Yeah, Wikipedia is garbage puffed up beyond all belief. I literally just today saw something just like you describe.
It should be viewed very skeptically on anything anyone disagrees over (because then it's just snapshots of an agenda-pushing battle).
I completely agree that Wikipedia can have errors, but in topics that I am educated in it seems pretty decent and I can't remember the last time I came across any (comp sci for example).
The most recent example I can think of is about is an article on vulture bees, and a citation about what their honey tastes like, which turned out to be garbage and incorrect (there are no reliable sources on the qualities of honey, it's basic composition and method of production is even in dispute, when I queried journal articles on the topic).
So "garbage puffed up beyond all belief" and "full of terrible and fake citations that lead to nowhere" sounds a bit hyperbolic, tbh.
I could give examples but I won't, because that would link my HN and Wikipedia accounts.
> So "garbage puffed up beyond all belief" and "full of terrible and fake citations that lead to nowhere" sounds a bit hyperbolic, tbh.
People unironically describe it as the "sum of all human knowledge," so it's definitely puffed up beyond belief. In reality, much of it is a slow battle of tendentious agenda-pushing, by people with weird personalities, played according to an arcane rule book (the first unstated rule of which is to never, ever acknowledge that you're pushing an agenda). That doesn't taint all of it, but it taints far more than you'd think.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download
I can understand if this is just too much effort to put into an online discussion though, I probably wouldn't bother myself.
And yeah there have been lots of scandals with Wikipedia. This one was pretty infamous:
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/aug/26/shock-an-aw-...
Ironically I think your attitude probably protects Wikipedia quite a bit, and from that perspective I'd like to see more of it. The less people see it as a good source of information, the less incentive there is for all of the agenda-pushing you've described (which also definitely happens).
I still think the bulk of it is pretty decent though, on non/less-polarizing subjects, which describes most of IMO.
My main issue is that most articles are an inch deep. I find myself using textbooks and journal articles more often these days, while sailing the open seas as this would otherwise be cost prohibitive.
In many history articles, there are random citations to web pages without any provenance that claim to be translated documents. Sometimes this is done despite the existence of reliable public databases of such documents available through universities, foundations, and governments. Then there is the link rot problem which gets worse over time.
How?
Seen it way too many times for it to be a coincidence.
It's definitely not a coincidence. Wikipedia is structured to actively select for it.
So far all of the claims of Wikipedia as a pile of shit never had a real base to me. And political topics are controversial by its nature. There are authorative sources saying Marxism(Capitalism, or whatever) is good and Marxism(Capitalism) is bad, so what is the right side, Wikipedia should present? It struggles to cover the middle ground of scientific consensus, saying those said this and they said that. Which is why scientific articles about biology or physics are way better of course, but sure, in its current state, Wikipedia is good for a overview of a topic, but to dive in, you should read the quoted sources.
Usually the first thing when I encounter something new, is indeed to check Wikipedia. And I am glad it exists. I know I cannot believe it fully, but I still trust it way more, than some random site that might be better, but how should I know at first glance?
To really study, I read the scientific books and papers about a topic and Wikipedia is a good start for that.
Too late now.
The last Wikipedia page I visited ( Elder_Mother ) someone had, years ago, removed all of the citations for the article. These were websites that contained much more and higher quality content than the Wiki page itself, and had been cited with the original page creation. I only found the citations by chance, because I decided to look at the page's history. This poor curation isn't just bad for the usefulness of Wikipedia, it's borderline plagiarism since the entire article was composited from paraphrasing.
Before that I saw a Wikipedia page ( The Voyage of Life ) that admitted its own plagiarism. The page had a big disclaimer at the top: "This page might contain plagiarism" but more delicately worded. So somebody noticed the verbatim plagiarism, added a flag, and then nothing.
Another issue is the lack of expertise, which leads to misleading wishy-washy statements. The page for slugs, talking about control, says crushed eggshells, "are generally ineffective on a large scale, but can be somewhat useful in small gardens." This is false, eggshells are ineffective in all gardens. But to avoid edit wars the language has to pussyfoot around sensitive topics like gardening advice.
Stemming from the lack of expertise, Wikipedia itself becomes out of date without curation. The problem is while it claims to be more up-to-date than printed media, there's no easy way to identify how significant the information on a page is. If I go to an article am I reading things that were written 20 years ago or 2 years ago? Is the material presented relevant in 2023? Was it ever significant to begin with, or did the author happen to have knowledge and interest in something obsolete?
Most pages are also, I think, poorly organized ( Partial differential equation ). I believe a single voice and more effort to write articles for a well defined audience would help immensely, specifically with math and science pages. Wikipedia keeps trying to condense complex material from a textbook into an encyclopedia article format, and it's not working out.
That's an interesting point. A lot of Wikipedia articles seem to be stuck in the late 2000s (2005-2010). When it was new, a lot of people had fun banging out new articles, but then those got more-or-less abandoned. It doesn't help that their population of dedicated "editors" has really dropped off from those highs and is in long-term decline.
Let's take for example the article about Patrisse Cullors (of BLM fame). A video surfaced of her saying "I am a trained Marxist". If you look at the archives[1], many people wanted to include this. But it was rejected with such ridiculous arguments as: "it is entirely unclear what a 'trained Marxist' actually means [...] She doesn't say anything like 'I am a Marxist' "
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Patrisse_Cullors/Archive_...
It is similarly telling that conservative wikis have barely any articles on core topics like engineering, mathematics, philosophy, and the sciences. These intellectuals you're describing oddly don't seem to have much interest in things most people would deem intellectual...
For example, compare the Wikipedia article on Leonhard Euler with that of conservapedia... It's so absurd I had to double check the self-proclaimed "conservative wikipedia" wasn't satire.
Probably a false flag by the deep state though. Conservapedia has more on that than the entirety of linear algebra and computer science, lol.
It's not really telling, it's just a path-dependent artifact about how those projects are positioned in the "ecosystem." When you have a "mainstream" site that's a little biased against some ideology, it monopolizes the general-interest/popular users. A competitor that sets itself to answer that bias will only be able to attract a user base that's highly skewed towards very ideological users who found that bias intolerable, because the general interest users aren't motivated to leave for it.
If Wikipedia had a subtle conservative bias, a hypothetical "Leftopedia" would be similarly full of liberal axe-grinding and weak on general-interest topics.
A simple metric I use is: how long the talk page is. If a talk page has 15 archives then the article page is probably politically biased hot trash.
Someone gave an example above where a person calling herself a trained Marxist was not accepted as evidence that she is a Marxist. Do you seriously think that editing the article to include the reference would be allowed?
Furthermore, the point is that Wikipedia has a systematic problem. Individual instances that people point out are examples. It would be impossible to fix the whole problem yourself and saying "that example doesn't count because you can fix it yourself" is just a way of ignoring examples, not dealing with the problem.
https://www.wired.com/story/guerrilla-wikipedia-editors-who-...
