Comments on Is Wikipedia Trustworthy?
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Is Wikipedia Trustworthy?
So in elementary school, I was told not to use Wikipedia too much because you can't trust what they write. So then for all the projects, I used the Canadian Encyclopedia, but then now, I really would like to know why not to use Wikipedia. The only answer I know of is that anyone can write anything, but doesn't it have to go through a review under someone that actually is part of the Wikipedia community? What I think, is that Wikipedia takes a lot of information from other websites, then puts it all together, which is why normally, they have a big bibliography. I was wondering- Is Wikipedia really trustworthy?
tl;nr; Wikipedia is far from perfect, but a statement "don't use wikipedia" is quite extreme. When somebody has interest …
6y ago
It heavily depends on the topic. If it's about mathematics, computer science, physics, then Wikipedia is very trustwort …
6y ago
I like to say that broadly speaking, Wikipedia is mostly trustworthy when statements are cited, but it's never a source. …
6y ago
No information source is entirely trustworthy. But for purposes of citation, we need to distinguish three kinds of infor …
6y ago
Wikipedia is a crowd-sourced site where anybody can contribute, just like this one. Wikipedia strives for verifiability …
3y ago
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/q/32135. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
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tl;nr; Wikipedia is far from perfect, but a statement "don't use wikipedia" is quite extreme. When somebody has interest to falsify an article, it's not trustworthy. Otherwise it normally is.
Wikipedia has mechanisms to verify content - lots of articles cite information sources, some articles are protected and only certain people can edit them, etc. Before trusting the article you need to check whether the source really states what the article says (I have seen sources which are completely bogus). It is not required that an article passes review after being modified, but there are users who do that on selected articles (or just on random recent changes). Article "vandalism" is usually caught quickly.
You can ask yourself whether somebody has an interest to falsify a given article. Without ever having read them, I'd suppose articles like Alligator or Computer keyboard are quite trustworthy. On the other hand, I wouldn't really trust Catalan independence or Monsanto (at least not for everything).
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The fact is, there are paid editors on wikipedia. I have some personal experience with that.
Several years ago there were discussions about the Trans-Pacific Partnership and I noticed several people were putting lots of effort to remove the word "controversial" from the first paragraph. When there are such disagreements, people make discussions, but nobody was really giving arguments why the word shouldn't be there (it came from two trustworthy sources). Somebody repeatedly removed the word stating as reasons things like "We decided to remove it in the discussion" while there was nothing like that in the discussion. This was obviously a paid editor.
I decided to monitor the article and several days later new attempts to remove the word started from different accounts. The problem is that wikipedia has a rule that you cannot revert more than 3 times in a day and I was the only person trying to stop the editors. After making 4 reverts, I got reported by one of the paid editors (Phoenix7777). I tried explaining the situation to several people (including administrators), but nobody responded.
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/32202. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
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