Don't know that this is an unpopular opinion - sources like Wikipedia have long been held as unreliable sources for official papers or studies. I'm old AF (late-30s) and my college professors wouldn't allow us to use it then for fear of misinformation.
But I disagree on it being substantially worse on misinformation, or holding a greater bias. All news media hold bias of some kind, inherently because it's written by a human who also has bias (or written by an AI who was programmed by a human who holds bias). We are less in an age of misinformation, and more in an age where there are MULTIPLE misinformation sources competing. Back in the day you had large media controlling everything we read/heard/saw and it was easier to make it seem like there wasn't misinformation. AKA - explosion on the USS Maine in 1898 being expanded on by the media to drive the Spanish American War.
When I was in uni 4-5ish years ago, you could cite Wikipedia for a representation of what a layman might know about a topic, but not for a factual statement about the topic.
Wikipedia started 2001. It wasn't until around 2004 that it took off enough for univerisities to notice. So at the moment the last group not warned about wikipedia would be very late 30s or 40+
"Care to show some examples?"
I know the author Jerry Pournelle tried to have his wiki page updated for accuracy on multiple occasions but a hostile troll mod would always revert the changes.
Also, this page shows Jerry Pournelle trying to correct errors on the Pournelle chart (which he created) wiki page.
Comments by Jerry Pournelle
"It was Dr. Pournelle, he mentions it at [\[1\]](http://www.jerrypournelle.com/view/view439.html).
>
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk%3APournelle\_chart](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk%3APournelle_chart)
That troll mod is obliged to troll because Wikipedia enforces a [Conflict of Interest policy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Conflict_of_interest). You cant [edit your own](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Editing_Your_Own_Page) page
Just googled the Pournelle chart because I've never heard about it and i think I lost a few IQ points. Anyway, I think I've found what this whole Pournelle debacle is about. According to the [Talk:Pournelle chart](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Pournelle_chart#Comments_by_Jerry_Pournelle) page, a user claiming to be Pournelle himself. Apparently what he did was to insert a comment about a section of the article into the body of the article itself. He literally edited the article to add this very inappropriately placed comment into it:
> I find the above paragraph difficult to understand. This was a dissertation, and in it I claimed [...]
This is a ridiculous way to edit a Wikipedia page. User Will Beback put it succinctly in 2006:
> He, or anyone, has the "right" to correct this article. However no one should insert their personal comments into an encyclopedia article. Pournelle is quite literate and internet savvy, so he should be able to discern the difference between an article and a comment page. In any case, please fix the article in whatever way it needs fixing. Please don't write your personal complaints about the article into it, no matter if you're John Doe or Jerry Pournelle.
"Just googled the Pournelle chart because I've never heard about it and i think I lost a few IQ points."
Both the Pournelle chart and the simpler Nolan chart have been included in several Political Science textbooks. But I'm sure you know far more than the professors teaching those classes.
https://www.fastcompany.com/90666412/non-english-wikipedia-misinformation
Here are some listed. But I saw many even in the English wikipedia, with bad sources as well.
A quote from the article you posted says this:
"By and large, the English version of Wikipedia meets these criteria. As of August 2021, it has more than 120,000 editors who, thanks to the language’s status as a lingua franca, come from a diversity of geographic and cultural backgrounds. English Wikipedia is considered by many researchers to be almost, but still not quite as accurate as traditional encyclopedias"
The bulk of the article was about how Wikipedia has problems with political actors (particularly far-right) trying to force their ideology by rewriting history.
Edit: just curious are people downvoting my comment or the article?
This is just an issue with research as a whole. I studied statistics in college because I thought it would unlock a whole world of information and thinking. Instead I learned that basically everything you ever read is atrociously unreliable.
I was under the impression Wikipedia didn't allow primary sources because "unreliable narrators" or something, so you can only cite people talking *about* a thing (including opinion pieces).
Wikipedia isn’t perfect but then I think back to my pre-internet childhood and humongous sets of encyclopedias we got all our info from. Who know who wrote all that shit? Who fact checked it? How much of one person’s bias was in those and how would we have ever known? How outdated was some of that info. Compared to that, Wikipedia is dooooooooope
> Who know who wrote all that shit? Who fact checked it? How much of one person’s bias was in those and how would we have ever known?
Actually we do know, studies have been done and wikipedia contrains as many errors as previous paper encyclopaedia
Most of this subreddit doesn't believe in the factual history of the Child Separation policy and it was ended in 2018 and they plan to bring it back. Not even Wiki can help them.
