Wikipedia not an actual "source"?

sinkoman

sinkoman

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Anybody else getting a tad bit tired of people using wikipedia articles as their "sources"?

I mean, technically, somebody could just modify an article to suit their argument, than post a link to the article, quote the section they modified, and nobody would be none the wiser.

Not to mention, wikipedia is constantly changing, and is by nature oppinionated...

THOUGHTS?
 
sinkoman said:
Anybody else getting a tad bit tired of people using wikipedia articles as their "sources"?

I mean, technically, somebody could just modify an article to suit their argument, than post a link to the article, quote the section they modified, and nobody would be none the wiser.

Not to mention, wikipedia is constantly changing, and is by nature oppinionated...

THOUGHTS?
Click to expand...

wikipedia has a whole whack of fail safes to prevent that ..for instance people check every new entry ..you could change anything you wanted but it would be edited out ..remember when the US senators were caught changing their wiki entries? Also every single statement is sourced ..or else it goes into contention and they argue it out till they get a consensus ..there's an interesting article in last months CPU magazine with the founder and he says the biggest myth is that wiki is edited by millions of people ..when in fact most of it is done by a few hundred ..and they're mainstays
 
CptStern said:
wikipedia has a whole whack of fail safes to prevent that ..for instance people check every new entry ..you could change anything you wanted but it would be edited out ..remember when the US senators were caught changing their wiki entries? Also every single statement is sourced ..or else it goes into contention and they argue it out till they get a consensus ..there's an interesting article in last months CPU magazine with the founder and he says the biggest myth is that wiki is edited by millions of people ..when in fact most of it is done by a few hundred ..and they're mainstays
Click to expand...

Link, please Stern... and don't use wikipedia.......jackass

;)
 
CptStern said:
wikipedia has a whole whack of fail safes to prevent that ..for instance people check every new entry ..you could change anything you wanted but it would be edited out ..remember when the US senators were caught changing their wiki entries? Also every single statement is sourced ..or else it goes into contention and they argue it out till they get a consensus ..there's an interesting article in last months CPU magazine with the founder and he says the biggest myth is that wiki is edited by millions of people ..when in fact most of it is done by a few hundred ..and they're mainstays
Click to expand...

I can pull a few articles that i've edited, that haven't gone through any sort of check, never been looked at twice, and have never been removed.

I'm not saying referencing wikipedia is a bad thing, but when people pull up a link to wikipedia as their ONLY source, it's kind of annoying.

And no Bvasgm, I didn't make this thread because of your Boston Teaparty reference, that was just kinda what made me think "what if he just edited this to contest my argument" (which, I can assure you, I quickly pushed out of my mind, since I figured you wouldn't do that).
 
Wikipedia might have some stupidity and inaccuracy, but it is still infinitely better than almost any other internet source.
 
I love wikipedia. I visit it at least 20 times a day to look up various oddball things I might hear on TV or elsewhere. Just cause its fun.

That... and imdb.
 
Also, most wiki entries have their own list of references and citations, so it's not like they're making shit up out of thin air.

It is, for the most part, a reliable source due to the collective intelligence maintaining it. You'd think that would be a recipe for disaster, but it's beaten those odds, it seems.
 
Absinthe said:
Also, most wiki entries have their own list of references and citations, so it's not like they're making shit up out of thin air.

It is, for the most part, a reliable source due to the collective intelligence maintaining it. You'd think that would be a recipe for disaster, but it's beaten those odds, it seems.
Click to expand...

Well, I spose.

Whole reason is that I allways come accross articles that are full of typos, bad grammar, and random sentences that have nothing to do with the current paragraph.
 
There was a study on the acuacy of wikipedia earlier in the year that found , (in a random selection of articles) the same number of factual errors as the encyclopedia britanica.
Also the bias that you can find in wiki seems to reflect a mainstream bias, a lot of the historical/political entries I take issue with, but Im not about to stop using it, anymore than I would stop reading newspapers.

