this post was submitted on 09 Mar 2024
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Science Memes

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weaponized nerdery (mander.xyz)
submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

It's definitely not 100% foolproof to misinformation, but I've always found wikipedia to be reliable. Why do you feel it isnt?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Wikipedia's reliability in it's own words - check out the holocaust misinformation from last year!

US congressional staff editing controversies as documented by and presented in wikipedia

A ten year long hoax running until two years ago

Wikipedia's own list of its controversies - pay special attention here to the 2023 exposure of an administrator pretending to be a spanish folk singer as a sockpuppet of another administrator who was banned in 2015 for making "promotional edits".

I want to be clear: i do not feel that wikipedia isn't reliable. I can clearly observe that wikipedia is unreliable.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 8 months ago (3 children)

Info on Wikipedia shouldn't be taken at face value, check the sources given! A lot of the examples you gave likely didn't have any citation. The blame for misinformation partly lies with the people accepting information with no sources given. Also, any example of known misinformation just means that it has been caught and corrected. Everyone should know wikipedia is not right 100% of the time but it is always getting better. There millions of articles and I don't think the examples you listed should lead anyone to believe it is overall unreliable. It is good however to not blindly put your trust in whatever you read from it, and if you do come across something that isn't correct, you have the opportunity to fix it.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 8 months ago (1 children)

So would you now agree with the original comment that said Wikipedia is not a reliable SOURCE of accurate information? It's a great starting point and a potential resource that can be used as a bibliography of possible sources, but it's never a good source itself. Even as a bibliography, you have to consider whether the available references for an article are biased -- they don't always paint a fair picture.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

Yes I agree with that. I think there was an issue with establishing what "source" meant in the given context. I wouldn't say the text of a single wikipedia article is a reliable source by itself, however that doesn't discredit the reliability of accurate information on Wikipedia in my opinion. If you stripped a textbook of it's listed citations and credited authors, then you can't really verify the information in it either.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 8 months ago (1 children)

That’s wild.

If you knew a person who shouldn’t be taken at face value and whose claims had to be verified, what word would you use to describe them? Would that word be reliable? Trustworthy?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Wikipedia isn't a person though. It's a website of articles that summarizes topics and ideally lists sources that contain the info within it. I agree a person that sounds like that is untrustworthy, but that doesn't mean anything on the topic of wikipedia.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Woah.

So, like, if you knew of a website which shouldn’t be taken at face value and whose claims had to be verified, what word would you use to describe it? would that word be reliable? Trustworthy?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 8 months ago (1 children)

It depends on the website. A Twitter post with no source? Untrustworthy. Wikipedia page with plenty of sources to back up the article? I would default to saying trustworthy, but of course I would still have to check the sources myself. Wikipedia is a tool. It connects you to outside sources of info. It has the reputation of being reliable enough to get trustworthy info in its summaries. As I've already stated before, mistakes have been made though.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 8 months ago (1 children)

you: information on wikipedia shouldn't be taken at face value... it's good to not blindly put your trust in whatever you read from it...

also you: I would default to saying trustworthy...

🤔

[–] [email protected] 0 points 8 months ago (1 children)

You're missing a lot of other points I've made. Let me ask you then what is a reliable source of information? You're skepticism implies nothing is trustworthy if you have to verify information with various sources. Do you only trust what you can observe first hand?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 8 months ago

I promise you, I am not missing any other point you have made. my intent with selectively quoting was to go ahead and knock the legs out from under all the other stuff that rests upon those two statements in order to save us the back and forth of big walls of text.

My skepticism absolutely does not imply that nothing is trustworthy when it has to be verified. It explicitly applies to a website (Wikipedia) which maintains an extensive record of ways in which it has been shown to be systematically untrustworthy.

Within the scope of this discussion, it’s not important what sources of information I would consider trustworthy, we’re only talking about Wikipedia, a source that has a long history of being untrustworthy. We are talking about Wikipedia because it is the subject of the ops post which compares it to the library of Alexandria.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 8 months ago (1 children)

They used Wikipedia to prove that Wikipedia is untrustworthy

[–] [email protected] 0 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

The first paragraph of the first link they posted says that wikipedia's reliability has been generally praised over the last 10 years.

Edit: unless you're saying that wikipedia is so untrustworthy that it is misinformed about being untrustworthy lol