteers, armed with ever more sophisticated tools that this sea of trouble is kept at bay. It was an eye opener to me. Nevertheless, surprisingly even, most vandalism is actually very quickly found and corrected. Even those devious small changes are not so easy to slip in, as some think.
akolbe 4y ago
> Journalists and academics can’t use it as a reference. Nor can students, though they can use Britannica. Lots of journalists do use it. That is why there is a bunch of BBC articles claiming that the electric toaster was invented by a Scot called "Alan MacMasters" ... they used Wikipedia without checking its information. It was completely made up: https://wikipediocracy.com/2022/08/11/wikipedias-credibility-is-toast/ https://wikipediocracy.com/2022/08/11/wikipedias-credibility... A book published by Cambridge University Press says that coatis are also called "Brazilian aardvarks" – because the writer copied from Wikipedia. Completely made up. https://www.theregister.com/2017/01/16/wikipedia_16_birthday_fails/ https://www.theregister.com/2017/01/16/wikipedia_16_birthday... Wikipedia simply has different flaws than older reference works, and it's important to be aware of them. Another thing not to trust blindly is the Wikipedia fundraising banners. In 2015, the Washington Post published a piece titled, "Wikipedia has a ton of money. So why is it begging you to donate yours?" https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/12/02/wikipedia-has-a-ton-of-money-so-why-is-it-begging-you-to-donate-yours/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/12... In that piece, the Washington Post reported that the Wikimedia Foundation had "net assets in excess of $77 million". Today, the Foundation's assets (including its $115 million endowment with the Tides Foundation) stand at around five times as much: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/1/1e/Wikimedia_Foundation_FY2020-2021_Audit_Report.pdf#page=5 https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/1/1e/Wikim... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2022-06-26/Special_report https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2... Yet the fundraising banners and emails sound as desperate and guilt-tripping as ever. "Donate to keep Wikipedia online ...", "Donate to protect Wikipedia's independence ..." Many Wikipedians are disgusted with that: https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org/thread/YKYDOBBH2RHJO2DHNP4YEPH37J3L5PBH/ https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@list... Seriously, I love Wikipedia. I have been contributing to it for more than fifteen years. But I would say most volunteers who contribute to Wikipedia would NEVER advise anyone – say, a family member who is starting out as a doctor or journalist – to trust anything said in Wikipedia blindly. They'd ALWAYS tell you to check the references, and in a case of "Who invented X" to seek corroboration in a 20th-century source.
- akolbe 4y ago
LorenPechtel 4y ago
It's generally accurate. It suffers from the fundamental problem of truth by consensus rather than truth by competence, though. There is severe cherry-picking about disputed issues. An experience I had some years back makes it very clear. It was an Israel/Palestine article, I noticed one item that should have a link didn't. Being naive about it's biases at the time I added the missing link--no words changed, just the link added behind a couple of words. It got reverted--that's a link the left would prefer people not make.
- esperent 4y ago
  > reverted--that's a link the left would prefer people not make. Notably, you haven't shared the link here. So all we're getting is vague accusations about "the left". What was the link? And why do you think it was removed?
  - yucky 4y ago
    Not to speak for the person you're replying to, but I included several sources in my response above, if that helps. Just in terms of their financial/organizational potential for bias
- Beltalowda 4y ago
  I agree it's generally accurate, but I think it suffers from "truth by persistence" rather than "truth by consensus". That is, the editors who are the most persistent often "win". As an example, many years ago I edited some rather unflattering information to a controversial politician's Wikipedia article, properly referenced and cited of course. It was promptly removed by a "fan" and accused of "spreading lies" by referencing "obscure sites" or whatnot (the references were not obscure). I just ... gave up, because fuck this shit, and it's not all that important anyway. It is in the current version though, so someone took up the torch I guess. Either way, as a persistent and slightly-rude-but-not-rude-enough-to-be-banned editor you can exert a lot of control (and it takes quite a lot to be banned from Wikipedia in the first place). This is not a problem of "the left", or at least not uniquely so. In my example it was a right wing politician.
illuminerdy 4y ago
I remember when a well-respected doctor (in his field) started questioning the COVID narrative and Wikipedia let people literally erase him from wiki pages he had been on for years. None of the information on him was false, they just didn't want people using his experience and accomplishments to bolster his credibility. Saying that Wikipedia is "accurate and reliable" is like saying the corporate media is "trustworthy".
- hoffs 4y ago
  Which doctor
  - akolbe 4y ago
    Nice double-entendre. Kudos.
  - Manuel_D 4y ago
    I'm guessing this guy: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jay_Bhattacharya https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jay_Bhattacharya The scary thing is, he's essentially been proven right: China is facing a big issue where the rest of the world has herd immunity, but it's still resorting to draconian lockdowns. Bhattacharya was never a COVID denier, nor antivax, his main point was that isolation should have been targeted at the most vulnerable rather than applied nationwide.
    - alexvoda 4y ago
      > his main point was that isolation should have been targeted at the most vulnerable rather than applied nationwide. And you do not notice what the problems are with that solution compared to using lockdowns to keep spread under control until countermeasures (vaccines) are available?
