Open knowledge systems like Wikipedia are not really defensible. Letting anybody edit any page is a great way to get AI and human slop everywhere.
We need "open access" knowledge systems with known authors who are sponsored by non-profit and educational organizations and its their duty to defend their reputation.
>Letting anybody edit any page is a great way to get AI and human slop everywhere.
but that's not how Wikipedia works. articles about noteworthy or controversial things have activist commissars and/or paid shills watching every edit, and unless your edit aligns with the narrative they wish to present, it will be undone with essentially "because fuck you" as the reason.
its value is still considerable, of course -- there are far more neutral things than controversial ones, and most of the articles about those are fine. everything even remotely political, however, is thoroughly subverted.
I used to edit Wikipedia as a hobby with the goal of getting as many incorrect facts in it as possible, and seeing how long they lasted before being corrected. These were really minor things that hardly anyone would care about so they would often fly under the radar. I think my longest lived fake fact was around five years. Was quite pleased with that. Eventually I got bored and moved on but it was a great game while it lasted.
> Just as academics must cite any AI-generated machine outputs they rely upon in their research and writing, they can also cite Wikipedia if they use it in their work. Doing so can highlight Wikipedia’s value to other academics as a source of knowledge and provide greater transparency in one’s research processes. Despite longstanding skepticism of Wikipedia among some scholars, citations to Wikipedia in academic journals appear to be increasing – even in high-impact publications in subject areas like the health sciences.
As someone who's contributed to Wikipedia and seen how the sausage is made: that's stupid. Even Wikipedia itself considers wikis (including itself) to lack sufficient authority to be cited as a source.
Such citations could be easily gamed (if you cite a particular change) or are useless (the content you cite may not be there in the future), and are obvious pathways to "citogenesis."
If you look up something on Wikipedia and include it in your work without citing it, it's an even worse pathway to citogenesis, since someone trying to check whether you can be used as a source for Wikipedia won't know that that's where you got it from in the first place.
Of course for most things you should have no need to refer to Wikipedia at all, and hence also no need to cite it.
Recently I did a deep dive on some minor historical event in the 1800s that I won't bother to go into detail here, except to say that it has been claimed by an activist editor who was made it a personal mission to re-frame the event as an example of "westerners" committing sexual violence against helpless "easterners".
While certainly this kind of story is common throughout history, in this case, there's absolutely no documentary evidence of the event, and what little evidence exists points in the other direction. This is not just the weight of evidence -- it's what all current historical experts believe. Nonetheless, the Wikipedia editor clings to a bad reference (in an extremely biased book) that makes an off-hand assertion. This assertion, in turn, is sourced with only a single citation to a 1960s-era historical novel that a) didn't actually support what the author claims, and b) essentially made up signficant details of the event in question, based on popular movies and rumors of the time. It's garbage all the way down.
Nevertheless, anyone who edits this article to reflect accurate current knowledge is immediately embroiled in a war with this editor, because unfortunately, there's no "trusted source" that says the opposite of the bad citation. And so the lie remains. To fight this battle would require escalating the issue and possibly getting the editor removed. Who has time?
Academics citing any website should consider also pointing towards (or at least creating) an archived version via something like the Wayback Machine. Wikipedia is not the only website that changes over time, and most don't have a easily accessible revision history.
> Academics citing any website should consider also pointing towards (or at least creating) an archived version via something like the Wayback Machine.
It's probably better for the user to search the original URL themselves on the Wayback Machine. If you cite with a Wayback Machine link when the original link still works, you're just creating needless work for a non-profit. An archive isn't a CDN.
This is not a honest comparison. Books are mass produced and don’t rely solely on their authors paying hosting bills and willingness to not change stuff to keep existing.
Relying entirely on a single nonprofit (archive.org) to provide a honest snapshot of every cited link, at the time of citation, sounds much more unreasonable.
The authors usually has a copy of a cited article in their reference systems. at least as pdf.
So yes i dont see why they shouldn't also keep a pdf copy of cited websites with metadata attached
this could then be stored on a university server for future reference.
Or at least have the decency to make sure there's an archive of it when you looked at it - so many times I've found sources sited and Wayback as one from two years before the cite, and one year after; completely missing what the cite was about.
* one source of truth. Not useful for controversial topics
* On topics like graph databases (where I've spent 10+ years), the content doesn't reflect best practices (e.g. VLDB papers)
* Someone with sufficient resources can remove content in the name of "clean up"
* Google <-> wikipedia effect that others discuss in the thread.
Recently I did a deep dive on some minor historical event in the 1800s that I won't bother to go into detail here, except to say that it has been claimed by an activist editor who was made it a personal mission to re-frame the event as an example of "westerners" committing sexual violence against helpless "easterners".
While certainly this kind of story is common throughout history, in this case, there's absolutely no documentary evidence of the event, and what little evidence exists points in the other direction. This is not just the weight of evidence -- it's what all current historical experts believe. It's what all major encyclopedias say about the event. Nonetheless, the Wikipedia editor clings to a bad reference (in an extremely biased book) that makes an off-hand assertion. This assertion, in turn, is sourced with only a single citation to a 1960s-era historical novel that a) didn't actually support what the author claims, and b) essentially made up signficant details of the event in question, based on popular movies and rumors of the time. It's garbage all the way down.
Nevertheless, anyone who edits this article to reflect accurate current knowledge is immediately embroiled in a war with the editor, because unfortunately, there's no "trusted source" that says the opposite of the bad citation. And so the lie remains. To fight this battle would require escalating the issue and possibly getting the editor removed. Who has time?
Again, this is a minor historical event that nobody cares about, and you still cannot trust it as a source. I have seen enough things like this across Wikipedia that I no longer trust it for anything that might intersect with modern political opinions.
More generally, if there are two incompatible versions of an article to be had and editors can't write a neutral article (could have various reasons) initially the largest group "wins" which may be overruled by so called established editors which at times works out even worse. If the topic is actively propagandized or insulting to one or more people the thing may drag out for years.
Yes, exactly. I think it should be obvious [1] to anyone that Wikipedia is unreliable for extremely contentious subjects or modern politics. But if you point to those as examples of editorial bias, you get mired in of-the-moment political bickering. The reason I raise this example is to show that even in a boring area that should be unrelated to modern politics, you still see the rot.
[1] "should be" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in this sentence. Unfortunately, too many people have had their higher reasoning centers rotted by partisanship, and cannot acknowledge inconvenient facts even when they're blatant.
Are other encyclopedias or sources of information less or more likely to fall prey to this kind of bias?
Maybe in Wikipedia it's just more open, so you notice it more?
I've also noticed bias, especially in anything political (or that admits different political or ideological interpretations, such as history). However, I think you have one thing backwards: the more obscure and niche a topic is, the more likely you'll find it biased, since it has fewer editors looking at it.
Every source has bias, but wikipedia has the additional problem that anyone with a torch to burn, regardless of experience or knowledge can become an effective dictator of the content on a topic.
Say what you will about encyclopedias, but they generally farm their writing work out to subject-matter experts, and at least try to be neutral.
> I think you have one thing backwards: the more obscure and niche a topic is, the more likely you'll find it biased, since it has fewer editors looking at it.
Maybe, but the point remains: this bias has fully permeated wikipedia.
> Are other encyclopedias or sources of information less or more likely to fall prey to this kind of bias?
I think it's less likely, because other encyclopedias are written by paid professionals (or at least some cohesive group whose reliability you can evaluate).
> Maybe in Wikipedia it's just more open, so you notice it more?
I think it's more likely on Wikipedia, because no one there is getting paid, so you have to ask yourself, what's their motivation for doing so much work? Sure you have the altruistic gnomes, just laboring to do a good, fair job for its own sake. But you also have people with an axe to grind, propagandists, and other obsessives, and they contribute to basically propagandize their POV. The dumbest ones get banned, but the smarter ones learn to twist the rules and use things like slow long-term persistence to get their way.
Exactly. They also game the “no primary sources” rule to write pure fiction in modern political articles because a “trusted source” (aka a journalistic rag they agree with) purposefully didn’t include that information, and in fact may have blatantly falsified events.
I was able to edit this to fix it, but the geography of New Zealand page had a reference to Southland having a "tundra like climate." Invercargill, which is in Southland, actually has a temperate oceanic climate and a record low of -9C or 15F.
I find wikipedia is really vulnerable to Gill-Mann Amnesia where any article about a topic on which you are very familiar has blatantly incorrect information, but then you open a different one and read it as though it was true. Of course this is true of other sources, famously newspapers, but I think wikipedia is more vulnerable, especially on topics that are very emotionally salient to its power editors.
I think the Southland reference is to upland areas. Invercargill itself is temperate (but often cold) and has a lot of trees, as does Stewart Island to the south. I've camped in both places.
Just say which article this is about. You're leaving out a lead someone else could use to kick out that editor, or fix his mistakes down the line when he's gone.
