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.

Nah, you can't. It's still a great resource, but you always gotta read it critically.

Wikipedia is an excellent starting point for information - but saying you can absolutely trust it hell no.

Wikipedia is the only piece of the internet I would save from apocalipse. Like, seriously.

• With the exception of any article that's even slightly political.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

The Tab "Talk" gives you a lot more to learn on some pages, take a look !

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

And interestingly it’s trustable because it’s got no central authority core that can be corrupted

Elon Musk Offers to Also Ruin Wikipedia https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/elon-musk-wikipedia-twitter-x-encyclopedia-1234861220/

Permanently Deleted

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.

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

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

Oh man the rightoids came out of the woods for this shower thought.

Only if the source checks out

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 religion 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

Any argument based on "us vs them" is flawed by default.

I always trust the streets. People lie. Governments lie. News lies. But the streets. The streets never lie.

Except not really.

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.

They use what to tell you? Smoke signals? Semaphore?

• with the exception of any article with an on going feud

Huh?

Better than Google because at least it tries to fact check but it should be seen as a search engine

The same people who told you that now do fact checking on facebook instead

Not when elon turns it into dickipedia and makes every page reference him in a positive light

We should be careful or we will turn it into the Ministry of Truth.

Remember the prolific wikipedia contributor who had an extreme fascination with boobs?

Edit: It was a joke people. I wasn't being serious. But yeah, that did happen and there were articles about it for a while.

For a minute I thought this was in c/writingprompts. I don't know what to do with this prompt

That's kind of sad

Wikipedia has the rest of the internet beat in terms of despot admins.

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.

Hm, I was looking for unhinged Hexbear replies at the bottom, but there aren't any! I guess the defed did good

Wikipedia is dominated by a bunch of special interest groups that make ideological edits and lock others from reverting them.

Check out the "talk" tab if you want to see the psychopaths determining what content is shown.

Not if Musk takes over like rumoured.

Wikipedia is nefarious as fuck and nobody should trust it.

https://youtu.be/tExxkV1Xgzg?si=cqgkEghiy9a9m4aG