There are some math and physics articles that can go 10 paragraphs without a single citation. They'd be great blog posts or chapters in a book. But they're poor quality Wikipedia articles.
I understand anon IP blocks, of course. But not logged-in ones. Especially when (afaict) all of Mullvad's (London at least) IPs are blocked.
Not to mention, I very very much doubt that those articles prove every property they present (since I've never seen a math text of any kind do that, essentially).
If you allow that, proofs made using proof assistants prove every property they present.
And of course, Principia Mathematica (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principia_Mathematica) is a non-computer example.
Both get tedious fast if you try to understand a proof from the axioms up. That’s why you’ll rarely find a publication starting from almost zero.
And yes, sometimes there are conflicts. In France, we have two competing definition of a limit (relating to wether you include the point in its neighbourhood), one being the traditional one, taught in schools, and one being the one that's become the world standard and used from university onwards.
How do you arbiter that on wikipedia without sources ?
So on top-tier companies, the pages are cluttered with details of brief moves in and out of old headquarters buildings -- plus long-ago product rollouts and cancellations -- plus stock-market zigzags in 2013, 2015, etc. For authors/artists, each work is treated in isolation, without an effort to define their style and how it evolved.
There's no natural entry path for a subject expert to step in and make it all coherent. Instead, the mudslides just keep coming.
Can't think of an example off the top of my head, but it's super weird seeing a whole paragraph about something that's only relevant to historians followed by 1 sentence about something that revolutionized the field a few years ago and is now widely deployed in production.
I work in ML and have found wikipedia to be a very important reference when I do any research. Which is what an encyclopedia is supposed to be.
On Wikipedia's entry for Facebook, there's no discussion in the 2006-12 section about Facebook's steps to monetize the site around targeted ads. That has had gigantic global impact and was the impetus for Meta/Facebook's emergence as one of the world's most profitable companies. But Facebook never "announced" that it was doing this. So the entry is clogged with a string of quite minor "announcements" that it did make -- touching on short-lived headquarters moves, feature tweaks, obscure awards, etc. instead.
Wikipedia's entry on Maine Republican Senator Susan Collins is an achingly long list of votes she's taken over the years, or one-line quotes about her positions at various moments in time, without any effort to write coherently about what's been consistent or evolving in her political views. Also absent is any nuanced sense of how Collins's journey interacted with changing political tides. We end up with a 20,000-word string of factoids that goes on forever, with scant insight about her enduring impact, core principles, etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_Collins
There is a whole section and separate article on her political positions.
As an encyclopedic reference it looks like a pretty good reference. Obviously a strong narrative like a new Yorker profile can't be expected of an encyclopedia.
And, in my absolute favorite, Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin wrote the article about anarchy.
This is tricky, because some editors on Wikipedia would interpret that as "original research" and remove it. The rule of thumb is that the citation needs to contain the information added, not just allude to it.
There is no solution. Perhaps truth was always an illusion, but the illusion has been destroyed and it is unravelling society.
A consensus of reputation used to govern these things, but now reputation means almost nothing and there are no mechanisms for consensus on the web. Attempts at consensus are all based in censorship and what remains of reputation is a perverted proxy for "ability to get attention".
I'm thinking back to going in to a library, where a given topic would generally have 0-3 books. Books often put together by a single person, a person often chosen because of personal relationships with a publisher, plus that publisher's intent to turn a profit. Or opening up a daily newspaper, where I might get a few paragraphs on a topic, written by one person and edited by a couple more, all paid for by an ad-supported company run by people who often had local political connections.
There may be no mechanism for consensus on the web, but Wikipedia certainly has one, one that has worked reasonably well for 20 years at this point.
I'll also note you must have missed my question, as I don't think you have answered it.
https://thegrayzone.com/2020/06/10/wikipedia-formally-censor...
And I'll point out for the last time that you still haven't answered my initial question. If you're just going to keep dodging, I think I'm done here.
The entire internet points to wikipedia and its consensus mechanism is inherently vulnerable to editors for hire, as clearly demonstrated with scores of links.
So my answer is "pick any publication from 1980 and it is better because its bias can be audited and it is not polluting every search query I make"
I agree that Wikipedia's mechanism has its challenges; anybody who knows the site does. But it's vastly better than "any publication from 1980" because every edit is tracked, the citations should be available for all to see, and people can object to and/or edit bad content.
Just as an example of how a book from the olden tymes could go wrong, consider Trump's "The Art of the Deal". It sold more than a million copies, but its ghostwriter took 20 years to admit that it was a lot of horseshit: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/07/25/donald-trumps-...
Wikipedia is way more auditable than that book or most books from that era. And way more auditable than The Gray Zone that you've chosen to cite.
https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/expert/katherine-maher/
Then-US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton sent a representative of the Office of eDiplomacy to the 2012 Wikimania conference, who at the time was "leading an ambitious State Department initiative that uses social media and online platforms to change the way employees communicate and reach outside their boundaries to advance U.S. foreign policy interests."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/dc-politics/federal-fac...