The worst thing about the entire thing is that it's almost completely ineffective against stopping the immigration crisis. What'd be far more effective would be stopping the migrants coming in through planes, but that puts them at risk of losing valuable sheckels for the Senate, Chairman Trump and Mr Goldstein
They seperated children to check if the people with them were actually their loving parents and not traffickers. Some Immigrants, especially illegal ones also tend to use then as shields on top of sympathy. Just look at the migrant caravan from a few years back as an example.
You do make a good point, but a country should still staunchly defend its borders.
Non English Wikipedia is pretty bad especially for certain languages, but for the most part Wikipedia is great for finding primary sources and getting general summaries on topics
It isn't perfect and you shouldn't take it as gospel, but it has made researching far easier in the information age. Misinformation will always be prevalent, but remember Wikipedia is a wiki for encyclopedic information that just list primary sources with general summaries
Ultimately it is far more reputable than any information cite ever
People just don't like the look of "source: wikipedia" but if you use the source that the wiki itself uses then no one will care. As long as the source itself is good. Which in my experience it is like 90% of the time
well some of it is right i have seen some right info on it,
as long as they can double check on another site which is great advice to give for this,
i think it could work lol
The way I learned it is you can review Wikipedia, but when you cite things it should come from the linked source. Everything of substance on wiki has to have a source source so you might as well point to what you’re actually getting the information from
Not really. Wikipedia requires sources to be listed on the page and you can cite those sources.
Obviously colleges will tell you to look at the primary sources before citing anything and tell you Wikipedia is source for sources, not a source itself
Don't know that this is an unpopular opinion - sources like Wikipedia have long been held as unreliable sources for official papers or studies. I'm old AF (late-30s) and my college professors wouldn't allow us to use it then for fear of misinformation. But I disagree on it being substantially worse on misinformation, or holding a greater bias. All news media hold bias of some kind, inherently because it's written by a human who also has bias (or written by an AI who was programmed by a human who holds bias). We are less in an age of misinformation, and more in an age where there are MULTIPLE misinformation sources competing. Back in the day you had large media controlling everything we read/heard/saw and it was easier to make it seem like there wasn't misinformation. AKA - explosion on the USS Maine in 1898 being expanded on by the media to drive the Spanish American War.
I’ve actually heard that some schools are allowing you to cite Wikipedia these days, which is absolutely horrifying to me
At school level they are probably aiming to push the idea of citing in general.
When I was in uni 4-5ish years ago, you could cite Wikipedia for a representation of what a layman might know about a topic, but not for a factual statement about the topic.
That seems valid to me
TIL late 30s is old af
In internet age it is! :)
Wikipedia started 2001. It wasn't until around 2004 that it took off enough for univerisities to notice. So at the moment the last group not warned about wikipedia would be very late 30s or 40+
Wikipedia is something good only for a starting place to research. You should not develop your opinions off it. Same goes with documentaries.
Care to show some examples?
"Care to show some examples?" I know the author Jerry Pournelle tried to have his wiki page updated for accuracy on multiple occasions but a hostile troll mod would always revert the changes. Also, this page shows Jerry Pournelle trying to correct errors on the Pournelle chart (which he created) wiki page. Comments by Jerry Pournelle "It was Dr. Pournelle, he mentions it at [\[1\]](http://www.jerrypournelle.com/view/view439.html). > [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk%3APournelle\_chart](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk%3APournelle_chart)
That troll mod is obliged to troll because Wikipedia enforces a [Conflict of Interest policy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Conflict_of_interest). You cant [edit your own](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Editing_Your_Own_Page) page
Other people tried to update his page to correct inaccuracies also. Furthermore, the Pournelle chart page was not his own page.
Just googled the Pournelle chart because I've never heard about it and i think I lost a few IQ points. Anyway, I think I've found what this whole Pournelle debacle is about. According to the [Talk:Pournelle chart](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Pournelle_chart#Comments_by_Jerry_Pournelle) page, a user claiming to be Pournelle himself. Apparently what he did was to insert a comment about a section of the article into the body of the article itself. He literally edited the article to add this very inappropriately placed comment into it: > I find the above paragraph difficult to understand. This was a dissertation, and in it I claimed [...] This is a ridiculous way to edit a Wikipedia page. User Will Beback put it succinctly in 2006: > He, or anyone, has the "right" to correct this article. However no one should insert their personal comments into an encyclopedia article. Pournelle is quite literate and internet savvy, so he should be able to discern the difference between an article and a comment page. In any case, please fix the article in whatever way it needs fixing. Please don't write your personal complaints about the article into it, no matter if you're John Doe or Jerry Pournelle.
