Nah, you can’t. It’s still a great resource, but you always gotta read it critically.
They use to tell us we couldnt trust Wikipedia. Now we know. Wikipedia is the only website you can trust.
Submitted 1 year ago by Daft_ish@lemmy.world to showerthoughts@lemmy.world
Comments
PM_ME_VINTAGE_30S@lemmy.sdf.org 1 year ago
Honytawk@lemmy.zip 1 year ago
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.
Cethin@lemmy.zip 1 year ago
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).
TheActualDevil@lemmy.world 1 year ago
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…
Kecessa@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
And very often it’s dead links or sources that don’t say what the article pretends…
trash80@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 year ago
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.
Torvum@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Love reading any article then opening the talk tab for the civil war of edits proposed.
brianorca@lemmy.world 1 year ago
You should read everything critically. Which is easier on Wikipedia because it provides sources.
Polar@lemmy.ca 1 year ago
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.
kattenluik@feddit.nl 1 year ago
I’d love their perspective on this and the actual messages sent as this isn’t very useful standalone.
Polar@lemmy.ca 1 year ago
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.
SchizoDenji@lemm.ee 1 year ago
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.
Cethin@lemmy.zip 1 year ago
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.
Honytawk@lemmy.zip 1 year ago
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.
Vespair@lemm.ee 1 year ago
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.
daltotron@lemmy.world 1 year ago
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.
commie@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 year ago
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.
emergencyfood@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
Yes, but people shouldn’t have to jump through hoops to help Wikipedia.
Polar@lemmy.ca 1 year ago
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.
tony@lemmy.hoyle.me.uk 1 year ago
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.
bigkix@lemm.ee 1 year ago
How dare you trash Wikipedia on Lemmy? Infidel like you should be sent to gulag.
FinallyDebunked@slrpnk.net 1 year ago
It’s mostly true for articles that do not have large public coverage. Otherwise the number of those who stubbornly fight for the truth will prevail
BumpingFuglies@lemmy.zip 1 year ago
- With the exception of any article that’s even slightly political.
possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip 1 year ago
Honestly the aren’t that biased
Engywuck@lemm.ee 1 year ago
Wikipedia is the only piece of the internet I would save form apocalipse. Like, seriously.
MightEnlightenYou@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Yeah, I have Wikipedia saved to a portable hard drive… Just in case
Engywuck@lemm.ee 1 year ago
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).
rob64@startrek.website 1 year ago
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.
AngryCommieKender@lemmy.world 1 year ago
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.
guiguinofake@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
That’s only the text without any media. If you wanted to save all media on Wikimedia Commons, that would be about 420tb.
Frost752@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Is there an easy way of doing a full backup?
possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip 1 year ago
That’s interesting
stillwater@lemm.ee 1 year ago
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.
nucleative@lemmy.world 1 year ago
What if you need to remember how to procreate? I hear there are a number of informative videos about how to out there.
Engywuck@lemm.ee 1 year ago
But there aren’t on YouTube :-P
Emerald@lemmy.world 1 year ago
It would also be nice to have a p2p service to share all the things we have left.
JadenSmith@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
Could work like the underground networks in Cuba (I say underground but apparently there’s wires everywhere?)
joneskind@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I bought an app by Wikimedia CH that allows to download the whole thing. It’s called Kiwix.
sir_reginald@lemmy.world 1 year ago
you “bought” kiwix? AFAIK it’s free
crimsdings@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Wikipedia is an excellent starting point for information - but saying you can absolutely trust it hell no.
Kecessa@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
Yup, tried to correct something about a motorcycle manufacturer, linked to another article proving what I was saying, the next day the page was back to its previous version.
notst@lemmy.world 1 year ago
How dare you hurt another editor’s feelings with your facts!
corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca 1 year ago
It’s like chatGPT then!
sir_reginald@lemmy.world 1 year ago
at least Wikipedia is human-curated.
TootSweet@lemmy.world 1 year ago
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.