His Wikimania speech is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0NsY48OQdc&t=457s
A few years later, the person put in charge of facilitating the Wikimedia Strategy 2030 process was Hillary Clinton's former Trips Director, Whitney Williams:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/...
The PR company that has looked after Wikimedia for the past decade or so is Minassian Media, run by the chief communications and marketing officer of the Clinton Foundation, who formerly was assistant press secretary and director of television news in the White House for President Bill Clinton:
https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/wikipedias-d...
The Chief Advancement Officer at Wikimedia is the politically very well connected lady here:
https://sfgov.org/civilservice/sites/default/files/Documents...
The current CEO is Maryana Iskander; she has been a speaker at the Clinton Global Initiative and presented her work to Bill Clinton in South Africa.
Wikimedia also partners extensively with the Tides Foundation and Tides Advocacy ... So there are very significant political connections.
You can make of it what you will.
I still find it interesting though that the organisation attracts so many politicos. And as far as the Wikimedia Foundation's Strategy 2030 is concerned, it's absolutely relevant. A lot of people in the volunteer community felt that the result of the strategy discussions was kind of preordained, rather than a reflection of the community's will. ("By 2030, Wikimedia will become the essential infrastructure of the ecosystem of free knowledge, and anyone who shares our vision will be able to join us ..." etc.)
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/...
There is more indirect influence on content by the Wikimedia Foundation nowadays, where they fund community organizers to increase coverage in a particular topic area.
An early example that taught them how not to do this (as well as a clear example of undue donor influence) was the Belfer Center scandal:
https://thewikipedian.net/2014/04/02/bats-in-the-belfer-a-be...
That was a scandal only because the Wikipedia volunteer community paid attention.
https://www.dailydot.com/debug/wikipedia-paid-editing-scanda...
A more recent example that seems unobjectionable is this one:
https://diff.wikimedia.org/2022/09/22/join-the-organizer-lab...
In that case I wish you luck in finding the right place to discuss it.
How an an explicit web of trust not a solution?
Imagine a system where you can keep a local database of people/sites/pages you know and how much you trust them, selectively expose parts of that database to your immediate friends and/or the web as a whole, and lookup/query the databases exposed by contacts.
"My friend F1 assigns a trust score of 0.9 to website W1, and I assign a trust score of 0.9 to F1, so I trust this site 0.81 and I'm willing to make financial transactions on it without further research (but not give it my SSN)."
"My friend F2 trusts random R1 0.7, who trusts random R2 0.5, who trusts random R3 0.4, who is pushing this new cryptocurrency - maybe I should talk with F2 about R1 and R2 before doing anything with this..."
"My friend F3 distrusts site W2 with a score of -0.7, I'm not going to shop there."
"My friend F4 is a history expert and distrusts this Wikipedia page on history with a score of -0.5, so it's probably not reliable."
What would be wrong with this system?
Linking echo chambers to mutually trusted echo chambers isn't going to lead people to objective truth. It's going to introduce flat-earthers to ghost hunters.
> > Perhaps truth was always an illusion
But my interpretation of what they meant by "very concept of truth" is something like "consensus reality;" where the vast majority of people trust something is true. A network of trust is fragmented bubbles of distinct truths.
> What would be wrong with this system?
For starters, I don't know that it's a priori better than the current fragmented bubbles of distinct truths we have. Are more fragmented bubbles better? For some populations or people, maybe; for society? It's less clear.
But I think the real thing wrong with web of trust systems is that the value is tied up in network effects and you have to solve for adoption.
---
I say that as someone who generally thinks this is a useful way of approaching the problem of trust. I've brainstormed building this too many times to count. :)
I want everyone to get as close a proximity to the truth as is possible and for us as a society to achieve consensus around what are the facts and what should be done about them.
What you describe, at scale, is a social credit system. It does feel like an inevitability and one that will produce unprecedented collateral damage, but may save civilization.
In other words, a web of trust trying to replace Wikipedia is useless to me after a couple hops, so next to zero material will be covered by it.
Its math and science content is too nonsensical to be useful.
I occasionally read a history article, maybe once every 6 months. But history from things happening hundreds to thousands of years ago, predating modern media... sorry historians, it might as well be fiction.
I'm sure someone has thought long and hard about why the content is losing quality.
This is a much harder problem for an encyclopedia than for a textbook chapter or a journal paper, because each article is supposed to (somewhat) stand alone and be both broadly accessible and somewhat comprehensive. For a textbook chapter you can systematically build up prerequisite knowledge from earlier chapters and you can assume that students will spend significant time and effort working problems and will have some expert guidance and support if they get stuck. For a journal article you can assume readers have deep subject-matter expertise, e.g. have a PhD in the field.
Traditional encyclopedias typically punt by just not including much technical detail at all. (Some Wikipedia articles also do this.)
