Wiki was getting popular when I was in college over 10 years ago. I recall a history professor telling me not to use Wikipedia as source. I am like, okay, I will just use the source wiki uses, which are pretty solid in my opinion. Wiki came a long way.
Yeah, it’s important to remember that wikipedia, itself, isn’t a source, it’s a summary of different sources. It’s a great resource to find sources and get an overview of a topic, though.
As long as you verify the source still exists. There are so many dead links on Wikipedia.
Archive.org bots replace dead links with working alternatives a lot nowadays. All the more reason to support that modern museum
Please dig a little bit deeper. You may end up with a stack of links to 404 sites instead of actual sources. Just because you copied a citation from WP doesn’t mean the source actually exists, let alone contains the information you seek.
In that case, try using an archived version of the webpage, for example at the Wayback Machine
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Nah, you can’t. It’s still a great resource, but you always gotta read it critically.
The thing is that it is very easy to read Wikipedia critically, since it lists every single source they get info from at the bottom of the page.
And here I am fixing missing sources on some wiki articles just yesterday.
I feel like news sources used to link to their sources too, but now it seems to be an infinite chain of links to their own articles, never directly taking you to the first hand source of information (unless they are the source).
And very often it’s dead links or sources that don’t say what the article pretends…
That’s why you don’t use Wikipedia as your primary source, you follow the citations. Of course, if you can’t verify that it’s accurate information, don’t report it, but it can be used as a jump off to find a legitimate source if the information you cant immediately verify is useful.
The thing is, if the place you’re getting your information from doesn’t list it’s sources, you can’t trust it. Whenever I’m researching a thing on the internet and I find an article or a paper, I don’t just stop there, I check where they got their info, then I find that source and read it. I follow it all the way back until I find the primary source.
Like the other day I was writing a paper about a particular court case. In the opinions, as in most cases, they use precedent and cite prior cases. So I found the other cases that referred to the thing I was writing about, and it turns out they were also just using prior cases. I had to go 6 deep before I found them referencing the actual constitution for one of them. On another I found it interesting that the most recent use case was so far removed from what the original one was about and it was could probably be questionable to even use it as precedent if they had used the original instead of another case.
Anyway, the point is, always check sources. If anyone says anything on the internet, assume it’s just their opinion until you check and follow the sources…
Depends
Coffman finds her next target in the footnotes of the article about the tank division. This one’s name is Franz Kurowski, and he seems to pop up all over the place. Kurowski served in the Luftwaffe. After the war, he tried his hand at all sorts of popular writing, often with a pseudonym to match: Jason Meeker and Slade Cassidy for his crime fiction and westerns, Johanna Schulz and Gloria Mellina for his chick lit. But his accounts of the Second World War made him famous under his own name. Kurowski’s stories weren’t subtle. As the German historian Roman Töppel writes in a critical essay: “They depict war as a test of fate and partly as adventure. German war crimes are left out—much unlike allied war crimes.”
To understand this dubious chronicler better, Coffman goes to Google, where she comes upon a book called The Myth of the Eastern Front. It describes how, in the immediate aftermath of the war, characters like Kurowski worked to rehabilitate the image of the German army—to argue that a few genocidal apples had spoiled the barrel. With a guy like Hitler to pin the blame on, the rest was easy. The so-called “myth of the clean Wehrmacht” took root on both sides of the Atlantic: German society needed to believe that not everyone who wore a gray uniform was evil, and the Americans were courting every anti-Communist ally they could find. Then, in the mid-1990s, a museum exhibit cataloging the crimes of the Nazi-era military traveled throughout Germany. An odd situation emerged: Germans began to speak more honestly about the Wehrmacht than non-Germans did.
When Coffman reads this, something clicks. She is dealing with a poisonous tree here. She shouldn’t be throwing out individual pieces of fruit. She should be chopping it off at the trunk. She starts to pivot from history (the facts themselves) to historiography (the way they’re gathered). She begins to use Wikipedia to document the false historical narrative, and its purveyors, and then make the fight about dubious sources rather than specific articles.
https://www.wired.com/story/one-womans-mission-to-rewrite-nazi-history-wikipedia/
Nah.