> a single citation to a 1960s-era historical novel
People get annoyed when I say "The Jungle" by Upton Sinclair is a novel, as is "The Grapes of Wrath" by Steinbeck, and are not appropriate as a historical reference (outside of being a literary cite).
This was less bad than that (a rigorously researched novel), but yes, the same basic idea. The fundamental problem with that kind of narrative non-fiction is that you don’t know what you’re citing - is it the fiction part, or the non-fiction part? Both?
The fact that a “legitimate” academic text cited this novel as a sole reference is an indictment of the entire book.
Both The Jungle and Grapes of Wrath were pretty rigorously researched, but were not really 'historical' novels at the time of writing (both described roughly contemporary places and events), so the research was closer to field work or journalism.
Are you sure about that? My dad grew up in the Depression. He sat next to Oakies in school in Long Beach. He also had a doctorate in history.
So I asked him about TGoW. He said it was an exaggeration, as was most of Steinbeck's work.
As for TJ, Sinclair could have done it as an actual history book, i.e. putting down the results of his rigorous research. But he didn't, and so he could make up whatever he needed. The entire book was a pitch for socialism.
Unfortunately, in time both will become definitive historical reference sources, if they haven't already.
Before the collapse of Google Books, when for a brief, glorious moment Google came closest to achieving the dream of making accessible all the world's knowledge, I could much more easily trace back historical "facts" to a single popular book in whatever field, but then keep going back through older material and often find contradictory accounts and narratives.
History is messy. There's of course what actually happened, but almost immediately narratives start to branch. Then at some point, years, decades, or maybe centuries later, narratives converge back to a single "truth", typically based upon a single, popular author's gloss. There can be some subsequent divergence and reconvergence, but that first convergence really seems to be nearly as defining if not more defining than the actual event(s).
Academics require primary source evidence - e.g., experimental or documentary. Wikipedia is a tertiary source; by policy it forbids primary sources and requires secondary sources.
Yes I was always taught in school that one shouldn’t cite encyclopedias. Encyclopedias, including Wikipedia, are tertiary sources. When writing papers in school and college, secondary sources were what we were supposed to cite.
People who say you should be allowed and encouraged to cite Wikipedia in academic contexts have clearly not spent enough time on Wikipedia. I love Wikipedia and I think it's one of humanity's greatest achievements- however, it has a lot of flaws and really shouldn't ever be used as a substitute for real in depth research. There are major trends and biases in the types of articles that are high quality and those that are low quality. For example, obscure Marvel comic book characters often have much longer and more detailed Wikipedia pages than ones for most pre-modern historical figures.
Wikipedia doesn't consider itself to be a reliable source, for obvious reasons: that's directly circular.
But Wikipedia must always be cited if you use it, otherwise people reading your work (including Wikipedia authors) cannot trace the provenance of the ideas you discuss.
Isn't this directly against WP:NOR, specifically WP:TERTIARY? Every fact must be supported by reliable first-party source, and the idea's provenance is that source.
In the research, there are often long paths that lead to the ideas: lunch room conversation -> paper 1 -> web search on term seen -> paper 2 -> web search on another term seen -> wikipedia page -> another wikipedia page -> original source (paper 3) -> paper 3's citation list -> paper 4 -> fact for your own paper
We always cite only the very last item in the chain, paper 4. I'd might cite other papers I've seen, but only if they are relevant. I was taught that the tertiary sources, like encyclopedias, are never to be cited, unless they have original facts which cannot be traced to other sources.
In my opinion, if you used Wikipedia, you should cite it. If you instead got your idea from "lunch room conversation", or a private email, or whatever, you can also cite that. It's a really huge problem that people pull ideas from Wikipedia, attribute them to something like "paper 4", but then it turns out that what Wikipedia said and what papers 3 and 4 said were not the same, and what Wikipedia said was actually based on some other paper 5 that turns out to be a bunch of bullshit, or a Wikipedia author made it up and wrongly attributed it to paper 3, or a Wikipedia author didn't understand paper 3 and made a total hash of it. Etc.
This of course also happens plenty when Wikipedia isn't involved, but for whatever reason people seem to have the mistaken idea that citing Wikipedia is inherently bad. There's no rule against citing Wikipedia, or tertiary sources in general, from professional work.
When a later person (e.g. a scholar or Wikipedia author) is trying to understand your work, it's incredibly helpful to know where some claim or idea came from. Otherwise they have to jump through extra hoops to trace the actual attributions and figure out where mistakes came from.
Wikipedia's original research policy is not relevant to what works you should cite in academic papers. A Wikipedia article is not supposed to contain the original research of its authors, because it's the wrong venue for such work, and because when such material is added it typically turns out to be nonsense or spam, but rejecting it on the grounds that it is unsourced is much easier.
> In my opinion, if you used Wikipedia, you should cite it [...] It's a really huge problem that people pull ideas from Wikipedia, attribute them to something like "paper 4"..
Your solution for using unreliable Wikipedia is to cite it. My solution (and the way I was taught) is to simply _never use it_ for stuff which goes into the paper.
If I wanted to claim something ("widgets are quux"), I might certainly _start_ with Wikipedia, just to make sure that my understanding is correct and that I am not wasting my time, but if I want to use this in the paper, I will need to move to primary sources, read them and ensure that there is a good evidence that widgets are indeed quux.
So now that I spent all that time reading primary sources, I'd certainly cite them and not Wikipedia - after all, primary sources are better, and a single citation is enough. And in the case the Wikipedia author was wrong, I will avoid a mistake.
By extension, if I am citing Wikipedia, this means I have not found/read any better sources, and that just shows that I am lazy or maybe those widgets are not quux at all. Any advisor/reviewer would immediately point to this mistake - "Why are you citing Wikipedia here? Find a better source or remove the claim"
And that's how the rule is made - it's not "Don't cite Wikipedia [put ideas unattributed instead]", it is actually "Don't cite Wikipedia [find a better source and cit it instead]".
(Although I agree that some lazy people do former rather than latter)
If you never do research on Wikipedia, then fine, don't cite it. That's kind of irrelevant though.
> after all, primary sources are better
This is sometimes true, and sometimes not. For some topics, the Wikipedia article is an amazing overview, significantly better than available alternate sources.
> in the case the Wikipedia author was wrong, I will avoid a mistake
Wikipedia authors are not the only people who can be wrong. All kinds of sources, including primary sources and scholarly secondary sources, contain factual errors, sometimes subtle ones. You should certainly try not to say wrong things, which is why you should approach all sources with a critical eye.
But people cite non-primary sources all the time. The most important thing is to say where you got your ideas/claims, because when you don't, the result is misleading to your readers. If you get your claim from one source, but then cite a different source, that's terrible practice that causes significant trouble. But this happens all the time, and telling people to "never cite Wikipedia" is a major contributor.
Isn't citing encyclopedias shunned in academia in the first place? Wikipedia is an encyclopedia and should be treated as such. I understand that access to primary sources can be difficult at times, but in that case, wouldn't an argument based on a citation from an encyclopedia have a shaky foundation?
It's sad that papers are citing to Wikipedia. Citation 101 is to cite to primary sources if possible, secondary otherwise, at least for substantive claims. Wikipedia isn't a secondary source, or as you point out any kind of legitimate source. Even if Wikipedia were perfectly reliable and accurate, it'd at best be a tertiary source, but it'd still be better to shorten the chain (unlike a tertiary source like a dictionary, which arguably is in a sense a kind of primary or secondary source). And citing to Wikipedia only proves how lazy an author is given Wikipedia itself usually cites to primary and secondary sources, so they couldn't even be bothered to copy+paste the reference, let alone actually read and analyze it first. (Many times I've come across citations that don't support the Wikipedia claim, and sometimes even contradict it, though that's hardly unique to Wikipedia. At least with Wikipedia I can try to do something about it. But even a bad citation is valuable precisely because it can be followed and verified in context.)
> As someone who's contributed to Wikipedia and seen how the sausage is made: that's stupid
What is stupid is considering that only paid publications are citeable. This sort of thinking is malicious and frankly borderline retarted. You don’t even understand the point of the article.
Something like Wikipedia is a wonderful idea in theory, but it's tough to defend when their policies allow factually incorrect content to remain just because it appears on a third-party source that the editors consider reliable. Most media sources contain a pretty high percentage of fake news and when this slop makes its way into Wikipedia that makes the problem even worse. Can we find a better solution?
Philosiphers have been trying to work on how to define what is "True" since forever without much to show for it.
Wikipedia tries to kick the bucket by going with what "reliable" secondary sources say. Thus the goal is not to say the capital T Truth, but to essentially sumnarize academic knowledge.
To steal a saying - its the worst method except for every other known method.
If anyone has a better idea how to determine what is true and what isn't - i'd certainly be very interested.
Sorry but scientific method has been the default for "Truth" for many academic subjects. It is reliable and idempotent. If all of the human information and most of the knowledge workers are removed from the Earth tomorrow, many will arrive in the same conclusion in most of the natural sciences and maths. The language and representation will be different but prime numbers will still be prime numbers and the matter will still be made of one neutral and two "interactive" elements.