* * *
As a basic example, let’s think about what might be included in an article about “circle”. You can look at this from a kindergartener’s point of view, or a high school geometry student’s, or an ancient astronomer’s, or a physicist’s, or a signal processing engineer’s, or a 19th century projective geometer’s, or a complex analyst’s, or a group theorist’s, or an algebraic geometer’s, or a topologist’s, or a number theorist’s, or an ergodic theorist’s, etc. Some of these audiences are easy enough to satisfy, but to provide deep comprehensive coverage of the way a fundamental concept like the circle is related to every mathematical field is going to take careers worth of background. Which parts to attempt, which parts to skip, and how to organize them is a very challenging set of editorial choices.
It has very strong moderation, and low quality answers are deleted. Their papers cite methods and hypothesis which removes a lot of "fiction" from the equation.
Also, they get quoted in mainstream media too. The content quality is out of this world.
Can you name a example?
I found them to be generally of higher quality than controversial topics. So maybe not always with the best didactic approach, but usually a good start. And then I follow the links, if I want to dive in deep.
Wikipedia is useful for me, for quickly checking something. Not scientifically dive into a deep topic.
Repetitive content, written at several levels simultaneously, weird fixations on tangential topics.
PDEs are a significant enough thing that the article is probably correct. But once you get into more niche math articles, a lot of the writing is incorrect.
I know enough to know the examples for Base sqrt(2) are not correct, but I don't know enough to write a proper example.
For example if this is true "Base √2 behaves in a very similar way to base 2 as all one has to do to convert a number from binary into base √2 is put a zero digit in between every binary digit"
Then Base(10) 3 aka Base(2) 11 converted to Base(sqrt2) would be 101. But it is actually 1000.000001
> Once again,
This is your first comment to me
I don't see how. As per the expansion definition in the article 101 = 2+0+1 = 3
1000.000001 = sqrt(8) + epsilon.
I don't understand why this bothers people. If something on Wikipedia is above or below my level, I just skip it. It takes all of three seconds to recognize. I've consistently found it to be a great starting point for self-study in all sorts of math.
It’s an incredibly common cause of anxiety in math education, and even if you’re not personally affected by it others may be.
Now it surely would be nice, if it could work more like it.
That wikipedia knows my skill set and automatically hides or show additional paragraphs in certain topics etc. or even the paragraph in a simpler language etc.
But this a bit more ambitious - and not really achievable with the current approach. So if I want a math course, I search for a math course.
I question whether this can be a root cause of anxiety. Simply not understanding stuff does not normally cause anxiety. Most people don't get anxious looking at, for example, Chinese characters.
On the other hand, imputing that something should be frightening can actually cause a fear response:
https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1993-20380-001
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030105110...
https://www.nature.com/articles/nn1968
Teaching students that incomprehensible math should frighten them doesn't seem like a good approach. There are no grades or critical teachers when you're passively reading a Wikipedia article.
[1] What is a "natural number" (do they start at 0 or 1?)
[2] What is a "function"? Does it carry along a "co-domain"?
A lot of those articles seem to follow a pattern of: "An A is a B that also does C".
If you click on the link to understand what a B is, you get "B is a D in the space of Es with properties F and G".
and so on...
I can understand that this appears logically consistent and very satisfying for people who have already understood the concepts, but it doesn't help at all if you're trying to gain an understanding.
A good textbook has a sense of order in which dependent concepts are introduced. With Wikipedia, the task of discovering that order is outsourced to the reader. Maybe you could develop some kind of path finding algorithm to figure out the optimal reading order for understanding a given concept, but to my knowledge, that doesn't exist yet.
The other problem is that no shortcuts are offered. Even if you figure out the order yourself, Wikipedia gives you no hints how much of B, C, D, E and F you have to understand to get the idea of A. The expectation seems to be to read the entire articles on the dependent concepts, which can be long, rambling and full of obscure special cases.
Wikipedia math articles are not useful to get a shallow understanding of a topic. On the contrary, it pulls you into a rabbit hole of dependent concepts just for you just to be able to understand the words in the article's summary.
From an actual reference, I'd expect that it gives a brief, self-contained description of the basic idea of a concept, without going too deep into specifics, possibly with a "see also". That's not what Wikipedia does.
https://stacks.math.columbia.edu/
The people who are looking up references to advanced math concepts are likely students who are already on a mainstream pedagogical pathway and are looking to fill in holes to a concept map they're already building.
The use case of someone who (1) does not wish to consult the vast and well-discussed pedagogy of math and (2) is not an advanced math student and thus wishes to have stand-alone math definitions is a Very special case.
Okay, but I don't think those communities are relevant to this conversation.
> The use case of someone who (1) does not wish to consult the vast and well-discussed pedagogy of math and (2) is not an advanced math student and thus wishes to have stand-alone math definitions is a Very special case.
Number 1 is a weird assumption! Unless by "consult" you mean spend weeks studying a textbook, the problem is that consulting is too difficult! And if I understand "harsher" correctly you just said the other sites are harder to use, didn't you?
So then it's just "not an advanced math student", which may or may not be a majority of people on these pages but it's a very significant amount and it's the more important target for a general encyclopedia.