I edited a page for a new OS update that was coming out. The page was FULL of misinformation, and I cleaned it up, linked official documentation as sources, etc.
My edits were reverted by some butt hurt guy who originally wrote the page full of misinformation, 0 sources, and broken English.
I reverted back to mine.
He reverted back to his.
He spammed my profile page calling me names, and then reported me to Wiki admins. I was told not to revert changes or I would be perma-banned. I explained how the original page was broken English, misinformation, and 0 sources were cited. They straight up told me they did NOT care.
Stopped editing wiki pages, and stopped trusting them. They didn’t care about factual information. They just wanted to enforce their reverting rule.
I’d love their perspective on this and the actual messages sent as this isn’t very useful standalone.
Their profile was banned last time I looked about a year ago. My profile I deleted because it was permanently tainted by that asshole spamming my talk page.
I remember posting about it on Reddit back when it happened a few years ago, and everyone in the comments told me how they’ve had similar experiences. Really just made me weary about trusting Wikipedia. I mean sure, if they get the date of a movie wrong that’s fine, but as for more serious topics, I just can’t really trust it.
Even sources can be garbage. I’ve seen plenty of blog spam cited as sources, which means nothing.
Yep, about a decade ago an expert on a subject was talking about it. He corrected the a page because the info presented with tons of sources all ended up taking their info from a single unreliable source. He had to edit things multiple times, making sure to follow guidelines, basically creating a new section that condensed his work on the subject to explain the controversy and so on… The page was edited back to its previous version every time because he didn’t have enough local reputation and “older sources are more reliable”…
Could you link us the article?
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And what’s your source for that claim you keep making?
Pro wrestling wiki pages used to have entrance themes, finishers and signature moves in the wrestler’s page.
One power-mod removed it and it’s gone.
People suck wiki’s cock on the Internet, but it’s a pretty dogshit site and I wish it dies so that a new and better alternative pops up.
It doesn’t need to die for a new alternative to pop up.
I just doubt any alternative will be as good as the one we have now.
There will always be someone there to take its place. Maybe a more transparent and decentralised alternative like how fan-wikis used to be before Fandom bough them.
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I think assuming a better alternative will appear is a bad idea. Most likely some company sees an opening to control the information and monetize it. They can’t really now because Wikipedia is the default, but I don’t doubt someone would try if they see the hold Wikipedia has falter.
Tbh those pieces of trivia don’t feel like encyclopedic information in the first place. A reader need not know specific intro songs to have an encyclopedic overview of wrestling, just that intro songs are often used.
A list containing the specific intro songs is vastly more suited for a fandom repository than an encyclopedia.
That sucks, but I also kind of empathize with wiki mods, cause it’s really hard to know when to cut stuff down. I remember seeing a while back a bunch of people that migrated out from wikipedia to some completely unknown new wiki nobody will ever hear about, because they were working on chronicling all the roads in america with screenshots and notes of location and historical details about it all. Wikipedia didn’t really get it, as it’s more like a kind of academic and news aggregate, and there was nothing really there to aggregate, it was just an infodump of a bunch of different stuff. If wikipedia was a 1-1 map of the world, then it would be the size of the world. Or bigger, if you include historical stuff. No way you’re fitting all that on a 102 gig drive, or whatever the size of wikipedia is. Plus there’s hosting costs to consider, so it’s not like they could do that even if they really wanted.
what’s the article in question?
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It’s not an uncommon tale about Wikipedia, that’s their biggest known issue with getting new blood into the community, which they’ve acknowledged themselves.
That’s a shame
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This is the third insightful comment from you on this thread against him. Are you by any chance, the alt of the user who wrote the original article on Wiki of the OS?
How dare you trash Wikipedia on Lemmy? Infidel like you should be sent to gulag.
TBH that doesn’t surprise me… I had a minor spat over the existence of a local supermarket, of all the stupid things… Wiki said it had been refused planning permission and never built. I had shopped in there many times, and could link to many articles about the fully built existing supermarket. I gave up after the second revert because it’s just not worth it.
there is a bureaucracy for dealing with the situation you described. the other editor gamed it, but if you were right, a little persistence would have left your edits in place.
