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Comment on They use to tell us we couldnt trust Wikipedia. Now we know. Wikipedia is the only website you can trust.

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.

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Neve8028@lemm.ee ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
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.

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Jarix@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Wikipedia does a pretty decent job of eventually being correct, at any given time it can be outrageously inaccurate. Its good to not just use wikipedia entrys and use the sources that are linked there. By using the sources that are cited you are helping to keep wiki trustworthy and helps avoid you using bad information.

It works well to manage the integrity of wiki. I think being able to intuitively navigate between entries by a variety of metrics like edits that have remained unedited the longest/shorest, newest/oldest, etc would be a very good addition to wiki.

Some kind of webarchive of wiki sources would also be amazing so that if the sources disappear or change over time there is a connection to what it was at the time it originally/previously was used as a source on wiki.

And maybe some of this already exists and im just not very good at getting my 4dollars a month worth :P

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- AFKBRBChocolate@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  
  Wikipedia does a pretty decent job of eventually being correct, at any given time it can be outrageously inaccurate.
  
  Yeah, I agree with this. I work at a high end engineering company, and some engineers have gotten into trouble using things like materials properties that they got from Wikipedia and turned out to be wrong, with unfortunate results. By policy, if we don’t know something like that we’re supposed to ask our tech library to get us the information, and that’s why.
  
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  - fromaj_debite@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Why not fix theses pages?
    
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    AFKBRBChocolate@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    They get fixed, but that doesn’t prevent someone from using erroneous information on the next one. Just one bad number can be a big deal.
    
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- daltotron@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  A bunch of wikipedia sources are already archived on the wayback machine, anything cited to like pre-2010, online, there’s a good chance it got taken down or changed in the last 13 years.
  
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SeaJ@lemm.ee ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
As long as you verify the source still exists. There are so many dead links on Wikipedia.

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Hamartiogonic@sopuli.xyz ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
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.

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- jbk@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  In that case, try using an archived version of the webpage, for example at the Wayback Machine
  
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fossilesque@mander.xyz ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
And it’ll get even better. That being said, it’s worth checking out the Talk pages on the articles you want to use, as they may contain information about what is (and isn’t) displayed.

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