      - Manuel_D 4y ago
        COVID's risk is not even remotely even across age. The overwhelming majority of the people who would potentially die from an infection are the elderly. His plan called for intense lockdown for elderly people and those with significant comorbidities. The overwhelming majority who are not at risk - vaccine or not - do not need to isolate.
cullinap 4y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23724917 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23724917
Manuel_D 4y ago
Wikipedia is fine for scientific topics. But for history, living persons, and any potential source other controversial it can be very slanted depending on who has ownership of the page. It can be interesting to open the talk tab on a page and get a sense of the kind of bias the page owners have. Often there's more content on the talk page than the article itself, one example I have on hand: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Ada_Lovelace/Archive_1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Ada_Lovelace/Archive_1
- Akronymus 4y ago
  Especially true for anything where media has any kind of stake in presenting one view point. Due to how sourcing works on wikipedia.
tweaktastic 4y ago
I think the main problem with the accuracy of Wikipedia comes into play when reading about events related to politics or similar controversial topics. I have seen plenty of wrong information on Wikipedia related to recent events which I knew for a fact that were wrong because those events happened in my city and the area in which I reside in. The information related to the field of science is accurate but can't say the same for modern events or history.
- Mountain_Skies 4y ago
  Without even looking, I'm willing to bet that articles related to sex and gender are heavily politicized despite being scientific topics (well, sex at least, gender is questionable). Likely the same for climate change, racial groups, and thousands of other scientific topics.
pilgrimfff 4y ago
I saw a solid video a couple days ago called "Why I hate Wikipedia (and you should too!)" https://youtu.be/-vmSFO1Zfo8 https://youtu.be/-vmSFO1Zfo8 I'd never given Wikipedia much thought, but it raised some very interesting points to think about. TLDR: Despite mediocre information, Wikipedia's ubiquity has supplanted the market for better sites dedicated to specific topics.
- wbsss4412 4y ago
  I’ll have to watch the video later to see how good their argument is… but I don’t but it. “The market” has seemingly deemed low value SEO spam to be what’s valuable. If Wikipedia didn’t exist, I imagine the alternative would more likely be garbage rather than quality.
  - pilgrimfff 4y ago
    In this case, "the market" is essentially just Google - who incidentally created the market for SEO spam. I don't necessarily blame Google for the tight integration with Wikipedia. It's much easier to deal with one site than many. I think it's disingenuous to blame "the market" for what's essentially the decision of a monopoly.
    - wbsss4412 4y ago
      Did the government grant Google a monopoly? This is a market outcome. Perfect competition is not the natural state of the market, even though free marketers prefer to hand wave it into existence.
      - asdff 4y ago
        The government is absolutely granting Google a monopoly today. They own the browser, your email, and search. If antitrust had any teeth in this era the company would have been nuked a decade ago if not even sooner.
        4y ago
VirusNewbie 4y ago
I think wikipedia could be saved by not being it a necessary condition to have a secondary* source. I can't remember the article (or maybe it was more than one), but I distinctly remember having an article cited that used a youtube interview as a source. The article then butchered the quote and extrapolated on the content of the video, and that was cited, despite the fact that you could see the actual content of the video itself!
pyuser583 4y ago
It varies a lot. When did Medieval Studies, I was told “Never cite, Wikipedia. Don’t even look at it.” A year later I was studying computer programming and “Wikipedia is an amazing source of information.” Medieval studies is a field where the general public believes many falsehoods (witch persecutions, etc). Wikipedia reflected that.
- akolbe 4y ago
  A friend of mine is a professor of medieval philsophy. He tried to contribute to Wikipedia for a while. He gave up in disgust. (The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which is also free, is much better for anything in that topic area.)
  - pyuser583 4y ago
    Medieval philosophy was my area of focus too! Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is very good - so is the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Fordham’s Internet Medieval Sourcebook is an absolute godsend. Another important resource is the “Cambridge Companion to …” series. It’s paid (about $45/book on Kindle), but will provide you with everything you need to start work on the topic.
yucky 4y ago
Wikipedia is an amazing resource, but we should be careful to realize where the bulk of its funding comes from. Wikipedia is mostly funded through the Wikimedia Endowment. From their footer: "The Endowment has been established, with an initial contribution by Wikimedia Foundation, as a Collective Action Fund at Tides Foundation (Tax ID# 51-0198509)" [0][1] The Tides Foundation is a "Donor Advised Fund", which effectively acts as a dark money PAC that funnels money from other non-profits and individual donors to progressive causes.[2] From the Wikipedia entry itself: "Tides Foundation is an American public charity and fiscal sponsor working to advance progressive causes and policy initiatives in areas such as the environment, health care, labor issues, immigrant rights, LGBTQ+ rights, women's rights and human rights. It was founded in San Francisco in 1976. Through donor advised funds, Tides distributes money from anonymous donors to other organizations, which are often politically liberal."