I didn’t know what to do. I was being threatened with a ban, even after explaining myself and my edits.
At the end of the day the Wikipedia page didn’t matter to me that much. Who cares if people get misinformation about an OS update. I quite literally didn’t get paid enough to deal with that.
It just really changed my perspective on Wikipedia. Unless you look at the history and check out profiles of people who get in edit battles, you really don’t know what’s going on behind the scenes.
At the end of the day the Wikipedia page I was trying to edit ended up being corrected by someone else (who completely disregarded all of my effort), but it took a month, and someone else to do it, before the page wasn’t full of misinformation anymore. RIP to anyone who visited that page within that month and never returned, because they were fed 80% misinformation.
the etiquette and process is non-obvious so i think your reaction was totally understandable.
Yes, but people shouldn’t have to jump through hoops to help Wikipedia.
you’re right. when transitioning away from reddit, i took the time to understand how to navigate the wikipedia editor bureaucracy. I understood most of it in a week. now i just monitor a few articles in which i have an interest, and add to that list periodically.
i wish it were easier. MY SUGGESTION is to just go ahead and use the talk page instead of the main article as your first place to make an edit. if it’s a good edit, it’s likely someone else will write the edit themselves. if they don’t and you dont see objetions, that will help your edit stand up if there is an edit war.
Wikipedia is an excellent starting point for information - but saying you can absolutely trust it hell no.
Yup, tried to correct something about a motorcycle manufacturer (no road legal model between year A and Z), linked to another Wikipedia article proving what I was saying (road legal modelS in year W to Y, just before Z), the next day the page was back to its previous version. I linked to the article about the road legal model they pretended didn’t exist and they just edited the page back to its previous version…
How dare you hurt another editor’s feelings with your facts!
It’s like chatGPT then!
My workplace got a “coronavirus” chat on the corporate chat server. And the known “conspiracy theorist” guy on my team posted a link to some article on some total misinformation mill masquerading as a news source.
I looked up the name of the source on Wikipedia, which said it was a total misinformation mill.
So I linked to the Wikipedia article in the chat.
I work at a fairly big and diverse company, so of course there was more than one conspiracy guy there. It was really surreal watching people who literally think all governments are run by a secret cabal of Democrat extraterrestrial pedophile child-adrenaline junkies attack the trustworthiness of Wikipedia.
Edit: I’d forgotten the name of the “misinformation mill” that originally started that shit storm in the work chat, but I went back and looked it up. It was Project Veritas. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Veritas
RIP in Piss P. Veritas I hope hell is hot for you on the way down
They still exist. They just do not have James O’Keefe who was shit canned.
Please let me live in the world where they were internationally disgraced and every pundit that used them as a resource equally disgraced
99% of people bashing Wikipedia do so because they read that they’re delusional about something.
Source: have read >100 Wikipedia bashings that answered follow-up questions.
Silly question but why is a work chat used for conspiracy theories? It seems like a bad use of company resources
They’ve got the permissions set up on the work chat server to allow anyone to create chats at will. Those chats can be public (listed in the search and anyone can join with a click) or private (can’t be joined without an invite from the owner of the channel).
And they don’t discourage non-work-related chats for… team building reasons, probably? There’s one for “Video Games” for instance.
I know the guy who made the “coronavirus” chat and he 100% did not intend it for conspiracy theories. The whole IT department was in the process of going remote when that chat was created and that chat was intended for everything from helpful tips for working remotely to news/rumors about when/if we might be going back to the office to news about death rate statistics and such.
And this conspiracy guy had (still has, actually) a deep-seated need to proselatize for the conspiracy of the week 24/7/365. So he just decided that was as good a pulpit as any.
Shortly after the shitstorm started, three levels of management above both me and Conspiracy McGee entered the chat. They didn’t end up doing anything. (It fizzled before they had to take action.) But I’m sure they all had their fingers hovering about 2mm above the “shut that shit down” button.
Now, all that said, there is a chat on the work chat server dedicated to the conspiracy podcast “No Agenda.” And I’m pretty certain it was created by Conspiracy McGee. And I’m pretty sure my/his direct boss is in the No Agenda chat.