VonCesaw@lemmy.world [bot] 1 year ago
RIP in Piss P. Veritas I hope hell is hot for you on the way down
SeaJ@lemm.ee 1 year ago
They still exist. They just do not have James O’Keefe who was shit canned.
explodicle@local106.com 1 year ago
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.
possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip 1 year ago
Silly question but why is a work chat used for conspiracy theories? It seems like a bad use of company resources
echodot@feddit.uk 1 year ago
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.
intensely_human@lemm.ee 1 year ago
And interestingly it’s trustable because it’s got no central authority core that can be corrupted
nednobbins@lemm.ee 1 year ago
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 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.
m3t00@lemmy.world 1 year ago
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 to ‘Features’ en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Comparison_of_…
Magpij@feddit.ch 1 year ago
The Tab “Talk” gives you a lot more to learn on some pages, take a look !
woshang@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Elon Musk Offers to Also Ruin Wikipedia rollingstone.com/…/elon-musk-wikipedia-twitter-x-…
Varyk@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
Except not really.
h_a_r_u_k_i@programming.dev 1 year ago
Not fully trust, but I trust it more than some listicles and low-quality SEO-boost sites.
When I want to learn something new, I often come to Wikipedia, or Britannica, or YouTube to get to know the subject. And generally, they will recommend me with some valuable reference to dig deeper.
creed10@lemmy.world 1 year ago
my understanding from an English professor is less about its reliability of information, but more its reliability regarding citing sources. you can’t cite something that consistently changes
randon31415@lemmy.world 1 year ago
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
yamanii@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Oh man the rightoids came out of the woods for this shower thought.
nephs@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Any argument based on “us vs them” is flawed by default.
ultratiem@lemmy.ca 1 year ago
I always trust the streets. People lie. Governments lie. News lies. But the streets. The streets never lie.
circuitfarmer@lemmy.sdf.org 1 year ago
Does anyone know if there is a way to see which wiki articles are edited the most? I don’t mean new topics or edits because there’s a lot of new info. I mean potential back-and-forth edits where there is disagreement on facts (or one viewpoint denies a fact, etc.).
If that exists, I’d be curious to know what articles they are (obviously probably region or politics). On the other side, those articles that have remained unedited for a long time are probably pretty rock solid, assuming they also get traffic.*
*I’m literally thinking out loud here and am sure there are many other factors to consider
cricket97@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Nah wikipedia has been taken over by politically motivated actors. I really enjoyed it when it was relatively agenda free. If you don’t believe me go check the talk page of any controversial article.
corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca 1 year ago
They use what to tell you? Smoke signals? Semaphore?
mlg@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Jokes on you, anything controversial relating to Pakistan and India gets spammed and brigaded hourly.
That being said, its a great resource for finding secondary sources. Even if the sources themselves happen to be biased lol.
Deftdrummer@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Wikipedia is nefarious as fuck and nobody should trust it.
zepheriths@lemmy.world 1 year ago
- with the exepyof any article with an on going feud
TimewornTraveler@lemm.ee 1 year ago
Hm, I was looking for unhinged Hexbear replies at the bottom, but there aren’t any! I guess the defed did good
OriginalUsername@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Huh?
scytale@lemm.ee 1 year ago
Remember the prolific wikipedia contributor who had an extreme fascination with boobs?
Onfire@lemmy.world 1 year ago
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.
Neve8028@lemm.ee 1 year 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.
Jarix@lemmy.world 1 year 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
AFKBRBChocolate@lemmy.world 1 year ago
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.
daltotron@lemmy.world 1 year 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.
SeaJ@lemm.ee 1 year ago
As long as you verify the source still exists. There are so many dead links on Wikipedia.
Hamartiogonic@sopuli.xyz 1 year 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.
jbk@discuss.tchncs.de 1 year ago
In that case, try using an archived version of the webpage, for example at the Wayback Machine
fossilesque@mander.xyz 1 year 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.