Social sciences like politics, history and economy are harder to replicate with the scientific method, however repeated observations, statiscial information as well as qualitative analysis with evidence-based research can still provide replicable analysis.
> If anyone has a better idea how to determine what is true and what isn't - i'd certainly be very interested
This kind of excuse is often cited to shut down any discussion, especially in history, politics and economics. I find it deeply anti-intellectual and dogmatic. As long as evidence and counter-evidence is followed, it should be possible to discuss alternative interpretations and solutions.
While I agree with your sentiment, I must add to this that to say that something is unequivocally true that holds in all conditions everywhere is difficult to ascertain in general. So we have to deal with that two (or more) things can be true at the same time (sometimes). This may be less the case for things such as prime numbers but more the case when the underlying principle is void of simple cause and effect (in the linear sense).
The scientific method can be used to falsify hypotheses. It cannot prove that something is true. Fields that use the scientific method typically rely on social consensus for determining the truth. Empirically speaking, the social consensus seems to converge to a reasonable approximation of the truth with a high probability, but the process can take decades.
> This kind of excuse is often cited to shut down any discussion, especially in history, politics and economics. I find it deeply anti-intellectual and dogmatic. As long as evidence and counter-evidence is followed, it should be possible to discuss alternative interpretations and solutions.
How do you propose to discuss "alternative interpretations and solutions" if you believe that doing so is "anti-intellectual and dogmatic".
I'm honestly confused how you could respond this way to my comment. It sounds like you are criticizing yourself (?)
How do you propose an encyclopedia applies the scientific method? It's an encyclopedia, not a research lab. Wikipedia specifically rules out original research (which is good, because imagine all the crackpots they would attract if they allowed it).
Or is your objection against all encyclopedias rather than specifically Wikipedia? Do you think other encyclopedias do this significantly better?
I understand that "truth" and "facts" are squishy philosophical concepts at the edges, but I'm talking about something much more basic. There are Wikipedia pages which are flat out wrong (by any common definition of the term) and yet the editors won't allow any corrections because the primary sources are also wrong.
One thing that might help a bit would be to tag or color code specific statements with a confidence factor. So a statement sourced only from a single trash site like the NY Times or Fox News would be red, whereas another statement sourced from multiple independent scholarly journals would be green. Or something like that.
> There are Wikipedia pages which are flat out wrong (by any common definition of the term) and yet the editors won't allow any corrections because the primary sources are also wrong.
Not saying that doesn't happen, but do you have an example of such a page?
> There are Wikipedia pages which are flat out wrong (by any common definition of the term) and yet the editors won't allow any corrections because the primary sources are also wrong.
Primary sources aren't really considered reliable on wikipedia (with some exceptions), so if such a situation is happening (and you have a source for whatever version you think is correct, since just trust me bro doesn't go far on wikipedia) and you can't resolve it on the talk page, probably time to escalate the situation.
I think the Gell Mann effect applies on Wikipedia just as much as in the papers. I’ve often come across articles in an area where I’m an expert and they have issues. I used to try and have them changed, but many years ago I just got exhausted by fanatics who seem to have just gotten really attached to their (incorrect) prose.
Literature reviews summarise the state of knowledge in a given field, and given Wikipedia articles are about the knowledge on a subject rather than the contents of a specific paper, I don't see why it would be unusual to rely on them. Is there anything specific that you find doesn't make sense to you? It's fairly common in, e.g. medical research for individual studies to be not relied upon and meta-analyses are certainly generally considered stronger evidence on any topic.
> Literature reviews summarise the state of knowledge in a given field, and given Wikipedia articles are about the knowledge on a subject rather than the contents of a specific paper
every paper has a review section built into the background section, which goes through the same peer-review process that a review does. usually these are much better and more up to date than review articles since they're written by scientists trying to put their findings into context, rather than reviews which are often handed by professors to their PhD students/postdocs who need to fill their CV with papers after a few 'dry' research years, and often peddle their group's take on a given topic rather than being neutral.
I can't tell you the number of times that I've read something in a review then gone on to read the original cited paper and found that the review inaccurately summarized the paper. often the review author didn't even read the paper, just summarized something from the title or abstract. this happens for primary papers too, but reviews are in no way more reliable, and in my opinion the farther you get from the source data the more errors propagate.
it's also a bad policy for seemingly controversial topics. the medical establishment is composed of humans with plenty of biases and groupthink, so a perfectly good idea can be shunned or ignored for decades if it's inconvenient to the establishment. this creates a chicken and egg problem for finding funding to study those ideas, or to know they even need to be studied.
in grad school we learned to 'embrace the controversy' in grant writing. instead of picking a side, steel-man the different opinions and evidence for each, and cite the differences as a reason for further study & explain how you'll figure it out.
wikipedia doesn't need that last part, but I think it will be a good habit for editors to learn to truly critique a primary paper.
the only thing reviews have going for them is they are more accessible/skimmable to the average reader. my guess is that the rule about citing was written to make it easier to be an editor. anyway, technically the wikipedia regulations don't outright ban primary literature as long as you give the necessary caveats, but there are plenty of megalomaniacal admins don't care about nuance (e.g. MrOllie)
A few years ago (April 25, 2023) I made my first significant edit to wikipedia on the Linus Pauling article, which was not up to date on its discussion of how Vitamin C affects cancer (2005-09 era papers).
The crux of the issue is that route of administration affects what Vitamin C does in the body, with opposing effects (pro-oxidant vs anti-oxidant and also changes how much vitamin C can get in the blood by orders of magnitude), so it’s almost a different drug depending on how take it. See review article in a few paragraphs.
The Wikipedia article focused on the lack of benefit of oral Vitamin C supplementation while barely mentioning recent successes in human trials or that attempts to repeat Pauling’s cancer trial didn’t use IV vitamin C.
So after this sentence in the article lead “None of his ideas concerning the medical usefulness of large doses of vitamins have gained much acceptance in the mainstream scientific community.” I added this: “However, attempts to replicate Linus Pauling's work did not use the exact method of delivery and specific molecules as the original experiments promoted by Pauling.”
I also replaced this sentence from the main text: “Results from most clinical trials suggest that modest vitamin C supplementation alone or with other nutrients offers no benefit in the prevention of cancer”, with this:
“Although there is no consensus in the literature on whether IV high dose vitamin C can affect cancer treatment outcomes, recent pre-clinical mouse studies have revealed a beneficial effect when high dose IV vitamin C is combined with immunotherapy. The effect was only observed in immunocompetent mice, suggesting that the anti-tumor effect depends in part on a functional immune system, rather than unspecific pro-oxidant activity.”
MrOllie reverted all of the edits and saying they were profringe, “blatantly fail WP:MEDRS requirements” yet couldn’t actually go into detail as to how they broke the WP:MEDRS rules, and how anything I wrote was ‘fringe’.
So, I've taken a look over the weekend, I can't say I've fully settled on what I want to say yet but I'd like to make an initial attempt at articulating what my thoughts are:
To start with, I think the "fringe" aspect played a bigger part in your interaction than the sourcing guidelines (MEDRS) and policies (OR § PRIMARY). I do find it unfortunate that there isn't a better way of informing people wanting to edit the first time, but anything in a contentious topic, whether it's officially designated as such and listed in the list of contentious topics... Well they're probably not the best places to get started because there are a lot of people who do want to pick individual primary sources and overemphasise their weight relative to the body of other primary sources (such as those as reviewed by MEDRS secondary sources).
So if you're editing in a field with a lot of interest from, uh, altmed type people, you're probably going to see much stricter application of the relevant guidelines than other medical topics without such interest unfortunately, and the editors working in such areas are probably very tired of anything that even vaguely looks like promoting altmed. Megavitamin therapy at the moment would still be that even if it's vastly more plausible to actually have a mechanism of action unlike certain other types of altmed.
> it's tough to defend when their policies allow factually incorrect content to remain just because it appears on a third-party source that the editors consider reliable.
I feel this is the kind of discussion that would really benefit from a number of concrete examples.
> Sealioning (also sea-lioning and sea lioning) is a type of trolling or harassment that consists of pursuing people with relentless requests for evidence, often tangential or previously addressed, while maintaining a pretense of civility and sincerity
You really believe that applies here?
Its hard to say its relentless when not a single piece of evidence has been given so far.
Its hard to say its tangential when it speaks to the original poster's thesis.
> I feel like that is the kind of response that is an example that could be used for "sealioning" on Wikipedia.
Not at all. Mainly because this is asking for the first line of examples, not repeatedly bogging down the conversation with constant requests for additional evidence.
Also it matters because in this kind of vague remarks that Wikipedia is unreliable, or that articles are wrong, almost always the people claiming this fail to provide specific examples, instead relying on some general feeling of frustration and shared belief that it must be true. But if they provided a specific example of a factually incorrect article, maybe other people would disagree. Or if they provided an example of ideological bias, maybe it would turn out the complainer is in the minority in believing that was biased. And if it turned out that this were controversial topics that most encyclopedic articles struggle with in some form, maybe it isn't a problem with Wikipedia. So examples matter!