What? I'm confused on what you're saying here. Are you stating there are no primary sources on history from more than a few hundred years ago? All history is made up? I'm sure there are poor quality historical articles, but I wouldn't go so far to call all history "fiction".
I once worked with someone in an important position in a major media organization who believed nothing was recorded before the printing press, and was quite vocal about it. He quite strongly believed that everything else was made up.
I always wanted to ask him what he thought about Egyptian hieroglyphs, but he was too far above my pay grade to approach or challenge.
And even then, records are questioned. Sometimes period historians really had to stick their necks out to speak the truth (and in the most literal sense) so direct impressions we have of certain elements of history may be reasonably called into question. And there are numerous historians that are known to have fabricated elements.
The entries are not exhaustive nor are all of them very scientific-sounding, but at least the basic facts which we sort of know of are there.
Not sure what went wrong with the Internet but it's not living up to the early hype, and doesn't really even seem to be heading the right direction.
To the point of this article, much of this is driven by the teachers, who say they will not accept sources that might have "social biases" (as if it were possible for any book to not have those!) The library then purges those books because "no one has checked them out in a couple of years".
The sad thing is that almost 100% of books being added to the libraries fall into just a few categories: Books promoting or "celebrating" perverted sex of any and all kinds (including pretty much all "youth fiction"), Manga, or "Graphic Novels" (let's face it, some have good artwork, but are really just nicely bound and printed comic books, usually with little to no redeeming educational value.)
Sadly, I don't know a single person under 30 who has a clue how to actually use a library to find real sources - they all just default to Googling. The web is amazing, but what's NOT on it is staggering, and of amazing quality and scholarship (which is itself a lost art...)
More worryingly, I've seen a LOT of valuable content vanish from the search engines, which just shoves that content right down the memory hole, using the same flawed logic as those high school librarians - no one's asked for it recently.
We lose access to and context for valuable information when our search engines (it's all about the money from hits and eyeballs) only keep what is "popular". Alas, we've replaced Carnegie Libraries with Kardashian libraries, to our great loss...
Both were still a decent place to start, but they're both often only "right" from a certain point of view.
It's always frustrating for me to see things in Wikipedia I know are wrong because I was in the room when a particular decision was made, or because I personally made the decision.
I gave up making corrections because they would always get reverted by someone in another country who wasn't even born when the event happened. Simply because there wasn't a random blogger live streaming it, and nobody's written a book about it, my knowledge remains my own.
Wikipedia is the ultimate example of deleting the world's history because it can't be linked to.
Wikipedia is explicitly not meant to be a primary source (indeed, no encyclopedia is).
If you've got a good answer to that question I'm sure they'd love to hear it and to update their policy.
For what it's worth, you can write the information you know in a blog that can be linked back to you personally, and that's an acceptable source to cite.
Press sources do often have minor or major inaccuracies which can then get perpetuated in Wikipedia.
"What people outside do not appreciate is that a newspaper is like a soufflé, prepared in a hurry for immediate consumption. This of course is why whenever you read a newspaper account of some event of which you have personal knowledge it is nearly always inadequate or inaccurate. Journalists are as aware as anyone of this defect; it is simply that if the information is to reach as many readers as possible, something less than perfection has often to be accepted." —David E. H. Jones, in New Scientist, Vol. 26
Wikipedians, for that matter, are aware of this defect too (or ought to be), because a great many press articles about Wikipedia contain absolute clangers.
> The author is an established expert on the topic of the article whose work in the relevant field has previously been published by reliable third-party publications, except for exceptional claims.[4] Take care when using such sources: if the information in question is really worth reporting, someone else will probably have done so.[5]
"Never use self-published sources as third-party sources about any living people, except for claims by the author about themself. This holds even if the author of the source is an expert, well-known professional researcher, or writer."
That limits things quite severely. The relevant policy is here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Biographies_of_livin...
(Just to explain: in Wikipedia, "policies" are "widely accepted standards that all editors should normally follow"; a "guideline" is "a generally accepted set of best practices that editors should follow, though it is best treated with common sense, and occasional exceptions may apply", and an "essay" can be just one editor's opinion; it is "not one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, as it has not been thoroughly vetted by the community.")
I still disagree in the narrow bounds of this conversation, which is articles about technical topics. The prohibition there seems to be on accepting someone's claims about themselves, which is different from an expert on a subject making specific fact-based claims in their field.
Wikipedia is far more trustworthy than local news channels even about recent events, and everything is sources (casualty count: who said it etc.)
Though, vertical specific niches often have better sources of information. For e.g. Examine.com currently seems better for nutrition and supplement information. Or even an old school reference book like The Art of Computer Programming by Donald Knuth is better for algorithms.
It is rediculous to compare an encyclopedia like wikipedia to an advanced text like Knuth. They aren't trying to do the same thing.
That's more due to the very low quality of news.
https://www.npr.org/2022/07/29/1114599942/wikipedia-recessio...