[3] Also, the General Counsel of Wikimedia Foundation is Amanda Keton, who came over from Tides. "Prior to joining Wikimedia, Amanda was General Counsel of Tides Network, a national public foundation deploying donor-advised grants and investments to build a world of shared prosperity and social justice. While in that role, she worked with the Wikimedia Foundation to establish the Wikimedia Endowment, a permanent source of funding to support the Wikimedia projects and mission in perpetuity. She also served as Head of Tides Foundation and People Operations and the CEO of Tides Advocacy, the policy affiliate in the Tides family of organizations."[4] One would hope all of this would not lead to a strong bias in the way Wikipedia is edited & managed, but it's important that everyone understands the quite strong bias behind the organization itself. [0] - https://wikimediaendowment.org/ https://wikimediaendowment.org/ [1] - https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jan/15/wikipedia-fund-future https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jan/15/wikipedia... [2] - https://capitalresearch.org/article/tides-legal-laundering-an-incubator-for-the-left-three/ https://capitalresearch.org/article/tides-legal-laundering-a... [3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tides_Foundation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tides_Foundation [4] - https://wikimediafoundation.org/profile/amanda-keton/ https://wikimediafoundation.org/profile/amanda-keton/
- akolbe 4y ago
  Most of the Wikimedia Foundation's revenue comes from small donations, and part of that is then funneled to the Endowment at the Tides Foundation – which has never to date published audited accounts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2022-05-29/Opinion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2... This $100 million endowment was built in half the time anticipated: https://www.dailydot.com/debug/wikipedia-endownemnt-fundraising/ https://www.dailydot.com/debug/wikipedia-endownemnt-fundrais... The Wikimedia Foundation currently has almost $400 million in assets and reserves: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2022-06-26/Special_report https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2... That's five times as much as it had in 2015, when the Washington Post published an article titled "Wikipedia has a ton of money. So why is it begging you to donate yours?" https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/12/02/wikipedia-has-a-ton-of-money-so-why-is-it-begging-you-to-donate-yours/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/12...
Ekaros 4y ago
I'm happy with Wikipedia with hard facts. Numbers are usually good enough. Programming too. Physics and Chemistry no issue. Though haven't digged into more political sides of those. Anything topical and controversial the sources are clearly curated to one side. And likely rather untrustworthy. It never seems to drive to neutrality and being unbiased on these topics.
- Akronymus 4y ago
  And yet, some topics are so widely cited one sidedly that even people skeptical of biases tend to just go along with it anyways. (Gamergate, for example) https://youtu.be/xs69lv0UGNU https://youtu.be/xs69lv0UGNU
Beltalowda 4y ago
I have certainly edited quite a few inaccuracies and misrepresentations over the years. Example: the Wikipedia page of a certain controversial figure once contained a sentence along the lines of "in 2016 Duckburg Times revealed that Donald Duck had a criminal history". When checking the reference it was something like a disorderly conduct and resisting arrest misdemeanours at a party when they were 18 (over 20 years ago) or something along those lines and some minor traffic citations. Is some stupid drunken thing they did when they were 18 (no felonies) a "criminal history"? I don't think anyone would phrase it as such. This is the kind of "bias" people with axes to grind can put in; I don't even think it's intentional (or not always, at least) because summarizing an entire story is hard, but the entire story was already a red herring hit piece IMHO, and summarizing it as "criminal history" a horrible summarisation of said red herring. But ... people will read the Wikipedia article and go "zomg, that guy is a criminal!!!!"
- akolbe 4y ago
  I came across a case where a disgruntled former lodger added stuff like that to a woman academic's Wikipedia biography, citing purported court documents (alleged driving offences) that had never been the subject of a press report. The whole thing was presented under the heading “Brushes with the law” and took up more than half the body of the biography.
more_corn 4y ago
Citation required
asdff 4y ago
For some topics, you can go through the years and see dramatically different articles on the same topic that have been entirely overhauled, sometimes removing sources and detail to mask nuance unfortunately. The incentives are high to influence what is written for certain articles on there when everyone and their mother says "just check on wikipedia" these days for the source of truth on anything they don't have expertise with. How could they not be?
rcktmrtn 4y ago
Combining the current-ness and expansiveness of current research and journalism with the connectedness and cohesiveness of an encyclopedia is, without a question, a revolutionary product. But I think when people say that Wikipedia is "accurate" and "reliable", they mean nothing more or less than that it's a faithful rendition of what you'd get if you grind up a certain set of secondary sources into a slop and bake it into a homogeneous pie. Within any given article, the mistakes in Wikipedia are nothing more or less than you would see slip through in a random mainstream newpaper or academic journal. Wikipedia feels like a grand unified "view from nowhere". In a scientific journal, you can speak with a neutral point of view, representing the consensus of experts in that field. But when your scope is "everything", who are the domain experts? Is it the domain experts for the specific page (who may have fringe views about adjacent topics), or is it the editors who have a shallow consensus about everything, despite not being experts on the page in question? ...and ultimately, why do we take it as a given that this question can be meaningfully resolved?