So no examples must be provided at all, the vague claims of various terrible flaws in Wikipedia must be accepted prima facie?
I disagree. And it's funny because lots of people believe contradictory things about Wikipedia (or anything else, really). Without examples, we cannot be sure if the specific claims make sense. "But everyone knows what I mean" is unacceptable.
Calling this sea lioning seems disingenuous and a cop out to me.
Fair to assume that the library of Alexandria contained books written by the most erudite scholars and philosophers of their day, not Joe and Jane and their cohort of terminally online gatekeepers.
> can anyone argue that Wikipedia is not our best attempt at collective facts?
Maybe at free collective facts. If you want to pay: JSTOR and Google Scholar, for example; textbooks; or any of the endless scholarly encylopedias, guides, and review papers, especially on specific topics. And if you don't want to pay: shadow libraries, or the reference room of an academic library.
I am not familiar with the process of peer review, but is it open? As far as I know, it is confidential on purpose, right? Doing all of this with an open moderation trail is what makes Wikipedia truly ambitious, isn't it?
I have spoken with a few Reddit mods, and Chad, Reddit's 12th hire about this topic. Everyone agreed that truly open moderation would be the biggest shit show ever. Yet, that is ambition of Wikipedia.
Can you imagine what Dang and Tom would have to deal with if all of their moderation was open? I might have some disagreements with HN moderation, but open moderation is not something I would wish upon them.
Yes, the reviewers' comments and the authors' rebuttals are generally confidential, and there are good reasons for doing it that way. One significant reason is to allow the reviewers to make their comments freely, without worrying about how those comments might be perceived by the public or how the authors' reputations might be impacted; likewise with the authors' rebuttals. Another reason is to avoid tainting the review process in situations where a paper is rejected from one journal and re-submitted to another -- the second set of reviewers should not know that it was previously rejected, nor should they know why it was previously rejected.
On the other hand, the peer review process is "open" in the sense that there is no explicit credential required to be a reviewer, only expertise in the field (typically determined by publishing papers -- in principle someone with no formal education could publish enough papers to start getting invitations to be a reviewer). It is also "open" in the sense that anyone can submit a paper for review as long as it adheres to formatting (page layout, font size, etc.) and length requirements.
What are "collective facts?" How do you distinguish "collective facts" from "alternative facts?"
It is hard to imagine a worse attempt at establishing a collection of commonly accepted truths than Wikipedia. Scientific journals are overwhelmingly better at weeding out falsehoods and hoaxes, despite the history of successful efforts to dupe reviewers. University libraries are also better at collecting knowledge, and in fact the entire industry of journal publishing began at university libraries. That knowledge is not locked away from the masses, it is just less convenient to access than Wikipedia.
Even Wikipedia has had to accept that a certain amount of oversight and review is necessary. There are some topics that attract bad actors, paid shills, state-sponsored propagandists, etc., and Wikipedia had to introduce "protected pages" to deal with such things. Add a structured review process and more rigorous citation requirements and those "protected pages" would be a lightweight version of academic publishing.
Defense of open knowledge will appear when they attack the monopoly of Elsevier and other publishers through innovative systems for peer-evaluated papers, not by trying to resuscitate the body of the spook-filled Wikipedia.
Wikipedia is existentially threatened by AI, which does the same thing but better.
> most users of AI products do not click the links to Wikipedia, choosing instead to accept machine-generated outputs without further verification. If this practice continues, readership on Wikipedia will continue to decline.
This is the same mechanism by which Wikipedia drained readers from news outlets and academic papers that it cites for information.
You could argue that unlike Wikipedia, greedy AI companies might ban sources for political reasons. But Wikipedia does the same thing: much of the mainstream media is unreliable (red) or not reliable (yellow):
What academics need to defend is wikipedia in latent space. Not walls of text that reflect the opinions of a few who have the time to edit that the rich and famous can optimize.
Not sarcastic. Backed by a registered domain name, GitHub project, discussion links, huggingface dataset and an OSS graph database project with 1900 stars.
The extremists are the ones who believe that Wikipedia is working well and quote Poe's law as described on the page, which Google will cite literally.
Academics have a duty to make quality knowledge open. The difference between what is outside and inside the walled garden is astounding. They most of the truly valuable knowledge to themselves, and leave the public to feed on scraps, augmented by mountains of junk food, drowning in an ocean of sh-t (misinformation).
What on earth did we do before WP? I'm old enough to remember the olden days before WP existed and the practice of reading the news.
I also remember the whispers and chatter outside of and around the 'papers. Those whispers etc would reinforce a later article.
What is happening now with news ie top down dissemination of world events is not new but what is different today is the immediacy of commentary by the hoi poloi - you and me and who knows what from across the world ... and bots.
I think we have to get to grips with the fact that an event happening within one corner of the world measuring an inch squared can rock up on the agenda of anyone, anywhere across the entire world.
I miss making monthly trips to the local university library as a child. I would have some infatuation, often related to electronics or programming, and would get a big book on it and just dive in for a few weeks. There were magazines on microfilm. It felt like a privilege to get that information. You had to wait to get to it and would only possess it for a while. The ideas would simmer for long stretches without any ability to instantly cross-check your information or get clarifications or feedback on work. Trite, I know, but I feel joy just thinking about that whole experience.
Downvote away, but: Academics have a duty to explain their years of inaction while their students have wilted and faltered as a direct result of academics not understanding how to to be effective in the real world in which their students are expected to be productive members. Those that cant, teach, and teach ridiculous fallacies they personally subscribe to. Instead of real critical thinking they instilled a twisted sick worldview about social issues that has no connection to creating market value and being a good, supportive human. Wikipedia is the last concern of this rapidly imploding rightthink crumbling empire, on its last legs from those whose families bore the ultimate cost to get their kid a degree that is increasingly worthless.
I propose our leadership cut funding and fine any program in the US where a professor is not actively working in their field at a minimum part-time. These people are so out of touch it is literally sickening when you think of all the negative downstream effects.
They're academics. The job is to say things that are true inosfar as a community of experts driven by rigorous argument believes.
Whether or not that has any effect on the real world is not their concern. The academy is proud of their record of interest in things that have no applications whatsoever in the real world and ideas that turn out to be extremely harmful if applied. The people pretending that academia is some sort of vocational system were wrong and are to blame for the academics doing exactly what they were expected to do.
Although yes to the idea that taxpayers shouldn't have to fund running everyone through university. The academics are often opposed to the taxpayers, it isn't fair to make the taxpayers fund them.
Indeed, broadening what academic scores mean (past a citation number) and letting them be recongnized by contributing to open knowledge like wikipedia (vs closed private journals) is the counterbalance we need.
> The fulfilment of ethical obligations to support knowledge communities, however, requires support from institutions of higher education. Currently, most academics are evaluated on their scholarly and research achievements, teaching performance, and service duties to their departments. Public service, like contributing to Wikipedia, goes largely unrecognised, if it is even counted at all. If academics are to fulfil their responsibilities to protect knowledge and knowledge communities, institutions must recognise efforts like contributing to Wikipedia and provide resources and support. Doing so may also help to address the public’s eroding trust in higher education itself, as a greater commitment to serving the public would reassert the role of universities as stewards of knowledge that exist to serve humanity – a role shared by Wikipedia.
As someone who is old enough to remember the start of Wikipedia. Academia originally had issue with wikipedia due to the lack of academic oversight and therefore didn't allow it in citation for academic work. Now they have to defend it?
Editors are still not allowed to have credentials. The absurd argument is that credentials can never be validated.
I don't know how scientific journals manage to exist but technically it could be as simple as a link to the user page on the university professors profile page.
Wikipedians have all kinds of credentials, which they are allowed to publicize if they want. Many Wikipedians have their full names and links to their personal websites, scholarly work, etc. on their user page.
There are also plenty of pseudonymous Wikipedians with credentials that they keep secret or vague. As long as they don't edit pages where they have an undisclosed conflict of interest, that's also fine.
Credentials can lend someone credibility in discussions. They just don't grant special editing privileges.
Linking to something from the wiki is considered irrelevant as it doesn't prove anything.
If an editor is an expert in a field and you can verify it it would be most useful to the encyclopedia to treat them as such. This is not actually a special privilege but how people normally do things.
I can gather citations and glue them into an article but someone with actual expertise knows which parts are important, what isn't and what is missing.
Wikimedia is of course free to have an encyclopedia project to entertain children with to much time on their hands but they will continue to lose good editors. You can't have both.
If you disarm the man before throwing him into the alligator pit he won't survive but it will be great for the alligators.
I don't understand your point. People who are experts in the field are treated as experts. They just don't get to unilaterally make all of the decisions.