The problem people seem to have is the conceptual leap from an elitist top-down approach to that of a flatter more democratic information structure.
Both are inherently flawed, but we are all indoctinated to look up the social chain for defintive answers ,rather than look to our peers.

Yeah it can be annoying sometimes, but consider the alternative, an endless wave of jackasses posting unsubstantiated claims and figures.
IMHO , overuse of wikipedia is by far the lesser of two evils.
 
Yes, how is Wikipedia any less reliable than any other source you find on the interweb? In fact it's probably more reliable because as Stern said it's checked as it's put up and afterwards. It's better than googling for some random site where you have no idea who the author or what his/her motives are and it hasn't been moderated on at all.
 
It very much depends on the article and the subject in question, IMO. Wikipedia is as good a cast-iron source as you're going to get on the vast majority of subjects (not only that but the articles have to cite their own sources as Absinthe said).

However, the more trivial and niche interest the subject is that you're investigating, the less the relevant wikipedia article will have been subject to input and review from other people. When you get people linking to wikipedia to resolve, for example, an argument about genre classification in heavy metal, then you're entering the realm of the ridiculous and wholly unreliable.
 
Wikipedia is awesome. Like stern said theres tons of security measures on it, and also there is almost always citations for information that is not common knowledge. Not to mention you can look up ANYTHING on it
 
alot of schools here don't allow wikipedia as a proper source, theyre pretty stupid since a large quantity of all articles have listed sources
 
I mainly use wikipedia for a way to find a specific piece of information that be hard to find even when googling. I usually back it up with a source though.
 
When Wikipedia comes to specific subjects like mathematics, archaeology, linguistics, etc, the information rarely goes wrong, even the information are unlikely to be very detailed. Wikipedia is still reliable and is quite a nice starting point, as Hullu said. Not to forget, if you think Wikipedia is inaccurate, I would say most of the information on the Internet can be inaccurate since you don't know who wrote the articles. Unlike Wiki, there is essentially no one examined those articles. So never think other websites on the Internet are always better than Wiki.
 
sinkoman said:
I can pull a few articles that i've edited, that haven't gone through any sort of check, never been looked at twice, and have never been removed.

I'm not saying referencing wikipedia is a bad thing, but when people pull up a link to wikipedia as their ONLY source, it's kind of annoying.

And no Bvasgm, I didn't make this thread because of your Boston Teaparty reference, that was just kinda what made me think "what if he just edited this to contest my argument" (which, I can assure you, I quickly pushed out of my mind, since I figured you wouldn't do that).
Click to expand...


How do you know it hasn't been checked?

If there is no backup on the info, chances are is the article will get deleted
 
Fliko said:
How do you know it hasn't been checked?

If there is no backup on the info, chances are is the article will get deleted
Click to expand...

I mean edits i've done a few months back that are still standing.

One of thems on the Chad Smith page. I moved around a few paragraphs to different sections of the article.

The other is on the John Frusciante page. One line was written with horrible grammar. The line was about two records he produced, saying one was for nothing but drug money, and the other was for similiar reasons. The way the douche wrote it though, it sounded like something completely different.

So, I rewrote that line. Lately, somebodies expanded on my edit, and completely seperated the paragraph where the edit was, so that there's even less confusion.
 
sinkoman said:
I mean edits i've done a few months back that are still standing.

One of thems on the Chad Smith page. I moved around a few paragraphs to different sections of the article.

The other is on the John Frusciante page. One line was written with horrible grammar. The line was about two records he produced, saying one was for nothing but drug money, and the other was for similiar reasons. The way the douche wrote it though, it sounded like something completely different.

So, I rewrote that line. Lately, somebodies expanded on my edit, and completely seperated the paragraph where the edit was, so that there's even less confusion.
Click to expand...

As long as you contributed to the article, why should they delete it? If you're trolling and/or spamming, it will disappear quite quickly.
 
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