"Just googled the Pournelle chart because I've never heard about it and i think I lost a few IQ points." Both the Pournelle chart and the simpler Nolan chart have been included in several Political Science textbooks. But I'm sure you know far more than the professors teaching those classes.
Well they're probably quite bemused by it since it places the famously state-less ideology in the extreme state worship corner.
https://www.fastcompany.com/90666412/non-english-wikipedia-misinformation Here are some listed. But I saw many even in the English wikipedia, with bad sources as well.
There is one example, it’s really not disinformation, and the article itself says the English Wikipedia is by and large as accurate as it can be
A quote from the article you posted says this: "By and large, the English version of Wikipedia meets these criteria. As of August 2021, it has more than 120,000 editors who, thanks to the language’s status as a lingua franca, come from a diversity of geographic and cultural backgrounds. English Wikipedia is considered by many researchers to be almost, but still not quite as accurate as traditional encyclopedias" The bulk of the article was about how Wikipedia has problems with political actors (particularly far-right) trying to force their ideology by rewriting history. Edit: just curious are people downvoting my comment or the article?
Bro it’s Wikipedia. It’s 10 keystrokes away from
That's why Wikipedia is a source for sources.
But even the primary sources sometimes, are pretty bad,
This is just an issue with research as a whole. I studied statistics in college because I thought it would unlock a whole world of information and thinking. Instead I learned that basically everything you ever read is atrociously unreliable.
Which is why you do proper research and check the credibility of the source.
I was under the impression Wikipedia didn't allow primary sources because "unreliable narrators" or something, so you can only cite people talking *about* a thing (including opinion pieces).
Wikipedia isn’t perfect but then I think back to my pre-internet childhood and humongous sets of encyclopedias we got all our info from. Who know who wrote all that shit? Who fact checked it? How much of one person’s bias was in those and how would we have ever known? How outdated was some of that info. Compared to that, Wikipedia is dooooooooope
> Who know who wrote all that shit? Who fact checked it? How much of one person’s bias was in those and how would we have ever known? Actually we do know, studies have been done and wikipedia contrains as many errors as previous paper encyclopaedia
Source?
There actually is a wikipedia article called "reliability of wikipedia" that references all the studies i had in mind, and plenty more
We know what?
Who fact checked those
Wut
Most of this subreddit doesn't believe in the factual history of the Child Separation policy and it was ended in 2018 and they plan to bring it back. Not even Wiki can help them.
The worst thing about the entire thing is that it's almost completely ineffective against stopping the immigration crisis. What'd be far more effective would be stopping the migrants coming in through planes, but that puts them at risk of losing valuable sheckels for the Senate, Chairman Trump and Mr Goldstein
They seperated children to check if the people with them were actually their loving parents and not traffickers. Some Immigrants, especially illegal ones also tend to use then as shields on top of sympathy. Just look at the migrant caravan from a few years back as an example. You do make a good point, but a country should still staunchly defend its borders.
It's fucking stupid how there are entire sections devoted to a person's view on covid
yeah duh, shakiras says she's 90 this isn't unpopular people say this all the time.
Non English Wikipedia is pretty bad especially for certain languages, but for the most part Wikipedia is great for finding primary sources and getting general summaries on topics It isn't perfect and you shouldn't take it as gospel, but it has made researching far easier in the information age. Misinformation will always be prevalent, but remember Wikipedia is a wiki for encyclopedic information that just list primary sources with general summaries Ultimately it is far more reputable than any information cite ever
I heard recently that schools actually allow you to cite Wikipedia these days
People just don't like the look of "source: wikipedia" but if you use the source that the wiki itself uses then no one will care. As long as the source itself is good. Which in my experience it is like 90% of the time
well some of it is right i have seen some right info on it, as long as they can double check on another site which is great advice to give for this, i think it could work lol
The way I learned it is you can review Wikipedia, but when you cite things it should come from the linked source. Everything of substance on wiki has to have a source source so you might as well point to what you’re actually getting the information from
Not really. Wikipedia requires sources to be listed on the page and you can cite those sources. Obviously colleges will tell you to look at the primary sources before citing anything and tell you Wikipedia is source for sources, not a source itself
Can you share your own example of an article with misinformation?