Actually the most significant reason to not cite Wikipedia is the churn -- citations are supposed to give readers enough information to actually find the specific information that is being cited, and that should be possible even decades after a paper is published. Citations to academic journals are generally preferred because journal articles can, in principle, always be found because of the archives maintained by university libraries. Citations to Wikipedia articles would need to include the specific revision being cited and there is no guarantee that any revision of any article on Wikipedia will actually be available 50 years from now.
I’m old enough to remember when Wikipedia was not allowed to be cited in high school papers because it wasn’t a sufficiently authoritative source. How the turn tables…
That time was also when people could just add useful information to articles without some self-declared gatekeeper/“curator” removing everything they cannot grasp or simply deem uninteresting again.
This is true. I think the problem has changed but it still there. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think it’s a reliable academic source. I just think it’s ironic that an academic is saying it’s a moral duty to protect it.
But my attempts to make him a page on English Wikipedia keep getting rejected -- failed to establish notability. The fact that he won some awards and kids read his stories on the other side of the planet is apparently not good enough for Wikipedia.
Looks like your drafts didn't have much in the way of sources. Someone else did a complete rewrite in September with additional sources to establish notability.
The funny to me is that without context there’s no way to know which ideological bias you mean. Just looking at the parts of Wikipedia I routinely use I don’t see much of a bias beyond one that favors more verbose articles.
I’ve routinely heard “Wikipedia is becoming ideological,” and it’s usually action flip as to whether they thinks it’s too far to the left or right.
If you find an article is too long to read comfortably, please consider adding {{too long|date=October 2026}} (or whatever the date at the time is) to the top so that people can figure out what to do with it.
I don’t have any problem with the trend, it’s just notable to me. I think any encyclopedia with essentially unlimited space would eventually trend in the same direction.
Sorry, I should have included this in my comment. I'm referring to pages on communism or communism adjacent topics, socialism and the middle eastern conflicts involving Isreal. I find a lot of the communist pages use sources that have 'a marxist perspective of history' which is ahistorical. The middle east articles involving Isreal use a lot of sources known to be unreliable like middleeasteye and Al-jazeera. They also receive a a ton of traffic from both sides as they're using wikipedia to fight over history.
Rather, it's a recognition that it's not worth it to engage when the odds of the question being honest are slim. If you are curious about bias on Wikipedia, the information is readily available. There's even a Wikipedia article.
It's a nice Wikipedia article, and highlights that the people most critical of Wikipedia are cranks (e.g. Larry Sanger, Elon Musk), and that most studies trying to objectively discover bias find very mild and isolated examples of bias.
Spoiler: turns out the commenter I was asking about this had an issue with Wikipedia re: marxism and the Middle East / Israel.
The mention of marxism is puzzling, but re: the Middle East / Israel, I think it's impossible for any kind of written publication to report anything relatively recent on this topic that won't make anyone enraged about bias. So it seems a bit unfair to claim this is how Wikipedia is "being lost to ideology", because this is a property of the various Middle East conflicts, not of Wikipedia. Let me emphasize: nothing that could be written anywhere about the Middle East or Israel, today or in recent years, can possibly avoid enraging a large number of people all over the world.
Sorry, I should have included this in my comment. I'm referring to pages on communism or communism adjacent topics, socialism and the middle eastern conflicts involving Isreal. I find a lot of the communist pages use sources that have 'a marxist perspective of history' which is ahistorical. The middle east articles involving Isreal use a lot of sources known to be unreliable like middleeasteye and Al-jazeera. They also receive a a ton of traffic from both sides as they're using wikipedia to fight over history.
Based on what you're saying, I think your real issue is that your own ideology and biases clash with whatever you perceive about Wikipedia. If Wikipedia had a less "marxist perspective of history" (!) or relied more on whatever you think is more reliable about the Middle East and Israel, then we'd have another commenter claiming Wikipedia is hopelessly biased in the opposite direction.
Unfortunately this boils down to "I don't like it", which is very subjective and very hard to evaluate in a neutral way that everyone agrees must mean "Wikipedia is being lost to ideology", as you claimed.
I think we all agree political and recent-ish history are mired in controversy and these divisive topics are problematic in Wikipedia, but ultimately hard to report on neutrally anyway. I guess they could settle for a insincere "neutral" tone that left everyone unsatisfied; Wikipedia supposedly tries to do that.
The currently accepted 'knowledge' framework has been vigorously defended in WP since its beginning. When the label 'pseudoscience' appears in the first few paragraphs, you can usually depend on content highly critical of any threats to the orthodox (if they're even allowed mention).
Academics are more likely to defend the current paradigm. Traditionally, anomalies often go unmentioned in published papers.
All evidence for the existence of meteors was denied for centuries after Newton declared that outer space is empty - until the late 18th century, when ignoring the evidence became too burdensome.
Kind of. I'm referring to pages on communism or communism adjacent topics, socialism and the middle eastern conflicts involving Isreal. I find that they make a claim about a state of the world and they use quotes from well known people to support it but those well known people aren't historians and they are very often misrepresenting the state of the world at the time. I'll see stuff that frames an action in a positive way and then uses a quote from someone who 'gives the Marxist perspective of history' but a Marxist perspective on history is ahistorical.
I feel like you're one of the only people reading about Marxist topics on Wikipedia, given that most (intelligent) people genuinely interested on the topic will engage with primary sources. Very rarely do I read "below the fold" on any topic, but especially on topics concerning sociopolitical issues is my scrollbar completely untouched.
You may be raising criticism genuinely, but you're fighting a very uphill battle because many of the people who cry about Wikipedia bias would want, e.g., the article on Communism to start as it does on Conservapedia:
> Communism is a left-wing anti-democratic and violent ideology dedicated to overthrowing capitalism, replacing it with an unelected "dictatorship of the proletariat" by technocrats and an atheist elite.
which is, for lack of a more honest and concise word, retarded.
Im on the progressive left just not the ML communist left. I dont only engage with the wikipedia page or I wouldnt have noticed the clearly marxist framing on some sections.
Some of that stuff, rather than deliberate ideology may be the writers doing what they can but not getting it quite right. You can always try correcting it yourself if there is a factual error and you have a suitable source to cite.
I appreciate a serious answer, and I have to say that I avoid articles on modern conflicts and people for most part, at least in part for the reasons you state. I’m not sure that it’s a singular bias so much as the usual, “Always online true believers of any stripe will always be far more likely to contribute, edit, and fight for their views than the rest of us.”
As a technical resource I love Wikipedia, as a quick reference it’s valuable though.
Most of the IPs are used are blocked before they even start. If you do get in there, an editor without a clue will challenge your edits even if he (nearly always a "he") knows nothing about the given subject.
I find moreso that certain ideologies are more and more rejecting the foundation on which Wikipedia is built: knowledge and rationality. When a movement discards truth in the pursuit of power, it's no surprise that there becomes a disconnect with sources of truth.
Pray tell - from where do you get your ideologically neutral information?
I'm not sure if I'm confused or terrorized by the article.
Concerns on Wikipedia dying because of a lack of editors, and that being due to AI? Wikipedia's community often makes it very clear they don't want editors, and there's a whole lot of people who have actually tried to contribute who will tell you of the unjustifiable miserable time they had when wanting to do a good deed, that has been a considerable problem for I don't even know how many years now, why would I care about AI redirecting traffic possibly reducing the influx of editors when there's a far larger, more evident, long-standing problem?
Promoting quoting Wikipedia as a source is madness. It begs circular logic. Citogenesis is already a considerable problem, can we not kick it into overdrive? Please? Wikipedia being at risk is one thing, but asking for a cancer to be spread upon academia, I'm sorry but we are not at a point in which reputation can be squandered like that.
>Doing so may also help to address the public’s eroding trust in higher education itself, as a greater commitment to serving the public would reassert the role of universities as stewards of knowledge that exist to serve humanity – a role shared by Wikipedia.
And there's even acknowledgement! But that somehow makes it worse because one of the main reasons academia has lost reputation is the same one that often gets called out on Wikipedia: political bias and agenda pushing.
It's like there's a fire in a building and a huge stack of papers on another, in which a guy is playing with matches, and the argument is that we should move the fire from the former to the latter. I honestly think that if this sort of advice was listened to, the consequences would be terrible.
157 comments
[ 0.25 ms ] story [ 8.7 ms ] threadWe need "open access" knowledge systems with known authors who are sponsored by non-profit and educational organizations and its their duty to defend their reputation.
but that's not how Wikipedia works. articles about noteworthy or controversial things have activist commissars and/or paid shills watching every edit, and unless your edit aligns with the narrative they wish to present, it will be undone with essentially "because fuck you" as the reason.
its value is still considerable, of course -- there are far more neutral things than controversial ones, and most of the articles about those are fine. everything even remotely political, however, is thoroughly subverted.
As someone who's contributed to Wikipedia and seen how the sausage is made: that's stupid. Even Wikipedia itself considers wikis (including itself) to lack sufficient authority to be cited as a source.