46 points by ctrlmeta 4y ago

Wikipedia is already taken seriously enough by most people under the age of 50 that I know. That said, it does still have issues and by its very nature is prone to organized disinformation campaigns. Yes, it will be corrected in time, but if timed correctly it could be too late. Imagine this: A post on social media site X goes viral. The post makes some wildly divisive claim about an American political figure. The claim is untrue, but the posts virality leads many to believe it. Simultaneously, a group of dedicated attackers change the political figures wiki page to match the disinformation in the viral post, keeping it like that until the posts virality cools down. The Wikipedia article gets linked in the comments of the post. The hundreds of thousands of people who saw that post at its peak all now believe the false claim. The malicious actor benefits.

hulitu 4y ago
> Wikipedia is already taken seriously enough by most people under the age of 50 that I know. Seriously , yes, enough , no. And i would say people under the age of 18 and their teachers take Wikipedia as a serious source. There are some good articles on Wikipedia but the majority is lacking quality.
Akronymus 4y ago
Then media outlets start picking up on it and include it in their reporting, then reporting on reporting happens and so on, then someone adds it to wikipedia with the news source, and then that gets uaed as a reference without saying so. Then those new artikles get added to the wiki and it becomes an established fact.
- akolbe 4y ago
  Wikipedia has a list of cases where this precise sequence of events occurred: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_citogenesis_incidents#Known_incidents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_citogenesis_...

peanut_worm 4y ago

It can be taken seriously enough but I can also change Suleiman the Magnificent’s birthplace to Nairobi and no one will notice for a week. Wikipedia should publish curated “editions” like a traditional encyclopedia.

duckmysick 4y ago
I assume curating would mean freezing and cross-checking each article. This would take a while (I imagine years) and by the time it's done the information would be outdated.
esperent 4y ago
> I can also change Suleiman the Magnificent’s birthplace to Nairobi and no one will notice for a week. Have you actually tried doing something like that? You might be surprised how fast it gets reverted.
- akolbe 4y ago
  I think it's a case of a million people trying, and 99% being reverted. Which sounds great, until you realise that it means ten thousand bits of nonsense aren't spotted. Case in point: https://www.dailydot.com/unclick/amelia-bedelia-wikipedia-hoax/ https://www.dailydot.com/unclick/amelia-bedelia-wikipedia-ho...
- peanut_worm 4y ago
  Yes. I have had edits stay for months.
  - akolbe 4y ago
    This one stayed for ten years: https://wikipediocracy.com/2022/08/11/wikipedias-credibility-is-toast/ https://wikipediocracy.com/2022/08/11/wikipedias-credibility...
marginalia_nu 4y ago
I don't think vandalism is the big problem. It's not hard to find articles that are written with some agenda, either product advertisement or political motives, but presented with the same objective encyclopedic tone as the rest. This article is a pretty good example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pair_programming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pair_programming The entire article is basically an advertisement for the idea, citing a handful of fairly old studies, including prominently a fairly odd one in its own section: "In an online survey of pair programmers from 2000, 96% of programmers stated that they enjoyed work more while pair programming than programming alone. Furthermore, 95% said that they were more confident in their work when they pair programmed. [...]" Just... stop and think about that survey for a moment. At a glance you might not catch it, but they basically asked people who prefer pair programming whether they prefer pair programming, and discovered that yeah, almost all of them did. Both the "indicators of non-performance" and "pairing variations" also seem oddly out of place in a wiki article.

JoeAltmaier 4y ago

You get burned even once, you get wary.