There are differing levels of "frozen", which require differing levels of editor seniority to be allowed to edit.
My grandparents had bought a copy of Britannica decades ago and they had something like 50 years of its yearbooks. I would cite it sometimes and no one at school batted an eye. I remember reading through it and cross-referencing articles against Wikipedia and Wikipedia's accuracy was far superior.
The thing to keep in mind is that not only are all encyclopedias fraught with errors, primary sources are often wrong too! The goal isn't perfection, it's transparency -- and Wikipedia in this department is enormously better than any private encyclopedia you'll ever find.
Britannica doesn't contain outright hoaxes and nonsense. Examples:
https://www.theregister.com/2017/01/16/wikipedia_16_birthday... https://wikipediocracy.com/2022/08/11/wikipedias-credibility...
But Britannica can never be as up to date as Wikipedia:
https://www.inputmag.com/culture/queen-elizabeth-ii-death-wi...
Nor can it cover as many topics as Wikipedia.
Wikipedia's quality also depends on the topic area. Hard science and computing tend to be covered more adeptly than philosophy for example.
And article quality simply varies much more in Wikipedia. It ranges from some of the finest writing anywhere, rivalling anything in Britannica and surpassing it in up-to-dateness, to complete rubbish and intentionally falsified content.
I did this analysis long ago and i don't have the set in front of me, but there absolutely were hoaxes and nonsense which were believed to be true (or which fit the prevailing narrative) in 1970.
Not being up to date isn't just about incorporating new information. Fields like social sciences have huge revisions and reversals because conclusions in those fields are so often rooted in opinion and inference rather than empirical observation.
Yet, no teacher would complain about using an old copy of Britannica.
At any rate, here is a quote from a BBC journalist: "In the Wikipedia gullibility stakes, no one is infallible. That means any journalist in any newsroom will likely get a sharp slap across the head from an editor for treating Wikipedia with anything but total scepticism (you can imagine the kicking I've taken over this article)."
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-37523772
I doubt any journalist ever got such a kicking because they cited Britannica.
You know in the world of tech they have a similar saying: "No one ever got fired for buying IBM."
This does not mean IBM is either a superior choice, or a wise choice.
I consult it maybe four or five times a year, and the Britannica website maybe another dozen times or so.
Still, it's good to always be aware that the ways Wikipedia and Britannica are produced are very different and to factor that in (see my post below from just a couple of minutes ago, about the desert article).
If however we were to go look up 'Mars' .. or 'electron' and find hoaxes there, then there would be a clear and obvious problem
False info inserted: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Desert&diff=prev&...
False info deleted: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Desert&diff=60327...
The desert article was classified as a "Good article" during that time and got about a million views. This is not an obscure article, nor was the article on Maurice Jarre at the time of his death, which is why the hoax instantly entered newspapers around the world.
So I accept your point to a degree: many of the topics mentioned in that article are very obscure, but even a high-visibility, highly trafficked article can contain absolute balderdash mixed in with solid information and really good writing.
I'm also not trying to make an argument against Wikipedia – I am a Wikipedian and I love Wikipedia, and use it daily, but it's important to be aware of its weaknesses and vulnerabilities.
But you know I was just thinking earlier today reading a Wikipedia article and looking at some of the citations, and I thought that even with it's shortcomings, it has the potential to make readers, especially those that are curious, actually question what they're reading.. And I think when compared to like Britanica, thats a very positive aspect.
Meaning.. I know that citations are all over academia and research areas, but they aren't in a lot of k-9 textbooks .. and maybe for someone who doesn't go on to higher education, they can potentially have that questioning-effect.
"There has been lots of research on the accuracy of Wikipedia, and the results
are mixed—some studies show it is just as good as the experts, others show
[that] Wikipedia is not accurate at all."
They found that in general, Wikipedia articles were more biased—with 73
percent of them containing code words, compared to just 34 percent in
Britannica.
I'm not sure that's a great measure of bias. It's easy to write in an unbiased tone, yet still be biased.
However, you just made my point, which is that, "random online information can often be wrong or conflict with other online authorities."
But wikipedia is far ahead on more practical like which way the toilet paper goes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toilet_paper_orientation
I am right handed and prefer to have the paper oriented over itself.
A member of my family is left handed and prefers to have the paper under itself. She once said that for her, with left handedness, having the paper under itself makes it easier to grab.
To be clear, I think it would be far fairer to say something to the effect of:
>The goal isn't accuracy, it's expediency
I would argue that a majority of the people who use Wikipedia do not know, care, or have ever looked at the efforts done on Wikipedia to document changes. Transparency, to the people to serves, is then irrelevant. I would, however argue that people do expect information on Wikipedia to be up to date. That they want a relatively short account of a topic, with the most relevant information available.
Basically, wikipedia is McDonald's. Fast, quick, easy. When you want something high quality, you go to a "sit down" restaurant where they prepare it individually. It takes a lot longer, costs more, and is presented in an entirely different manner. The intentions, use case, and clientele of each are not the same, but they do overlap from time-to-time. It is a mistake to compare one to the other. They serve different purposes.