Such citations could be easily gamed (if you cite a particular change) or are useless (the content you cite may not be there in the future), and are obvious pathways to "citogenesis."
Of course for most things you should have no need to refer to Wikipedia at all, and hence also no need to cite it.
Those two things are not alike. Nobody can view themselves as sufficient authority to be cited as their own source.
(The late Victor Mair was an exception; he was happy to "support" his own claims by citing wikipedia articles that cited unsourced claims from him.)
While certainly this kind of story is common throughout history, in this case, there's absolutely no documentary evidence of the event, and what little evidence exists points in the other direction. This is not just the weight of evidence -- it's what all current historical experts believe. Nonetheless, the Wikipedia editor clings to a bad reference (in an extremely biased book) that makes an off-hand assertion. This assertion, in turn, is sourced with only a single citation to a 1960s-era historical novel that a) didn't actually support what the author claims, and b) essentially made up signficant details of the event in question, based on popular movies and rumors of the time. It's garbage all the way down.
Nevertheless, anyone who edits this article to reflect accurate current knowledge is immediately embroiled in a war with this editor, because unfortunately, there's no "trusted source" that says the opposite of the bad citation. And so the lie remains. To fight this battle would require escalating the issue and possibly getting the editor removed. Who has time?
It's probably better for the user to search the original URL themselves on the Wayback Machine. If you cite with a Wayback Machine link when the original link still works, you're just creating needless work for a non-profit. An archive isn't a CDN.
> or at least creating
I agree on creating.
Do you also expect universities to have an archived version of every article and book their professors cite?
Relying entirely on a single nonprofit (archive.org) to provide a honest snapshot of every cited link, at the time of citation, sounds much more unreasonable.
this could then be stored on a university server for future reference.
While certainly this kind of story is common throughout history, in this case, there's absolutely no documentary evidence of the event, and what little evidence exists points in the other direction. This is not just the weight of evidence -- it's what all current historical experts believe. It's what all major encyclopedias say about the event. Nonetheless, the Wikipedia editor clings to a bad reference (in an extremely biased book) that makes an off-hand assertion. This assertion, in turn, is sourced with only a single citation to a 1960s-era historical novel that a) didn't actually support what the author claims, and b) essentially made up signficant details of the event in question, based on popular movies and rumors of the time. It's garbage all the way down.
Nevertheless, anyone who edits this article to reflect accurate current knowledge is immediately embroiled in a war with the editor, because unfortunately, there's no "trusted source" that says the opposite of the bad citation. And so the lie remains. To fight this battle would require escalating the issue and possibly getting the editor removed. Who has time?
Again, this is a minor historical event that nobody cares about, and you still cannot trust it as a source. I have seen enough things like this across Wikipedia that I no longer trust it for anything that might intersect with modern political opinions.
[1] "should be" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in this sentence. Unfortunately, too many people have had their higher reasoning centers rotted by partisanship, and cannot acknowledge inconvenient facts even when they're blatant.
Maybe in Wikipedia it's just more open, so you notice it more?
I've also noticed bias, especially in anything political (or that admits different political or ideological interpretations, such as history). However, I think you have one thing backwards: the more obscure and niche a topic is, the more likely you'll find it biased, since it has fewer editors looking at it.
Every source has bias, but wikipedia has the additional problem that anyone with a torch to burn, regardless of experience or knowledge can become an effective dictator of the content on a topic.
Say what you will about encyclopedias, but they generally farm their writing work out to subject-matter experts, and at least try to be neutral.
> I think you have one thing backwards: the more obscure and niche a topic is, the more likely you'll find it biased, since it has fewer editors looking at it.
Maybe, but the point remains: this bias has fully permeated wikipedia.
I think it's less likely, because other encyclopedias are written by paid professionals (or at least some cohesive group whose reliability you can evaluate).
> Maybe in Wikipedia it's just more open, so you notice it more?
I think it's more likely on Wikipedia, because no one there is getting paid, so you have to ask yourself, what's their motivation for doing so much work? Sure you have the altruistic gnomes, just laboring to do a good, fair job for its own sake. But you also have people with an axe to grind, propagandists, and other obsessives, and they contribute to basically propagandize their POV. The dumbest ones get banned, but the smarter ones learn to twist the rules and use things like slow long-term persistence to get their way.
I find wikipedia is really vulnerable to Gill-Mann Amnesia where any article about a topic on which you are very familiar has blatantly incorrect information, but then you open a different one and read it as though it was true. Of course this is true of other sources, famously newspapers, but I think wikipedia is more vulnerable, especially on topics that are very emotionally salient to its power editors.
People get annoyed when I say "The Jungle" by Upton Sinclair is a novel, as is "The Grapes of Wrath" by Steinbeck, and are not appropriate as a historical reference (outside of being a literary cite).
The fact that a “legitimate” academic text cited this novel as a sole reference is an indictment of the entire book.
So I asked him about TGoW. He said it was an exaggeration, as was most of Steinbeck's work.
As for TJ, Sinclair could have done it as an actual history book, i.e. putting down the results of his rigorous research. But he didn't, and so he could make up whatever he needed. The entire book was a pitch for socialism.
Before the collapse of Google Books, when for a brief, glorious moment Google came closest to achieving the dream of making accessible all the world's knowledge, I could much more easily trace back historical "facts" to a single popular book in whatever field, but then keep going back through older material and often find contradictory accounts and narratives.
History is messy. There's of course what actually happened, but almost immediately narratives start to branch. Then at some point, years, decades, or maybe centuries later, narratives converge back to a single "truth", typically based upon a single, popular author's gloss. There can be some subsequent divergence and reconvergence, but that first convergence really seems to be nearly as defining if not more defining than the actual event(s).
Academics require primary source evidence - e.g., experimental or documentary. Wikipedia is a tertiary source; by policy it forbids primary sources and requires secondary sources.
What do you mean by "gamed"?
My favorite version is when topics are stuck decades ago and newer sources are rejected as an attempt to make the topic look real
But Wikipedia must always be cited if you use it, otherwise people reading your work (including Wikipedia authors) cannot trace the provenance of the ideas you discuss.
In the research, there are often long paths that lead to the ideas: lunch room conversation -> paper 1 -> web search on term seen -> paper 2 -> web search on another term seen -> wikipedia page -> another wikipedia page -> original source (paper 3) -> paper 3's citation list -> paper 4 -> fact for your own paper
We always cite only the very last item in the chain, paper 4. I'd might cite other papers I've seen, but only if they are relevant. I was taught that the tertiary sources, like encyclopedias, are never to be cited, unless they have original facts which cannot be traced to other sources.
This of course also happens plenty when Wikipedia isn't involved, but for whatever reason people seem to have the mistaken idea that citing Wikipedia is inherently bad. There's no rule against citing Wikipedia, or tertiary sources in general, from professional work.
When a later person (e.g. a scholar or Wikipedia author) is trying to understand your work, it's incredibly helpful to know where some claim or idea came from. Otherwise they have to jump through extra hoops to trace the actual attributions and figure out where mistakes came from.
Wikipedia's original research policy is not relevant to what works you should cite in academic papers. A Wikipedia article is not supposed to contain the original research of its authors, because it's the wrong venue for such work, and because when such material is added it typically turns out to be nonsense or spam, but rejecting it on the grounds that it is unsourced is much easier.
Your solution for using unreliable Wikipedia is to cite it. My solution (and the way I was taught) is to simply _never use it_ for stuff which goes into the paper.
If I wanted to claim something ("widgets are quux"), I might certainly _start_ with Wikipedia, just to make sure that my understanding is correct and that I am not wasting my time, but if I want to use this in the paper, I will need to move to primary sources, read them and ensure that there is a good evidence that widgets are indeed quux.
So now that I spent all that time reading primary sources, I'd certainly cite them and not Wikipedia - after all, primary sources are better, and a single citation is enough. And in the case the Wikipedia author was wrong, I will avoid a mistake.
By extension, if I am citing Wikipedia, this means I have not found/read any better sources, and that just shows that I am lazy or maybe those widgets are not quux at all. Any advisor/reviewer would immediately point to this mistake - "Why are you citing Wikipedia here? Find a better source or remove the claim"
And that's how the rule is made - it's not "Don't cite Wikipedia [put ideas unattributed instead]", it is actually "Don't cite Wikipedia [find a better source and cit it instead]".
(Although I agree that some lazy people do former rather than latter)
> after all, primary sources are better
This is sometimes true, and sometimes not. For some topics, the Wikipedia article is an amazing overview, significantly better than available alternate sources.
> in the case the Wikipedia author was wrong, I will avoid a mistake
Wikipedia authors are not the only people who can be wrong. All kinds of sources, including primary sources and scholarly secondary sources, contain factual errors, sometimes subtle ones. You should certainly try not to say wrong things, which is why you should approach all sources with a critical eye.
