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.<p>Often there's more content on the talk page than the article itself, one example I have on hand: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Ada_Lovelace/Archive_1" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Ada_Lovelace/Archive_1</a>
I volunteered for a while on vandalism watch.<p>You would not <i>believe</i> 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.<p>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.
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.<p>Saying that Wikipedia is "accurate and reliable" is like saying the corporate media is "trustworthy".
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.<p>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.
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.<p>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.
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.<p>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!!!!"
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.<p>The information related to the field of science is accurate but can't say the same for modern events or history.
It varies a lot. When did Medieval Studies, I was told “Never cite, Wikipedia. Don’t even look at it.”<p>A year later I was studying computer programming and “Wikipedia is an amazing source of information.”<p>Medieval studies is a field where the general public believes many falsehoods (witch persecutions, etc). Wikipedia reflected that.
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.<p>Wikipedia should publish curated “editions” like a traditional encyclopedia.
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?
Wikipedia is already taken seriously <i>enough</i> by most people under the age of 50 that I know.<p>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.<p>Imagine this:<p>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.
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.<p>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.<p>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?<p>...and ultimately, why do we take it as a given that this question can be meaningfully resolved?
[from the article]<p>>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.<p>Similar comment, and additional recent discussion, here:
<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32793755" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32793755</a>
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 <i>that</i> was cited, despite the fact that you could see the actual content of the video itself!
I saw a solid video a couple days ago called "Why I hate Wikipedia (and you should too!)" <a href="https://youtu.be/-vmSFO1Zfo8" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/-vmSFO1Zfo8</a><p>I'd never given Wikipedia much thought, but it raised some very interesting points to think about.<p>TLDR: Despite mediocre information, Wikipedia's ubiquity has supplanted the market for better sites dedicated to specific topics.
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.<p>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.<p>Zero trust is even worse because now you have nothing.<p>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.
Wikipedia is an amazing resource, but we should be careful to realize where the bulk of its funding comes from.<p>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]<p>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]<p>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]<p>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]<p>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.<p>[0] - <a href="https://wikimediaendowment.org/" rel="nofollow">https://wikimediaendowment.org/</a>
[1] - <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jan/15/wikipedia-fund-future" rel="nofollow">https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jan/15/wikipedia...</a>
[2] - <a href="https://capitalresearch.org/article/tides-legal-laundering-an-incubator-for-the-left-three/" rel="nofollow">https://capitalresearch.org/article/tides-legal-laundering-a...</a>
[3] - <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tides_Foundation" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tides_Foundation</a>
[4] - <a href="https://wikimediafoundation.org/profile/amanda-keton/" rel="nofollow">https://wikimediafoundation.org/profile/amanda-keton/</a>
> Journalists and academics can’t use it as a reference. Nor can students, though they can use Britannica.<p>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:<p><a href="https://wikipediocracy.com/2022/08/11/wikipedias-credibility-is-toast/" rel="nofollow">https://wikipediocracy.com/2022/08/11/wikipedias-credibility...</a><p>A book published by Cambridge University Press says that coatis are also called "Brazilian aardvarks" – because the writer copied from Wikipedia. Completely made up.<p><a href="https://www.theregister.com/2017/01/16/wikipedia_16_birthday_fails/" rel="nofollow">https://www.theregister.com/2017/01/16/wikipedia_16_birthday...</a><p>Wikipedia simply has different flaws than older reference works, and it's important to be aware of them.<p>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?"<p><a href="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/" rel="nofollow">https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/12...</a><p>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:<p><a href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/1/1e/Wikimedia_Foundation_FY2020-2021_Audit_Report.pdf#page=5" rel="nofollow">https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/1/1e/Wikim...</a><p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2022-06-26/Special_report" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...</a><p>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 ..."<p>Many Wikipedians are disgusted with that:<p><a href="https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org/thread/YKYDOBBH2RHJO2DHNP4YEPH37J3L5PBH/" rel="nofollow">https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@list...</a><p>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.