PopAlongKid 4y ago

[from the article] >I suspect in part because many gatekeepers of knowledge – journalists, scientists, teachers, the Encyclopedia Britannica – simply don’t like the idea that anonymous amateurs are competing on their domain. Similar comment, and additional recent discussion, here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32793755 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32793755

akolbe 4y ago
The "Why I hate Wikipedia" YouTube video discussed at the other thread you link was made by YouTuber and journalist J. J. McCullough. You wanna see something funny? This discussion is from 2008: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/J.J._McCullough https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletio... The J. J. McCullough biography was created and deleted a total of five times on Wikipedia (with two different spellings of J.J.): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/J.J._McCullough_(2nd_nomination) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletio... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/J.J._McCullough_(3rd_nomination) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletio... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/J._J._McCullough https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletio... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/J._J._McCullough_(2nd_nomination) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletio... I believe he may not be telling the whole story in that video.

beardyw 4y ago

Something close to the truth is the best we will ever know.

bacchusracine 4y ago

Hahahhahaha....evidence they say....hahahahahah. Exhibit A: https://www.vice.com/en/article/pkgbwm/chinese-woman-fake-russian-history-wikipedia https://www.vice.com/en/article/pkgbwm/chinese-woman-fake-ru...

chasebro 4y ago
What a great example of how accurate Wikipedia is, someone went to extreme lengths to falsify information, they were discovered and their edits reverted, as happens in most cases
- akolbe 4y ago
  Well, yes, after ten years, just as in the case of the toaster. And the translations of her Featured Article in three other Wikipedia language versions had STILL not been corrected last time I looked.
- Spooky23 4y ago
  As a joke, some of my colleagues created a fake persona for another colleague after obtaining an old picture of him in punk rocker garb from college. It was a long con, they created a fake band, added references to various obscure pages, etc. ultimately a page was created with the photo posted that followed every Wikipedia policy except for being false. I’m sure people are doing that professionally. The problem with Wikipedia is that it’s awesome except for when it isn’t. The weakness of the system is that it depends on arbitrary standards of notability and online reference. Not novel problems but you need to have a different kind of critical eye than other platforms.
  - akolbe 4y ago
    Then there was the case of the man whose image was used for two years to illustrate the Wikipedia article on a serial killer. https://www.vice.com/en/article/5dgpnq/wikipedia-and-google-identified-wrong-man-as-a-serial-killer-for-years https://www.vice.com/en/article/5dgpnq/wikipedia-and-google-...
  - 4y ago

freedude 4y ago

The interesting thing about truth is that it is binary by its nature. Something is either true or false. There is no "My Truth" or "Your Truth" as the public school system would corrupt you into believing but there is only "The Truth". Since you cannot account for a random person telling the truth without recourse, there is no implicit trust in Wikipedia. The lie in the world is that people are basically good. No, people are basically greedy of fame and fortune. People want and they mostly want the wrong things at the wrong times and for the wrong reasons. Given these facts trust cannot be implied if reputation and gain are not inherent in the founding of the trust. Zero trust is even worse because now you have nothing. Wikipedia is untrustworthy at best and is only useful as a stepping stone to the truth not as a source and certainly not as an immutable source.

armchairhacker 4y ago
Truth is rarely binary , it’s nuanced and detailed and when you convert it into a simple statement you inject your own opinion. The world isn’t black and white. For example, you’re right that people are naturally greedy, but most are also naturally altruistic. Many people are kind to strangers, and provide help as long as it doesn’t get in their way. Most Wikipedia authors want the popularity which is why they publish, but they’re not publishing the wrong information (esp. because it’s more likely to be removed). Wikipedia is for the most part trustworthy because there are a lot of people who have dedicated themselves to providing “truth”, and while these people each have their own biases especially wrt controversial articles, the factual content is agreed on and so that it what ultimately gets published.
- _aavaa_ 4y ago
  What you are describing is "consensus" among those with the power to veto or edit articles.

isaacfrond 4y ago

I volunteered for a while on vandalism watch. You would not believe the onslaught of vandalism that is occurring continuously, around the clock. It is only through its dedicated volunteers, armed with ever more sophisticated tools that this sea of trouble is kept at bay. It was an eye opener to me. Nevertheless, surprisingly even, most vandalism is actually very quickly found and corrected. Even those devious small changes are not so easy to slip in, as some think.