But people cite non-primary sources all the time. The most important thing is to say where you got your ideas/claims, because when you don't, the result is misleading to your readers. If you get your claim from one source, but then cite a different source, that's terrible practice that causes significant trouble. But this happens all the time, and telling people to "never cite Wikipedia" is a major contributor.
What is stupid is considering that only paid publications are citeable. This sort of thinking is malicious and frankly borderline retarted. You don’t even understand the point of the article.
Wikipedia tries to kick the bucket by going with what "reliable" secondary sources say. Thus the goal is not to say the capital T Truth, but to essentially sumnarize academic knowledge.
To steal a saying - its the worst method except for every other known method.
If anyone has a better idea how to determine what is true and what isn't - i'd certainly be very interested.
Social sciences like politics, history and economy are harder to replicate with the scientific method, however repeated observations, statiscial information as well as qualitative analysis with evidence-based research can still provide replicable analysis.
> If anyone has a better idea how to determine what is true and what isn't - i'd certainly be very interested
This kind of excuse is often cited to shut down any discussion, especially in history, politics and economics. I find it deeply anti-intellectual and dogmatic. As long as evidence and counter-evidence is followed, it should be possible to discuss alternative interpretations and solutions.
How do you propose to discuss "alternative interpretations and solutions" if you believe that doing so is "anti-intellectual and dogmatic".
I'm honestly confused how you could respond this way to my comment. It sounds like you are criticizing yourself (?)
Or is your objection against all encyclopedias rather than specifically Wikipedia? Do you think other encyclopedias do this significantly better?
One thing that might help a bit would be to tag or color code specific statements with a confidence factor. So a statement sourced only from a single trash site like the NY Times or Fox News would be red, whereas another statement sourced from multiple independent scholarly journals would be green. Or something like that.
Not saying that doesn't happen, but do you have an example of such a page?
Primary sources aren't really considered reliable on wikipedia (with some exceptions), so if such a situation is happening (and you have a source for whatever version you think is correct, since just trust me bro doesn't go far on wikipedia) and you can't resolve it on the talk page, probably time to escalate the situation.
every paper has a review section built into the background section, which goes through the same peer-review process that a review does. usually these are much better and more up to date than review articles since they're written by scientists trying to put their findings into context, rather than reviews which are often handed by professors to their PhD students/postdocs who need to fill their CV with papers after a few 'dry' research years, and often peddle their group's take on a given topic rather than being neutral.
I can't tell you the number of times that I've read something in a review then gone on to read the original cited paper and found that the review inaccurately summarized the paper. often the review author didn't even read the paper, just summarized something from the title or abstract. this happens for primary papers too, but reviews are in no way more reliable, and in my opinion the farther you get from the source data the more errors propagate.
it's also a bad policy for seemingly controversial topics. the medical establishment is composed of humans with plenty of biases and groupthink, so a perfectly good idea can be shunned or ignored for decades if it's inconvenient to the establishment. this creates a chicken and egg problem for finding funding to study those ideas, or to know they even need to be studied.
in grad school we learned to 'embrace the controversy' in grant writing. instead of picking a side, steel-man the different opinions and evidence for each, and cite the differences as a reason for further study & explain how you'll figure it out.
wikipedia doesn't need that last part, but I think it will be a good habit for editors to learn to truly critique a primary paper.
the only thing reviews have going for them is they are more accessible/skimmable to the average reader. my guess is that the rule about citing was written to make it easier to be an editor. anyway, technically the wikipedia regulations don't outright ban primary literature as long as you give the necessary caveats, but there are plenty of megalomaniacal admins don't care about nuance (e.g. MrOllie)
Sure, I have been wanting another opinion for a while. Do you want me to post here or via email?
A few years ago (April 25, 2023) I made my first significant edit to wikipedia on the Linus Pauling article, which was not up to date on its discussion of how Vitamin C affects cancer (2005-09 era papers).
The crux of the issue is that route of administration affects what Vitamin C does in the body, with opposing effects (pro-oxidant vs anti-oxidant and also changes how much vitamin C can get in the blood by orders of magnitude), so it’s almost a different drug depending on how take it. See review article in a few paragraphs.
The Wikipedia article focused on the lack of benefit of oral Vitamin C supplementation while barely mentioning recent successes in human trials or that attempts to repeat Pauling’s cancer trial didn’t use IV vitamin C.
So after this sentence in the article lead “None of his ideas concerning the medical usefulness of large doses of vitamins have gained much acceptance in the mainstream scientific community.” I added this: “However, attempts to replicate Linus Pauling's work did not use the exact method of delivery and specific molecules as the original experiments promoted by Pauling.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Linus_Pauling&dif...
And cited this secondary source, which itself cites reviews of multiple human clinical trials as well as a mouse study offering a potential mechanism: Archived link: https://web.archive.org/web/20230414222229/https://www.cance.... The article now lives at this URL: https://frederick.cancer.gov/news/intravenous-high-dose-vita...
I also replaced this sentence from the main text: “Results from most clinical trials suggest that modest vitamin C supplementation alone or with other nutrients offers no benefit in the prevention of cancer”, with this:
“Although there is no consensus in the literature on whether IV high dose vitamin C can affect cancer treatment outcomes, recent pre-clinical mouse studies have revealed a beneficial effect when high dose IV vitamin C is combined with immunotherapy. The effect was only observed in immunocompetent mice, suggesting that the anti-tumor effect depends in part on a functional immune system, rather than unspecific pro-oxidant activity.”
With this primary source: Vitamin C selectively kills KRAS and BRAF mutant colorectal cancer cells by targeting GAPDH https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/scitranslmed.aay8707
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Linus_Pauling&dif...
MrOllie reverted all of the edits and saying they were profringe, “blatantly fail WP:MEDRS requirements” yet couldn’t actually go into detail as to how they broke the WP:MEDRS rules, and how anything I wrote was ‘fringe’.
He was really hard to talk to, did not seem engaged in good faith discussion and seed to be wrong on the merits: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:MrOllie/Archive_17#c...
I reported him and was then quickly blocked by Bbb23 for a week for ‘edit warring’, with no discussion of anything ...
To start with, I think the "fringe" aspect played a bigger part in your interaction than the sourcing guidelines (MEDRS) and policies (OR § PRIMARY). I do find it unfortunate that there isn't a better way of informing people wanting to edit the first time, but anything in a contentious topic, whether it's officially designated as such and listed in the list of contentious topics... Well they're probably not the best places to get started because there are a lot of people who do want to pick individual primary sources and overemphasise their weight relative to the body of other primary sources (such as those as reviewed by MEDRS secondary sources).
So if you're editing in a field with a lot of interest from, uh, altmed type people, you're probably going to see much stricter application of the relevant guidelines than other medical topics without such interest unfortunately, and the editors working in such areas are probably very tired of anything that even vaguely looks like promoting altmed. Megavitamin therapy at the moment would still be that even if it's vastly more plausible to actually have a mechanism of action unlike certain other types of altmed.
I feel this is the kind of discussion that would really benefit from a number of concrete examples.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sealioning
You really believe that applies here?
Its hard to say its relentless when not a single piece of evidence has been given so far.
Its hard to say its tangential when it speaks to the original poster's thesis.
Not at all. Mainly because this is asking for the first line of examples, not repeatedly bogging down the conversation with constant requests for additional evidence.
Also it matters because in this kind of vague remarks that Wikipedia is unreliable, or that articles are wrong, almost always the people claiming this fail to provide specific examples, instead relying on some general feeling of frustration and shared belief that it must be true. But if they provided a specific example of a factually incorrect article, maybe other people would disagree. Or if they provided an example of ideological bias, maybe it would turn out the complainer is in the minority in believing that was biased. And if it turned out that this were controversial topics that most encyclopedic articles struggle with in some form, maybe it isn't a problem with Wikipedia. So examples matter!
I disagree. And it's funny because lots of people believe contradictory things about Wikipedia (or anything else, really). Without examples, we cannot be sure if the specific claims make sense. "But everyone knows what I mean" is unacceptable.
Calling this sea lioning seems disingenuous and a cop out to me.
Of course agreeing on collective facts is extremely messy.
Show me a better attempt, please.
Maybe at free collective facts. If you want to pay: JSTOR and Google Scholar, for example; textbooks; or any of the endless scholarly encylopedias, guides, and review papers, especially on specific topics. And if you don't want to pay: shadow libraries, or the reference room of an academic library.
I am not familiar with the process of peer review, but is it open? As far as I know, it is confidential on purpose, right? Doing all of this with an open moderation trail is what makes Wikipedia truly ambitious, isn't it?
I have spoken with a few Reddit mods, and Chad, Reddit's 12th hire about this topic. Everyone agreed that truly open moderation would be the biggest shit show ever. Yet, that is ambition of Wikipedia.
Can you imagine what Dang and Tom would have to deal with if all of their moderation was open? I might have some disagreements with HN moderation, but open moderation is not something I would wish upon them.