I’d bet any mining of actually working citations would average closer to 2015. It used to be people citing something from the 70’s or 80’s would get strange looks from people who lived then, now I see Millenials looking at Gen-Z kids that way.
History is written not by the victor, but by the last wiki editor.
Also various other newspaper archives have mind-numbing amounts of scanned material dating back well over 100 years, and the Wikipedia Library provides free access to these resources for editors.
This just isn't true. Most wikipedia references have a hyperlink and a proper citation which can be looked up using traditional means. For example, a cite might look like this:
"Intel Pentium Processor G6950 (3M Cache, 2.80 GHz) with SPEC Code(s) SLBMS". Ark.intel.com. 2010-07-13. Archived from the original on 2011-03-09. Retrieved 2010-07-29.
The link to intel.com has rotted, but:
1) There's an archive of the page so the information hasn't been lost
2) There's also a full citation, with which you can write a letter to Intel asking them for the document in question ("Intel Pentium Processor G6950 (3M Cache, 2.80 GHz) with SPEC Code(s) SLBMS"). This is a lot more detail than you'd have in a traditional encyclopedia. If you're a researcher, the encyclopedia has given what you need to seek more detail from the primary source - and that's the whole point!
archive.org and wikipedia.org working together is really powerful.
In terms of book references Wikipedia simply wins, hands down. Those don't rot.
It's unclear what your point is. Are you suggesting wikipedia shouldn't also have citations to content published online, simply because it might be removed?
There are 81 citations. Of these, only 9 are not citing published books with an ISBN, or articles published in journals.
4 are citations to papers or articles published by physics professors on their university websites (Berkeley, Riverside, CUNY, Caltech)
Three are links to magazines: Quanta Magazine, Scientific American, Physics World
The remaining two are a link to the Nobel Foundation (regarding a nobel prize award) and a link to Merriam-Webster for a definition of "Quantum."
> At best you can get some people's opinion about something.
Nah, not even close.
Cherry picking can only occur if I'm generalizing, and I am not. Counter-examples aren't cherry-picking.
Your statement "At best you can get some people's opinion about something" has been disproven.
"Wiki" is a type of software, like "editor" or "web browser". It is not the name of wikipedia.
Yes yes, language evolves, but this is like someone deleting the Internet Explorer link from their Windows desktop and saying "I deleted the internet from this computer, I don't have the internet any more".
If you want an eye opening experience pick something in the news that might be scientific. Say, COVID. Then run a correlation between the release of news articles and the frequency of edits to Wikipedia.
In theory, this provides the most up to date information. In reality, Wikipedia is a disinformation farm. Contributors may think they are updating the "latest" version of "truth" (like a "fact" checker) but in reality they are making knee jerk decisions to sometimes literally change the definition of something.
Still not convinced a paper encyclopedia is better? Still worried a scary private corporation controls Encyclopedias? Steven Pruitt is a legendary "editor" (what an appropriate name) of wikipedia. Holding the record for the most Wikipedia edits of anyone by a large margin, he is a veritable gatekeeper of what Wikipedia defines as truth. Whereas in a corporation you might have this divided among dozens of experts in their field, one man with no known expertise in anything and a dramatically one-sided and well-known political leaning is in control of a LOT of information.
In summary, I refuse to donate to Wikipedia and actively promote other sources of information (such as scholarly articles, meta-analyses, expert blog posts, etc) as better secondary or primary sources of information. Parents, teachers, and schools are absolutely right to be suspect of Wikipedia. Aside from relatively niche, infrequently edited articles, Wikipedia is no better than asking your neighbor what he thinks about a subject. At least you might get a beer out of doing that, though.
Someone with millions of edits does not de-facto have the systems in place, the time, and the power to influence any article he puts his mind to? What I posted is inference, not misinformation, and worth considering despite the downvote parade happening on it right now by pro-wiki shills.
To call what I posted misinformation is a sign of times. Inference is not misinformation and while I have no "fact checked" articles proving he manipulates wiki articles he is a defacto central power of Wikipedia whose contributions are vast. So vast, in fact, they shadow every other contributor by orders of magnitude. If this doesn't concern you I guess by all means, cite wikipedia in all your scholarly works. Isn't my problem, anyway. I don't use it and I don't donate to it. I have no dog in this race.
Ignoring Pruitt my point stands in general. Wikipedia edits spike during times of political strife, elections, major news, etc. They are edited so frequently that it's impossible to tell what is real and fake. This is the principle failing of any truly open system that does no KYC. It inevitably collapses under the weight of idiots (which have more density than smart people). If Wikipedia expects to be trusted authors should be credential-locked to fields and vetted by the community. Except that can't happen because then you'd have to pay for it, and then it's not wikipedia.
I'd rather have vetted experts writing articles on their fields (e.g. an actual encyclopedia) than any random shmuck off the street being able to contribute to an alleged body of "knowledge". Right now I can go contribute to the article on theoretical physics. Something I know nothing about. That should not be possible on any system alleging to be a source of truth.
