Except you can use obscure dead tree books as sources and no one will take the effort to check whether the book indeed says so. Use a book obscure enough -- especially in a non-English language -- and it becomes almost impossible to execute said check.

It depend so. The amount of trust I want to give. By citing an obscure book I can judge the fact "hm, that book sounds obscure, why isn't there some other source?" and then decide how much weight I give to it.

And if I don't have the book at hand I can identify the person who added the citation and can see what other edits they did to judge their domain knowledge.

No one does this. And Wikipedia myths spread to other media until it's hard to pinpoint where it started.

Sometimes referred to as citogenesis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circular_reporting#Circular_re...

There is a list of known incidents: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_citogenesis_...

But in case they do you can ask your other well established sleeper account for a book reference then reply a few days later with a: This is what I found posting. Then when asked you can point to yourself and say I've asked him. Do a conversation with yourself weighting how a book is hard to validate vs how important the information is to the article.

A bit of topic. Does anyone know, why the english Wikipedia site about the JFK movie does not talk about what was fiction, what was true in the movie and what is unknow? On the german page about the movie, they have a lot about it.

I understand there are differences in languages. But in this case, in english, the most important information is missing. So it's just a movie, all fiction?!?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/JFK_(film)

In general you can sometimes get insight from the "Talk" section for these kinds of questions.

In this case, there was a "historical inaccuracies" section which was removed due to sourcing concerns. Not sure how well it holds up to what is (/was was the time) up on the German one.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:JFK_(film)/Archive_1#Qu...

Sometimes it can be up to chance or culture, sometimes editorial differences.

EDIT: Come to think of it, in this case maybe the German Wikipedia just has misproportionate coverage and activity for its speaker-base (this would certainly fit with my preconception)? I recall reacting to pages on topics from other countries where I'd be surprised to find it covered in German and not the native language,

> So it's just a movie, all fiction?!?

Well, yes.

I've seen several movies based on real events that have a section about the level of similarity to actual events

Examples off the top of my head:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argo_(2012_film)#Historical_in...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/12_Years_a_Slave_(film)#Histor...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spotlight_(film)#Historical_ac...

The german site has it too. That's why I was wondering.

According to Wikipedia Elon Musk is the founder of Tesla. That's how reliable Wikipedia is

"The company was incorporated as Tesla Motors, Inc. on July 1, 2003, by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning.[13]"

No, it doesn't.

"It was started in 2003 by Martin Eberhard, Dylan Stott, and Elon Musk (who also co-founded PayPal and SpaceX and is the CEO of SpaceX)." [1]

[1] https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla%2c_Inc%2e

1) 'simple' wikipedia isn't 'main' wikipedia - same as any other language wikipedias. 2) You can edit and fix mistakes if you see that as a mistake.

1) Nobody said anything about qualifying what wikipedia is. However, this is wikipedia, as one can see by looking at the domain in the url, wikipedia.org. Even so, there are many pages that cover tesla at wikipedia.org. Besides, if you just google for, "What companies has Elon Musk founded?" without quotes you will get a google listing of companies founded by Elon Musk. The very first of those is Tesla!

2) That was the point of the parent's comment! There are many pages at wikipedia that contain conflicting information.

Okay, fair point about the second part - my mistake indeed.

But I have to push back about the first part. The throwawayaug8 did say "According to Wikipedia Elon Musk is the founder of Tesla. That's how reliable Wikipedia is" - which I understood as a claim that "Wikipedia is unreliable". Then marak830 claimed that such claim is wrong and IncRnd claimed that the original claim is true because 'Simple' Wikipedia has an article with such text.

But I just have to disagree here - I believe that the 'main' Wikipedia is mostly or more accurate than any other Wikipedia - be it 'simple' or 'lithuanian' (https://lt.wikipedia.org/).

I believe that it's unfair to judge the main wikipedia project by using it's smaller 'translation' branches - the main one has hundreds of thousands of contributtors, and smaller wikipedias have way less.

In a same way I wouldn't say that whole javascript is bad because there are some bad frameworks that are based on it.

But I don't know, I am not an expert, I'm just a random wikipedia user :shrug_emoji:

PayPal was launched by a Tiel owned company that also bought another company that Musk didn't start, zip2. Musk became CEO of PayPal, and was fired a month later for incompetence.

Elon Musk is legally "a founder" of Tesla, but that's different from having founded Tesla, and that difference doesn't say anything about Wikipedia's credibility.

Where did you read that? I highly doubt that such a change will get approved.

IMDB is just as verifiable as Wikipedia.

It cites its sources. In fact, all it is a list of citations.