So, I guess the short answer to your question is that they don’t want to shut down non-work-related chats so as to pay some lip service to team building and not appear too draconian (while at the same tacitly encouraging a culture in which it’s not really acceptable to spend too much time in those chats rather than furiously typing code). And the company’s management is sufficiently right-wing as to not get that allowing conspiracy theorists to conspiracy theorist is eventually going to backfire on them, so they don’t see it as dangerous. So they see it not much unlike having a chat about the latest Mario Kart game or the Marvel Cinematic Universe or whatever.
Hopefully that answers somewhat.
- With the exception of any article that’s even slightly political.
Even for political content it’s damn good. Every time someone on Lemmy points to an explicit article of bias, it falls into one of 3 categories:
- Slightly unfair bias, but still largely true
- Article is correct, Lemmy cannot provide a reliable source proving otherwise
- Article is incorrect, reliable source found, article amended
The third case happened once in an article about a UN Resolution on North Korea, and it was because the original article source was slightly misinterpreted. But yea, basically what I’m trying to say is if a “political article” is “wrong” but you can’t prove it, it’s not the political article that’s wrong but you.
Edit: ITT - People upset with my analysis, but not willing to provide sources to the articles they disagree with
Wikipedia has a claimed positive-bias, in which negative things are often left out of the article. This is more true the lower profile the page is.
And Wikipedia has an overall left-bias, because of the demographic of contributors.
And Wikipedia has an overall left-bias, because of the demographic of contributors.
FROM YOUR LINK
Until 2021, we rated Wikipedia as Center, but changed them to Not Rated because the online encyclopedia does not fit neatly into AllSides’ media bias rating methodologies, which were developed specifically for news sites.
Wikipedia completely slanders people it doesnt like. For example Daniele Ganser who helped to reveal Operation Gladio.
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Wikipedia is the only piece of the internet I would save from apocalipse. Like, seriously.
Yeah, I have Wikipedia saved to a portable hard drive… Just in case
I don’t know if you’re making fun of me, but, seriously, for me Wikipedia is an enormously valuable resource, much more than, for instance, YouTube (which I use, maybe, twice per year).
Wasn’t making fun of you, just agreeing with you and telling you my fix
How much data does it use?
I remember in the mid-aughts my brother hacked his iPod — the wheel kind, this was pre-iPhone — to hold the entirety of the text of English Wikipedia at the time.
It’s less than 90 gig to do a full backup. I can have the sum total of human knowledge on a 1TB external SDD, and still have room for Skyrim and my modlist.
Even less so if you exclude images
Those images are important, I would keep them. Wikipedia just scrapes the surface of information, a picture can give a bigger insight.
Is there an easy way of doing a full backup?
Funnily enough, wikipedia has the answer
ah I see, ty lol
That’s only the text without any media. If you wanted to save all media on Wikimedia Commons, that would be about 420tb.
You get the images, just not audio or video files.
It would also be nice to have a p2p service still up in the internet apocalypse to share all the things we have left.
Could work like the underground networks in Cuba (I say underground but apparently there’s wires everywhere?)
What if you need to remember how to procreate? I hear there are a number of informative videos about how to out there.
But there aren’t on YouTube :-P
I bought an app by Wikimedia CH that allows to download the whole thing. It’s called Kiwix.
IIRC this happens in the show or book of Station Eleven where a kid saves Wikipedia offline on his PS Vita (somehow) and it’s the only version of it out there post-apocalypse.
I was always told not to quote Wikipedia. They told everyone this because people would constantly quote Wikipedia and then someone would edit it so that the paragraph was now different. It was a right pain even if the information was correct.
What you do is you check Wikipedia’s sources and then quote those sources. Hopefully they’re quoting academic papers and not blog posts because otherwise you’re just kicking the cam down the road.
I hated in high school that teachers always said the internet isn’t a good source.
In college I finally realized that websites were poor sources because they change and move, whereas a published book, edition, and page number won’t change. But that doesn’t mean you can’t use the Internet to find a good source - you just need to cite the source itself and not the site.
Everything I’ve published is published digitally, but the journals still have editions and page numbers. When someone cites my work, they need to cite that information - not the website that may change names or shut down.
So now I’m mostly mad that teachers don’t explain why websites shouldn’t be cited. It makes good sense in that context.