In reality the internet is full of systems with open participation. We don't see them failing notably more or less often than other systems. I think a (personal, mental) model that makes inaccurate predictions is possibly flawed, and may need to be revisited a bit.
If you've looked into Epistemology before, you'll see that Capital-T Truth is a slippery thing to actually define properly. Indeed, thus, Wikipedia makes no claim to being a Source Of Truth. Wikipedia makes a more cautious claim. It claims to be an encyclopedia: A tertiary source representing what primary and secondary sources say about a matter.
So if you keep that in mind, you are actually quite welcome to contribute to an article on theoretical physics. If you put in the work to study, track down sources, and understand what they're saying, then that's a good start. If you can then use that information to write a coherent text explaining the concepts, then that's perfect.
There's no magic fairy dust that turns you into an expert. If you work hard and do the same things any other expert would be doing, then how should we treat you?
That's like saying billionaires, corporations, media etc don't have a lot of influence (or control) over elections because everyone can theoretically donate money, outvote them etc. too.
For a sample of my work, see:
No amount of wiki editors can protect you from “mob” changes on their platform.
I always thought you were a bit eccentric, but you seemed to be fairly sane otherwise, and managed to always keep yourself out of trouble. How did you manage to get yourself sitebanned of all things? %-(
I mean, arbcom reviewed it too, so it's not just a mob. Did you get tempted into saying or doing something unwise?
I hope you're doing ok now at least.
By the time I was able to read, we had two separate complete editions of the Brittanica, and he'd read both through, A-Z.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33124973
> Give a single example of how the Encyclopedia Britannica be worse than random idiots, foreign agents, and shills on Wikipedia.
I received no answer, which is what I expected. It was easier to flag the comment, because this forum is pathetic.
Most math and physics pages I have seen on wikipedia are about as good as an average textbook. The French wikipedia is way better for math, but the English one is not bad.
If there were a Wikipedia page about me, I can imagine that it would probably highlight some insignificant thing (from my perspective) that got my name into a small town newspaper or school / employer public relations piece while omitting several of the facts from my personal top-5 list (in importance) about my own life.
I find many of the mathematics articles to be difficult to read. I'll look at a mathematics concept that I think I understand (or even use often), and it will be written in jargon that is completely incomprehensible to me.
However, where Wikipedia really has a problem is in contemporary politics. Anything that is even remotely political is probably controlled by one or another clique of editors. There are opposing cliques that battle over every Israel-Palestine article, or over whether to use the Serbian or Croatian name for village X that existed 200 years ago, or about whether hummus is Lebanese or Syrian or Israeli or Levantine. There are also subjects in which one clique has gained complete dominance and is able to completely control a whole topic area. If you start looking at the edit histories and talk pages of articles on one topic, you'll come to realize how influential relatively small numbers of motivated (and sometimes coordinated, though this is against Wikipedia's rules) editors can be.
That's why I'd take anything that's even remotely politically contentious on Wikipedia with an enormous grain of salt.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woman (4th paragraph)
Even if you don't believe that trans women are women, it seems inarguably correct that they identify as women in spite of having been identified as male when they were born. You could complain about the vocabulary, I guess, but there's no set of vocabulary that won't upset someone.
It was a group of editors who conspired to game Wikipedia's rules (for example, "thou shalt not revert more than three times per day" can be circumvented by calling in a friend to revert for you). What makes the story really crazy is that they were exposed by Wikileaks, which published a giant stack of email threads between the conspirators.
This is a run-down of some of the things the most powerful member of the group, an administrator, said: https://wikileaks.org/wiki/Wikipediametric_mailinglist/Piotr....
I wrote a dissertation on Conlon Nancarrow's Player Piano Study No. 36.
Skimming the facts in the article on Conlon Nancarrow, everything looks to be both true and relevant to Nancarrow's life and musical output. I could make a few small improvements. E.g., the proportions of tempos among the twelve voices in Study No. 37 are taken from a peculiar tuning system that apparently only appears in Cowell's New Musical Resources. Making that connection would tie in nicely to the previous section that mentions the influence of Cowell's book on Nancarrow. (I believe that connection is made in Kyle Gann's book in case anyone wants to go ahead and make that edit.)
> That doesn't make Wikipedia useless, but the author's best advice is to use Wikipedia as a map to other sources of information.
As an expert on Conlon Nancarrow's music, I approve of using the Wikipedia article about him as a useful and accurate starting point for learning about his life and music.
Until I read a citation on a current Wikipedia article in your area of expertise that has factually inaccurate information in it, I can only reserve judgment on your opinion about Wikipedia's veracity.
The content of any given article may recently have been
changed, vandalized, or altered by someone whose opinion
does not correspond with the state of knowledge in the
relevant fields.
Outright discarding one of the best sources of information humanity has ever created is IMHO just plain wrong. I would understand it if this were people writing doctorates but anything below university level should definitely use it.