akolbe 4y ago

> Journalists and academics can’t use it as a reference. Nor can students, though they can use Britannica. Lots of journalists do use it. That is why there is a bunch of BBC articles claiming that the electric toaster was invented by a Scot called "Alan MacMasters" ... they used Wikipedia without checking its information. It was completely made up: https://wikipediocracy.com/2022/08/11/wikipedias-credibility-is-toast/ https://wikipediocracy.com/2022/08/11/wikipedias-credibility... A book published by Cambridge University Press says that coatis are also called "Brazilian aardvarks" – because the writer copied from Wikipedia. Completely made up. https://www.theregister.com/2017/01/16/wikipedia_16_birthday_fails/ https://www.theregister.com/2017/01/16/wikipedia_16_birthday... Wikipedia simply has different flaws than older reference works, and it's important to be aware of them. Another thing not to trust blindly is the Wikipedia fundraising banners. In 2015, the Washington Post published a piece titled, "Wikipedia has a ton of money. So why is it begging you to donate yours?" https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/12/02/wikipedia-has-a-ton-of-money-so-why-is-it-begging-you-to-donate-yours/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/12... In that piece, the Washington Post reported that the Wikimedia Foundation had "net assets in excess of $77 million". Today, the Foundation's assets (including its $115 million endowment with the Tides Foundation) stand at around five times as much: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/1/1e/Wikimedia_Foundation_FY2020-2021_Audit_Report.pdf#page=5 https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/1/1e/Wikim... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2022-06-26/Special_report https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2... Yet the fundraising banners and emails sound as desperate and guilt-tripping as ever. "Donate to keep Wikipedia online ...", "Donate to protect Wikipedia's independence ..." Many Wikipedians are disgusted with that: https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org/thread/YKYDOBBH2RHJO2DHNP4YEPH37J3L5PBH/ https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@list... Seriously, I love Wikipedia. I have been contributing to it for more than fifteen years. But I would say most volunteers who contribute to Wikipedia would NEVER advise anyone – say, a family member who is starting out as a doctor or journalist – to trust anything said in Wikipedia blindly. They'd ALWAYS tell you to check the references, and in a case of "Who invented X" to seek corroboration in a 20th-century source.

akolbe 4y ago

LorenPechtel 4y ago

It's generally accurate. It suffers from the fundamental problem of truth by consensus rather than truth by competence, though. There is severe cherry-picking about disputed issues. An experience I had some years back makes it very clear. It was an Israel/Palestine article, I noticed one item that should have a link didn't. Being naive about it's biases at the time I added the missing link--no words changed, just the link added behind a couple of words. It got reverted--that's a link the left would prefer people not make.

esperent 4y ago
> reverted--that's a link the left would prefer people not make. Notably, you haven't shared the link here. So all we're getting is vague accusations about "the left". What was the link? And why do you think it was removed?
- yucky 4y ago
  Not to speak for the person you're replying to, but I included several sources in my response above, if that helps. Just in terms of their financial/organizational potential for bias
Beltalowda 4y ago
I agree it's generally accurate, but I think it suffers from "truth by persistence" rather than "truth by consensus". That is, the editors who are the most persistent often "win". As an example, many years ago I edited some rather unflattering information to a controversial politician's Wikipedia article, properly referenced and cited of course. It was promptly removed by a "fan" and accused of "spreading lies" by referencing "obscure sites" or whatnot (the references were not obscure). I just ... gave up, because fuck this shit, and it's not all that important anyway. It is in the current version though, so someone took up the torch I guess. Either way, as a persistent and slightly-rude-but-not-rude-enough-to-be-banned editor you can exert a lot of control (and it takes quite a lot to be banned from Wikipedia in the first place). This is not a problem of "the left", or at least not uniquely so. In my example it was a right wing politician.

illuminerdy 4y ago

I remember when a well-respected doctor (in his field) started questioning the COVID narrative and Wikipedia let people literally erase him from wiki pages he had been on for years. None of the information on him was false, they just didn't want people using his experience and accomplishments to bolster his credibility. Saying that Wikipedia is "accurate and reliable" is like saying the corporate media is "trustworthy".

hoffs 4y ago
Which doctor
- akolbe 4y ago
  Nice double-entendre. Kudos.
- Manuel_D 4y ago
  I'm guessing this guy: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jay_Bhattacharya https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jay_Bhattacharya The scary thing is, he's essentially been proven right: China is facing a big issue where the rest of the world has herd immunity, but it's still resorting to draconian lockdowns. Bhattacharya was never a COVID denier, nor antivax, his main point was that isolation should have been targeted at the most vulnerable rather than applied nationwide.
  - alexvoda 4y ago
    > his main point was that isolation should have been targeted at the most vulnerable rather than applied nationwide. And you do not notice what the problems are with that solution compared to using lockdowns to keep spread under control until countermeasures (vaccines) are available?
    - Manuel_D 4y ago
      COVID's risk is not even remotely even across age. The overwhelming majority of the people who would potentially die from an infection are the elderly. His plan called for intense lockdown for elderly people and those with significant comorbidities. The overwhelming majority who are not at risk - vaccine or not - do not need to isolate.

cullinap 4y ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23724917 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23724917

