No one should give full faith to anything they read.
einlander@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Was suspected of being paid to edit pages, and was an admin. But people tell me wikipedia is totally trustworthy. People never really see the fighting that goes on in the Talk pages, if they did they would absolutely give pause about giving full faith to wikipedia.
xkforce@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Kid_Thunder@kbin.social 1 year ago
I don't know how it is now but back in the late 00's/very early 10's I had attempted to correct some obvious mistakes in some articles I came across. Some edits were immediately reverted -- seemingly by a bot while others were reverted to some editor. On some, I tried using Talk to discuss why the reversion is incorrect and had put forth better sources (the actual source) instead of some 'scientific journalist's' article that got it wrong and was basically threatened that I'd be banned.
These weren't some esoteric or difficult subjects but fairly well-known and straight-forward data. It was such a hassle that I just gave up after my very short foray into Wikipedia editing for 5 or so years. I gave it another go for some subjects in my industry and learned that editors are not only territorial but take corrections personally. Sources be damned. What I've seen is so-called scientific journalists for news articles/blogs are just anecdotes pulled from paper abstracts. An abstract of an abstract with opinions not derived from the actual data. How is something like theregister, CNN, MSNBC or Fox News more reputable than the sources that they sourced from?
With that, the well-known advice of "Take Wikipedia with a grain of salt and actually read the cited sources." and more importantly, the cited sources' source, rings true.
In other words, in my opinion, Wikipedia is more a summary of blogspam than it is an encyclopedia, though there are some exceptions of course.
Aatube@kbin.social 1 year ago
and was basically threatened that I'd be banned.
That doesn't sound normal to Wikipedia at all
Kid_Thunder@kbin.social 1 year ago
Well, this was back in the late 00s/early 10s. So circa 2008 - 2010. I don't remember the exact year.
I'd assume they had to make a policy against territorial editors because it was already a problem though. I definitely experienced it.
Aatube@kbin.social 1 year ago
The policy had been around since late 2003.
Pons_Aelius@kbin.social 1 year ago
I am more likely to trust a site that is open and public about its edit wars and that demands sourcing claims than I am all the others that are completely opaque about it and is just trust us bro.