Teachers treated them like fact until high school, though: Only in my senior year (1995-1996) were we told that while we could get basic information from an encyclopedia - to help us search for information - we couldn't use the encyclopedia itself as a source of information.
I don't understand why folks aren't treating wikipedia the same way. In general, a wikipedia article is going to give a fairly good faith overview of a subject. There are going to be more subjects than could fit in an encyclopedia. Many articles will be more in-depth and a good number have references: In other words, you can go off and read the source material if you want and use that for more information.
They are usually great and very accurate. They are also usually in "layers" with more basic information first and then more details.
I guess this is because you can hardly argue with an integral, as opposed to who the greatest baseball player was.
Limit "External Links" to only websites found in Google Scholar. More specifically, limit them to only academic sources. (Maybe limiting to .edu or country-specific educational TLDs, e.g., ac.uk, etc. is better. I realise Scholar is hardly a reliable filter for non-commercial sources, given Google's incentives. Remember "Knol".)
This could be an option. Maybe an HTTP header sent to Wikipedia:
Academic-Only: on
One can use Wikipedia solely as a path to "External Links" and/or "References". To the extent that articles just take their sentences from References or External Links, any verification needs to be done on the source, not the article. I use Wikipedia as the default search engine in Fennec. On desktop, I search Wikipedia from the command line with a custom script. The forward proxy scrubs the "X-Client-IP" header. Before reading an article, in the event I read the article instead of only using External LInks and references, I always skim the Talk: page.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Criticism_of_Google/Archive_1
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Knol/Archive_2
Completely random example of such a lab (and if you check publications you'll see they host papers under this domain name) https://www.honeylab.org/
I know things on utoronto.ca turn up sometimes for a example that does (UofTs non-edu domain name, which is used for most things. Though toronto.edu is also owned by the university and used for some things).
But Scholar proves it is possible to usefully filter for peer-reviewed papers.
Filtering is never "perfect". The question is whether it is good enough to be useful.
I use it sometimes for historical scores from past championships but beyond that I have plenty of non-Wikipedia sources for real-time or recent scores.
Nor can I say I have ever used Wikipedia to find sites that publish scores, either.
But maybe I just have not discovered how Wikipedia can be used for basketball scores. No doubt there are better sources for basketbal scores.
Anyway, I fail to see how giving someone the option to restrict Wikipedia "Related Links" and "References" to, say, academic ones would interfere with the status quo. It would not stop anyone from getting basketball scores by any manner they choose. Obviously do not enable an option to restrict to academic sources if looking for sports scores.
It's fascinating to see comments like this that try to argue against hypothetical options (I have seen this sort of comment before) because software and "tech" companies have a long history of forcing new "features" on people who never asked for them. People are not even given a choice. "Do you want this new feature?" is not a question that is ever asked.
Do we really want Google to have even more authority of what is considered accepted truths in society?
At the same time, it would be silly not to admit Scholar is quite useful. Not everyone has a subscription to a large collection of academic journals and many papers are often published via non-commercial websites, as pre-prints, etc.
Imagine prohibiting Wikipedia editors from using Google Search when researching Wikipedia articles. If they are allowed to use it then that means Google has some control over what is cited in Wikipedia.
A couple days ago I was kind of annoyed that the article on Greensleeves didn't include lyrics.
Call me skeptical, but can you provide us with examples where Wikipedia is misleading or wrong?
This is true even if you're reading works from experts in a field. For instance, Robert Hoyland, Fred Donner, and Patricia Crone (until her death a few years ago) are some of the leading academics in the studies of early historical Islam. However, Donner's review of Hoyland's textbook thought it was misleading[1], Crone's review of Donner's textbook considered it misleading, and Crone's Hagarism is generally not accepted by any current scholar as far as I can tell.
That is to say, one needs to be skeptical no matter the source, as well as humble enough to realize that know more than others doesn't necessarily make your understanding more correct. It's also useful to try to understand the disagreements in the field and how they've developed.
[1] http://www.middleeastmedievalists.com/wp-content/uploads/201... [2] https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/israel-middle-east/articl...
I then opened a random page of Britannica, about an opera. And the phonetic pronunciation of the Italian name was incorrect (I'm a native Italian speaker) and it was how a brit might pronounce it.
In Wikipedia I would have fixed it. In Britannica the error is probably still there.
I presume that since I found an error in the first page I looked at, there probably are many other errors.
That's one where the pronunciation is controversial, according to Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turandot#Origin_and_pronunciat...
You want to trick me with a french word? As if an italian would be unable to tell a word in italian from one in a different language?
Cf. https://medicine-opera.com/2008/12/turandot-without-the-t/
But never mind.
I don't think Wikipedia has a path forwards for fixing the quality of its articles. In my opinion it requires every page being rewritten by an expert with a single voice, as a traditional encyclopedia would have, which is the exact opposite of Wikipedia's core. Though I did check, and they have more than enough cash to write a traditional encyclopedia.