Manuel_D 4y ago

Wikipedia is fine for scientific topics. But for history, living persons, and any potential source other controversial it can be very slanted depending on who has ownership of the page. It can be interesting to open the talk tab on a page and get a sense of the kind of bias the page owners have. Often there's more content on the talk page than the article itself, one example I have on hand: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Ada_Lovelace/Archive_1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Ada_Lovelace/Archive_1

Akronymus 4y ago
Especially true for anything where media has any kind of stake in presenting one view point. Due to how sourcing works on wikipedia.

tweaktastic 4y ago

I think the main problem with the accuracy of Wikipedia comes into play when reading about events related to politics or similar controversial topics. I have seen plenty of wrong information on Wikipedia related to recent events which I knew for a fact that were wrong because those events happened in my city and the area in which I reside in. The information related to the field of science is accurate but can't say the same for modern events or history.

Mountain_Skies 4y ago
Without even looking, I'm willing to bet that articles related to sex and gender are heavily politicized despite being scientific topics (well, sex at least, gender is questionable). Likely the same for climate change, racial groups, and thousands of other scientific topics.

pilgrimfff 4y ago

I saw a solid video a couple days ago called "Why I hate Wikipedia (and you should too!)" https://youtu.be/-vmSFO1Zfo8 https://youtu.be/-vmSFO1Zfo8 I'd never given Wikipedia much thought, but it raised some very interesting points to think about. TLDR: Despite mediocre information, Wikipedia's ubiquity has supplanted the market for better sites dedicated to specific topics.

wbsss4412 4y ago
I’ll have to watch the video later to see how good their argument is… but I don’t but it. “The market” has seemingly deemed low value SEO spam to be what’s valuable. If Wikipedia didn’t exist, I imagine the alternative would more likely be garbage rather than quality.
- pilgrimfff 4y ago
  In this case, "the market" is essentially just Google - who incidentally created the market for SEO spam. I don't necessarily blame Google for the tight integration with Wikipedia. It's much easier to deal with one site than many. I think it's disingenuous to blame "the market" for what's essentially the decision of a monopoly.
  - wbsss4412 4y ago
    Did the government grant Google a monopoly? This is a market outcome. Perfect competition is not the natural state of the market, even though free marketers prefer to hand wave it into existence.
    - asdff 4y ago
      The government is absolutely granting Google a monopoly today. They own the browser, your email, and search. If antitrust had any teeth in this era the company would have been nuked a decade ago if not even sooner.
      - 4y ago

VirusNewbie 4y ago

I think wikipedia could be saved by not being it a necessary condition to have a secondary* source. I can't remember the article (or maybe it was more than one), but I distinctly remember having an article cited that used a youtube interview as a source. The article then butchered the quote and extrapolated on the content of the video, and that was cited, despite the fact that you could see the actual content of the video itself!

pyuser583 4y ago

It varies a lot. When did Medieval Studies, I was told “Never cite, Wikipedia. Don’t even look at it.” A year later I was studying computer programming and “Wikipedia is an amazing source of information.” Medieval studies is a field where the general public believes many falsehoods (witch persecutions, etc). Wikipedia reflected that.

akolbe 4y ago
A friend of mine is a professor of medieval philsophy. He tried to contribute to Wikipedia for a while. He gave up in disgust. (The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which is also free, is much better for anything in that topic area.)
- pyuser583 4y ago
  Medieval philosophy was my area of focus too! Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is very good - so is the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Fordham’s Internet Medieval Sourcebook is an absolute godsend. Another important resource is the “Cambridge Companion to …” series. It’s paid (about $45/book on Kindle), but will provide you with everything you need to start work on the topic.

yucky 4y ago

Wikipedia is an amazing resource, but we should be careful to realize where the bulk of its funding comes from. Wikipedia is mostly funded through the Wikimedia Endowment. From their footer: "The Endowment has been established, with an initial contribution by Wikimedia Foundation, as a Collective Action Fund at Tides Foundation (Tax ID# 51-0198509)" [0][1] The Tides Foundation is a "Donor Advised Fund", which effectively acts as a dark money PAC that funnels money from other non-profits and individual donors to progressive causes.[2] From the Wikipedia entry itself: "Tides Foundation is an American public charity and fiscal sponsor working to advance progressive causes and policy initiatives in areas such as the environment, health care, labor issues, immigrant rights, LGBTQ+ rights, women's rights and human rights. It was founded in San Francisco in 1976. Through donor advised funds, Tides distributes money from anonymous donors to other organizations, which are often politically liberal."[3] Also, the General Counsel of Wikimedia Foundation is Amanda Keton, who came over from Tides. "Prior to joining Wikimedia, Amanda was General Counsel of Tides Network, a national public foundation deploying donor-advised grants and investments to build a world of shared prosperity and social justice. While in that role, she worked with the Wikimedia Foundation to establish the Wikimedia Endowment, a permanent source of funding to support the Wikimedia projects and mission in perpetuity. She also served as Head of Tides Foundation and People Operations and the CEO of Tides Advocacy, the policy affiliate in the Tides family of organizations."[4] One would hope all of this would not lead to a strong bias in the way Wikipedia is edited & managed, but it's important that everyone understands the quite strong bias behind the organization itself. [0] - https://wikimediaendowment.org/ https://wikimediaendowment.org/ [1] - https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jan/15/wikipedia-fund-future https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jan/15/wikipedia... [2] - https://capitalresearch.org/article/tides-legal-laundering-an-incubator-for-the-left-three/ https://capitalresearch.org/article/tides-legal-laundering-a... [3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tides_Foundation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tides_Foundation [4] - https://wikimediafoundation.org/profile/amanda-keton/ https://wikimediafoundation.org/profile/amanda-keton/