I think it definitely was a huge breakdown in academic’s to adapt to new technology, and it is at the core of a lot of the societal problems we face today. Of course, a lot of the reasons for this were by design at the hands of a few corporate actors, and they share a lot of culpability.
There are philosophical underpinnings too - a lot of academics are still caught up on modernism (which would rightfully distrust new internet sources in favor of legacy sources of proven idealistic knowledge) vs. Postmodernism, which would provide a framework to recognize the truth in these systems.
One thing to keep in mind is that computers and the internet are still extremely new, and we are still figuring them out. It has only been a decade and a half where everyone has a general purpose, internet connected computer in their pocket.
There’s still good and plenty fuckery that can happen with citing books, though. Depending on the obscurity of the book, whether or not it’s out of print, or just has been outright destroyed, it might be really hard to access a copy, and check the source, especially if someone doesn’t have access to the internet archive or library genesis, i.e. digital scans of said book. There are reprints and new editions, sometimes not noted by the author of the citation (the author might have no way of knowing, depends), which can change or remove quoted passages. The internet also contains the ability to mass copy anything you want, and cite that copy, like what the internet archive does with the wayback machine, so if you have a citation of a webpage it’s probably a good idea to copy that in time and then spread it around anyways just for the sake of posterity and accessibility, especially if it’s obscure or is likely to be changed or removed. Same as you might for a book, except much easier, it’s much harder to copy a whole book in context and spread that around compared to a webpage.
Quote the sources or the source’s sources of Wikipedia. You would not believe how bullet proof this is against plagiarism if you do your citations correctly.
I don’t even understand how people get caught.
And interestingly it’s trustable because it’s got no central authority core that can be corrupted
I think the word you’re looking for is “trustworthy” but yes.
I consider it a separate concept.
yeah, apart from the admins that have absolute authority over everything and can do whatever the hell they want and make up arbitrary rules that disqualify your perfectly valid sources.
that doesn’t happen
There definitely are editors who game the rules. And they are enough of a problem that sometimes rules need to be modified specifically to handle them.
you seem to be conflating editors with admins.
Admins are a subgroup of editors. As more senior members, they should behave more responsibly. But some don’t.
That’s is definitely not true…
In general wikipedia is a great source of knowledge that would be very hard to find elsewhere. That said, it can and often is edited by anyone. I’ll never forget a friend sent me a link to file system comparison chart which included ReiserFS and someone added the last column ‘Murders your wife’ to ‘Features’ https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Comparison_of_file_systems&oldid=209063556#Features
Did they at least cite the source for that?
Source: just trust me bro
was it wrong tho?
technically, the filesystem wasn’t implicated beyond the f’d up way his brain was working at the time. smh
Elon Musk Offers to Also Ruin Wikipedia https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/elon-musk-wikipedia-twitter-x-encyclopedia-1234861220/
Elon Musk’s frustration with Wikipedia seems to come from his inability to control what it says about him, rather than any issues with the platform itself.
After what he’s done to Twitter, Elon just want the world’s most popular encyclopaedia bend towards his will.
People should consider using alternative platforms like Mastodon and WreMin. These platforms are in the early stages of development, but they will never be controlled by Elon or anyone else because, unlike Twitter, they work in a decentralized way.
Definitely not wiremin! it’s scam
Look at their website, they keep babbling about their “protocol”, but all you can find about this supposed protocol is marketing speak, no real technical specification or paper, no code, nothing. How does this thing actually run? Nobody knows.
It’s proprietary, which alone is enough reason to run away from it. And seeing that the dev’s email is gmail, we can be sure they don’t give a fuck about privacy or decentralization.
It seems that this decentralized style starts to be a new trend?
First this Fediverse/Lemmy I heard about. Then The Matrix (messaging platform). And now these Mastodon & WreMin.
Well, if that prevents or slows down the corrupted law of enshittification, then I’m approving it!
is wiremin using activitypub?
A fediverse decentralized Wikipedia substitute would be interesting for sure.
Wikipedia’s massive head start is pretty strong though. With Lemmy, I don’t care if a post has 100 comments while the same article on Reddit has 10,000. The comments here are better anyway. But if a Fedipedia has 1/100 the subjects covered that Wikipedia does, that makes it less useful.