Yes, the reviewers' comments and the authors' rebuttals are generally confidential, and there are good reasons for doing it that way. One significant reason is to allow the reviewers to make their comments freely, without worrying about how those comments might be perceived by the public or how the authors' reputations might be impacted; likewise with the authors' rebuttals. Another reason is to avoid tainting the review process in situations where a paper is rejected from one journal and re-submitted to another -- the second set of reviewers should not know that it was previously rejected, nor should they know why it was previously rejected.
On the other hand, the peer review process is "open" in the sense that there is no explicit credential required to be a reviewer, only expertise in the field (typically determined by publishing papers -- in principle someone with no formal education could publish enough papers to start getting invitations to be a reviewer). It is also "open" in the sense that anyone can submit a paper for review as long as it adheres to formatting (page layout, font size, etc.) and length requirements.
It is hard to imagine a worse attempt at establishing a collection of commonly accepted truths than Wikipedia. Scientific journals are overwhelmingly better at weeding out falsehoods and hoaxes, despite the history of successful efforts to dupe reviewers. University libraries are also better at collecting knowledge, and in fact the entire industry of journal publishing began at university libraries. That knowledge is not locked away from the masses, it is just less convenient to access than Wikipedia.
Even Wikipedia has had to accept that a certain amount of oversight and review is necessary. There are some topics that attract bad actors, paid shills, state-sponsored propagandists, etc., and Wikipedia had to introduce "protected pages" to deal with such things. Add a structured review process and more rigorous citation requirements and those "protected pages" would be a lightweight version of academic publishing.
> most users of AI products do not click the links to Wikipedia, choosing instead to accept machine-generated outputs without further verification. If this practice continues, readership on Wikipedia will continue to decline.
This is the same mechanism by which Wikipedia drained readers from news outlets and academic papers that it cites for information.
You could argue that unlike Wikipedia, greedy AI companies might ban sources for political reasons. But Wikipedia does the same thing: much of the mainstream media is unreliable (red) or not reliable (yellow):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Per...
That is why we are building latentpedia.org.
The extremists are the ones who believe that Wikipedia is working well and quote Poe's law as described on the page, which Google will cite literally.
I also remember the whispers and chatter outside of and around the 'papers. Those whispers etc would reinforce a later article.
What is happening now with news ie top down dissemination of world events is not new but what is different today is the immediacy of commentary by the hoi poloi - you and me and who knows what from across the world ... and bots.
I think we have to get to grips with the fact that an event happening within one corner of the world measuring an inch squared can rock up on the agenda of anyone, anywhere across the entire world.
I propose our leadership cut funding and fine any program in the US where a professor is not actively working in their field at a minimum part-time. These people are so out of touch it is literally sickening when you think of all the negative downstream effects.
Whether or not that has any effect on the real world is not their concern. The academy is proud of their record of interest in things that have no applications whatsoever in the real world and ideas that turn out to be extremely harmful if applied. The people pretending that academia is some sort of vocational system were wrong and are to blame for the academics doing exactly what they were expected to do.
Although yes to the idea that taxpayers shouldn't have to fund running everyone through university. The academics are often opposed to the taxpayers, it isn't fair to make the taxpayers fund them.
If you want job training, get certifications.
> The fulfilment of ethical obligations to support knowledge communities, however, requires support from institutions of higher education. Currently, most academics are evaluated on their scholarly and research achievements, teaching performance, and service duties to their departments. Public service, like contributing to Wikipedia, goes largely unrecognised, if it is even counted at all. If academics are to fulfil their responsibilities to protect knowledge and knowledge communities, institutions must recognise efforts like contributing to Wikipedia and provide resources and support. Doing so may also help to address the public’s eroding trust in higher education itself, as a greater commitment to serving the public would reassert the role of universities as stewards of knowledge that exist to serve humanity – a role shared by Wikipedia.
I don't know how scientific journals manage to exist but technically it could be as simple as a link to the user page on the university professors profile page.
There are also plenty of pseudonymous Wikipedians with credentials that they keep secret or vague. As long as they don't edit pages where they have an undisclosed conflict of interest, that's also fine.
Credentials can lend someone credibility in discussions. They just don't grant special editing privileges.
If an editor is an expert in a field and you can verify it it would be most useful to the encyclopedia to treat them as such. This is not actually a special privilege but how people normally do things.
I can gather citations and glue them into an article but someone with actual expertise knows which parts are important, what isn't and what is missing.
Wikimedia is of course free to have an encyclopedia project to entertain children with to much time on their hands but they will continue to lose good editors. You can't have both.
If you disarm the man before throwing him into the alligator pit he won't survive but it will be great for the alligators.
Yet at the same time their CloudFront WAF decided to block IP coming from Singapore ISP...
So much on defending open.
As an example, there is an American author B.B.Alston whose popular books for children were translated into dozen languages.
He has a page on Polish Wikipedia: https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/B.B._Alston
But my attempts to make him a page on English Wikipedia keep getting rejected -- failed to establish notability. The fact that he won some awards and kids read his stories on the other side of the planet is apparently not good enough for Wikipedia.
Looks like your drafts didn't have much in the way of sources. Someone else did a complete rewrite in September with additional sources to establish notability.
I’ve routinely heard “Wikipedia is becoming ideological,” and it’s usually action flip as to whether they thinks it’s too far to the left or right.
https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/reliable-sources-how-wik...
The mention of marxism is puzzling, but re: the Middle East / Israel, I think it's impossible for any kind of written publication to report anything relatively recent on this topic that won't make anyone enraged about bias. So it seems a bit unfair to claim this is how Wikipedia is "being lost to ideology", because this is a property of the various Middle East conflicts, not of Wikipedia. Let me emphasize: nothing that could be written anywhere about the Middle East or Israel, today or in recent years, can possibly avoid enraging a large number of people all over the world.
Based on what you're saying, I think your real issue is that your own ideology and biases clash with whatever you perceive about Wikipedia. If Wikipedia had a less "marxist perspective of history" (!) or relied more on whatever you think is more reliable about the Middle East and Israel, then we'd have another commenter claiming Wikipedia is hopelessly biased in the opposite direction.
Unfortunately this boils down to "I don't like it", which is very subjective and very hard to evaluate in a neutral way that everyone agrees must mean "Wikipedia is being lost to ideology", as you claimed.
I think we all agree political and recent-ish history are mired in controversy and these divisive topics are problematic in Wikipedia, but ultimately hard to report on neutrally anyway. I guess they could settle for a insincere "neutral" tone that left everyone unsatisfied; Wikipedia supposedly tries to do that.
The currently accepted 'knowledge' framework has been vigorously defended in WP since its beginning. When the label 'pseudoscience' appears in the first few paragraphs, you can usually depend on content highly critical of any threats to the orthodox (if they're even allowed mention).
Academics are more likely to defend the current paradigm. Traditionally, anomalies often go unmentioned in published papers.
All evidence for the existence of meteors was denied for centuries after Newton declared that outer space is empty - until the late 18th century, when ignoring the evidence became too burdensome.
You may be raising criticism genuinely, but you're fighting a very uphill battle because many of the people who cry about Wikipedia bias would want, e.g., the article on Communism to start as it does on Conservapedia:
> Communism is a left-wing anti-democratic and violent ideology dedicated to overthrowing capitalism, replacing it with an unelected "dictatorship of the proletariat" by technocrats and an atheist elite.
which is, for lack of a more honest and concise word, retarded.
As a technical resource I love Wikipedia, as a quick reference it’s valuable though.
And then the admins decide what gets deleted and what is allowed to remain.
Almost anyone can edit it though they seem to have blocked Larry Sanger the co-founder for being a pain.
Pray tell - from where do you get your ideologically neutral information?
It gets accused of that more now because of the rise of MAGA and the like.
Concerns on Wikipedia dying because of a lack of editors, and that being due to AI? Wikipedia's community often makes it very clear they don't want editors, and there's a whole lot of people who have actually tried to contribute who will tell you of the unjustifiable miserable time they had when wanting to do a good deed, that has been a considerable problem for I don't even know how many years now, why would I care about AI redirecting traffic possibly reducing the influx of editors when there's a far larger, more evident, long-standing problem?
Promoting quoting Wikipedia as a source is madness. It begs circular logic. Citogenesis is already a considerable problem, can we not kick it into overdrive? Please? Wikipedia being at risk is one thing, but asking for a cancer to be spread upon academia, I'm sorry but we are not at a point in which reputation can be squandered like that.
>Doing so may also help to address the public’s eroding trust in higher education itself, as a greater commitment to serving the public would reassert the role of universities as stewards of knowledge that exist to serve humanity – a role shared by Wikipedia.
And there's even acknowledgement! But that somehow makes it worse because one of the main reasons academia has lost reputation is the same one that often gets called out on Wikipedia: political bias and agenda pushing.
It's like there's a fire in a building and a huge stack of papers on another, in which a guy is playing with matches, and the argument is that we should move the fire from the former to the latter. I honestly think that if this sort of advice was listened to, the consequences would be terrible.