akolbe 4y ago
Most of the Wikimedia Foundation's revenue comes from small donations, and part of that is then funneled to the Endowment at the Tides Foundation – which has never to date published audited accounts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2022-05-29/Opinion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2... This $100 million endowment was built in half the time anticipated: https://www.dailydot.com/debug/wikipedia-endownemnt-fundraising/ https://www.dailydot.com/debug/wikipedia-endownemnt-fundrais... The Wikimedia Foundation currently has almost $400 million in assets and reserves: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2022-06-26/Special_report https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2... That's five times as much as it had in 2015, when the Washington Post published an article titled "Wikipedia has a ton of money. So why is it begging you to donate yours?" https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/12/02/wikipedia-has-a-ton-of-money-so-why-is-it-begging-you-to-donate-yours/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/12...

Ekaros 4y ago

I'm happy with Wikipedia with hard facts. Numbers are usually good enough. Programming too. Physics and Chemistry no issue. Though haven't digged into more political sides of those. Anything topical and controversial the sources are clearly curated to one side. And likely rather untrustworthy. It never seems to drive to neutrality and being unbiased on these topics.

Akronymus 4y ago
And yet, some topics are so widely cited one sidedly that even people skeptical of biases tend to just go along with it anyways. (Gamergate, for example) https://youtu.be/xs69lv0UGNU https://youtu.be/xs69lv0UGNU

Beltalowda 4y ago

I have certainly edited quite a few inaccuracies and misrepresentations over the years. Example: the Wikipedia page of a certain controversial figure once contained a sentence along the lines of "in 2016 Duckburg Times revealed that Donald Duck had a criminal history". When checking the reference it was something like a disorderly conduct and resisting arrest misdemeanours at a party when they were 18 (over 20 years ago) or something along those lines and some minor traffic citations. Is some stupid drunken thing they did when they were 18 (no felonies) a "criminal history"? I don't think anyone would phrase it as such. This is the kind of "bias" people with axes to grind can put in; I don't even think it's intentional (or not always, at least) because summarizing an entire story is hard, but the entire story was already a red herring hit piece IMHO, and summarizing it as "criminal history" a horrible summarisation of said red herring. But ... people will read the Wikipedia article and go "zomg, that guy is a criminal!!!!"

akolbe 4y ago
I came across a case where a disgruntled former lodger added stuff like that to a woman academic's Wikipedia biography, citing purported court documents (alleged driving offences) that had never been the subject of a press report. The whole thing was presented under the heading “Brushes with the law” and took up more than half the body of the biography.

more_corn 4y ago

Citation required

asdff 4y ago

For some topics, you can go through the years and see dramatically different articles on the same topic that have been entirely overhauled, sometimes removing sources and detail to mask nuance unfortunately. The incentives are high to influence what is written for certain articles on there when everyone and their mother says "just check on wikipedia" these days for the source of truth on anything they don't have expertise with. How could they not be?

rcktmrtn 4y ago

Combining the current-ness and expansiveness of current research and journalism with the connectedness and cohesiveness of an encyclopedia is, without a question, a revolutionary product. But I think when people say that Wikipedia is "accurate" and "reliable", they mean nothing more or less than that it's a faithful rendition of what you'd get if you grind up a certain set of secondary sources into a slop and bake it into a homogeneous pie. Within any given article, the mistakes in Wikipedia are nothing more or less than you would see slip through in a random mainstream newpaper or academic journal. Wikipedia feels like a grand unified "view from nowhere". In a scientific journal, you can speak with a neutral point of view, representing the consensus of experts in that field. But when your scope is "everything", who are the domain experts? Is it the domain experts for the specific page (who may have fringe views about adjacent topics), or is it the editors who have a shallow consensus about everything, despite not being experts on the page in question? ...and ultimately, why do we take it as a given that this question can be meaningfully resolved?