Yup…no matter how good a tool is, if there are no users to it, it might be as good as it never existed (unless if someone takes ideas from said tool and implements them to a user service, growing their quality, which is still better than nothing). Sad but true.
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Wikipedia was useful for me as a grad student because I could look up a topic and there would be a whole lot of citations I could follow. I never used them as a source, but rather as a curated forum of information.
Wikipedia is like our dear friend. It gives us general information, good advice, and direction in life, but never gets too deeply in it. The choice is ours to make.
Only problem is that half of them are broken :(
You’d be impressed by how good I was at finding PDFs of original articles on random sites. Turns out that when you go to grad school in the third world and don’t have access to the journals in the same way as you are accustomed, you learn how to do it for yourself.
sci-hub
This was back in 2010-ish. Don’t know if it works the same way now, there are probably better ways to go about it. Not sure if sci-hub existed at that time. Will remember that going forward.
I’ve been doing exactly the same thing with LLMs recently.
"Tell me about "
“What are the big problems their industry is trying to solve?”
“Who are their biggest competitors?”
“What’s the worst/best thing about them?”Questions like that often give me a great framework to look up specific questions, find relevant articles and get a handle on the sources that are likely to be useful.
I’d definitely be careful about made up stuff, but this sounds like an interesting idea.
Very careful. I never use anything from them directly. I just use them to give me a starting point on what to look for.
For example, if the AI tells me that some company is know for their low latency database, I’ll look around for primary sources on the latency of the database compared to other vendors. I’ll also look for evidence to the contrary.
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Yes. That’s how you use an encyclopedia.
Big brain move: Tell your students about this neat loophole, gets them started on actual research.
(Ideally - I’d be lying if I said I’ve never used a quote from Wikipedia citing the stated source without actually reading it [usually at 5 am for papers due in two hours], but more often than not Wikipedia was the signpost for the rabbit hole)
When “they used to tell us we couldnt trust Wikipedia” it wasn’t in contrast to random websites; it was in contrast to primary sources.
That’s still true today. Wikipedia is generally less reliable than encyclopedias are https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliability_of_Wikipedia.
The people who tell you not to trust Wikipedia aren’t saying that you shouldn’t use it at all. They’re telling you not to stop there. That’s exactly what they told us about encylopedias too.
If you’re researching a new topic, Wikipedia is a great place for an initial overview. If you actually care about facts, you should double check claims independently. That means following their sources until you get to primary sources. If you’ve ever done this exercise it becomes obvious why you shouldn’t trust Wikipedia. Some sources are dead links, some are not publicly accessible and many aren’t primary sources. In egregious cases the “sources” are just opinion pieces.
Wiki was as reliable as encyclopedias in 2005. It is far superior today.
“Oh, people can come up with statistics to prove anything, Kent. 14% of people know that.”
-Homer Simpson
Just look in this thread. I’m not talking about writing college papers. I’m talking about the boomers saying you can’t trust anything you read on the internet.
Anecdotal, but I’ve never had a teacher tell me why Wikipedia wasn’t a good source. Similarly, I’ve never had a teacher educate students on how to properly use resources like Wikipedia as a starting point for sources. All my peers and I heard was “Wikipedia is bad, never use it, it’s not reliable, don’t trust anything from it.”
I wish I had been taught why and how earlier, but I had to learn why and how myself.
The thing is: in the not to distant future encyclopedias will be a thing of the past.
There is a lot of bias on pages about religion, I find.
My kind of bias, or the wrong kind?
This is hilarious, thank you
For example there were pages that would state that “Scholars agree that the gospel of ____ was not written by _____ but was written by an anonymous author” when the original sources never discredited the original claim of authorship, but were essentially “I can’t be sure who wrote it”, never actually saying/discrediting that it wasn’t written by said evangelist.
I think the anonymous perspective belongs there, but when the original source says “I cannot be sure who wrote it” then that’s not saying it wasn’t written by them.
Wikipedia has been dealing with AI and bots since someone made a 2000 census article writer in 2003. Hopefully they are resistant to the rise of Chatbots
