People in here keep bitching about how unreliable and biased Wikipedia is. Almost every time someone dares to quote a Wiki article, they feel the need to add “I know, I know”, as if to ward off the disgrace that comes with it.
Is it really that bad, or are the detractors just butthurt because Wikipedia doesn’t pander to their pet ideologies? Does anyone know of any actual bad articles that Wikipedia currently hosts?
The problem is not as much accuracy as reliability. I have not found all that many factual errors and mistakes, but the ones I do are the kind that calls the entire concept into question.
Most surveys and comparisons focus on hard physical or historical data and tend to trumpet that WP is as accurate or sometimes more accurate - due to instant updating from new data - than traditional references. Which is no surprise - with 1,000 people a day looking at, say, the entry for ruthenium, the tendency is going to be a very high level of correction to correspond with validated sources.
Pretty much ditto for media trivialities - it’s reached the point where I tend to go to WP for information on TV series and the like because the info is better presented, likely to be highly accurate and is more voluminous than IMDb’s narrow (but moderated) format.
It’s when WP gets into less-absolute areas and interpretation of social, psychological and historical information that it gets worrisome. Besides the entries that are endlessly fought over and changed by one side, the other, or pranksters, there are many that have information I’d regard as questionable or one-sided. The same may be true of traditional publication, but in general something does not reach the shelves as a reference or quasi-reference book without substantial vetting. I have found complete nonsense in biographical and historical entries, and long passages of questionable interpretation… and they persist, sometimes indefinitely, thus misleading every person who uses that entry and doesn’t bring a shit-ton of outside knowledge with them.
Correcting such errors is also far harder than WP proponents airily suggest. I am an absolute, recognized world expert in a few (niche) areas, and there are entries I have struggled to correct or extend only to have WP’s ruling “star editor” nobility reset them, either directly or with watcher bots, and no amount of communication, “talk,” or establishing the validity of the changes will let them pass.
Not accuracy. Validity. WP is often *precise *but not truly *accurate *- as anyone who knows how to sight in a scope will understand.
Wikipedia is often very good as a starting place or a summary, but it should never be taken as the last word on something. If I quote or link to Wikipedia in support of some argument or factual claim, the “I know, I know” essentially means “I don’t believe this, and neither should you, just because Wikipedia says so.”
Here is an excellent article on the subject.
I wrote a clumsy sentence up there: entries on media stuff aren’t necessarily “highly accurate” but they are well-organized for fan/casual researcher use. While they may have omissions or overly brief content, they rarely have errors. I trust IMDb more if there’s any discrepancy, but IMDb is still optimized for single-item entries like films and is clumsy and segmented for multi-part and continuing works.
Previous Dope threads on the subject.
I used to find lots of examples of ludicrously biased editing on Wikipedia on “controversial” scientific topics. But those seem much less common now.
As previously noted, Wikipedia is a decent starting point for researching a topic, but not a dependable one-stop resource.
I think one of the worst was the “Wikipedia-Haymarket Affair”. Timothy Messer-Kruse noticed factual (not opinion) errors in the article, and corrected them, but the corrections were constantly changed back because his edits went against the “accepted majority position.” It didn’t matter that they were in fact correct, with supporting data (actual trial transcripts). In this case, Wikipedia “didn’t let facts get in the way of a good story”.
I don’t know how common that is, but it raises good questions about accuracy of any given article, and does undermine the myth of impartiality of the website.
Can you expound on that?
Exactly. And the Haymarket affair is one of those historical events that depends much on informed analysis and interpretation as on any listing of dull facts - so it’s consensus by democracy, not by expertise.
On one article I fought to update and correct, I actually got to the “Do you fucking know who I am?” stage… and the superstar editor basically replied, “I don’t really give a shit. It’s my page to watch and your changes are inappropriate.”
Unless you dig and dig into page history and the talk, there’s no way to know how much of this arbitrary, rules-and-customs driven bullshit underlies the content.
And it’s that not knowing that undercuts WP’s potential value, and always will.
ETA: Dorjan, if that doesn’t help, I can’t add much more. To identify the entries would pin my RL identity, which I prefer not to do. I can validate my stories in private, and there are some on board who know the issue (and me) and might vouch for it. It is not a matter of arguing the facts; it is a matter that some pages are “guarded” by dragons who won’t let anyone change what they think should be there - and as some of these people have thousands of pages under their umbrella, it can’t be a matter of superior expertise. It certainly isn’t when a factual reference can be shown for a change that keeps getting reversed.
I once heard from someone that apocryphal secondary sources are unreliable.
It’s the general problem with majority rule in any system. Sometimes the majority is wrong and it’s a minority view that’s correct.
But how do you separate the minority views that are right from the minority views that are wrong? How do you tell the difference between an Ignaz Semmelweis and an Andrew Wakefield?
The majority is always right, and the minority can lump it.
-Jack Aubrey
Maybe not quite what you are asking for but I know for a fact that someone changed the biography of a well known actor to have a complete lie inserted.
Nothing major just saying they had won something that they didn’t.
This insertion took place to see if any publications would put that piece of information in that persons obituary when they died.
Seven years later that person died and a few publications had the lie from wikipedia in their obituary in a very obvious cut and paste. Print editions as well as online editions.
The falsehood was removed from wikipedia but as it had been reported in a “reliable” publication the falsehood was put back in with a citation to the publication that had lifted it directly from the incorrect wikipedia article.
The circle complete the falsehood remains, presumably for evermore.
I imagine that kind of thing is not an isolated incident.
Can’t go wrong with that! 
On a serious note, I think one of the issues with Wikipedia, as Amateur Barbarian already said, is a sort of intentional inertia that makes editing difficult – the default assumption, probably with good reason, is that the typical contributor is either an incompetent or a prankster.
Oh, let’s just face it: Wikipedia is bunk – Conservapedia says so … this is why Conservapedia exists – to counter all that liberal bunk with properly vetted, highly accurate information. Conservapedia, FTW! Just a few important examples of how they’ve set the record straight against Wikipedia’s deplorable lies … and no, I am not making any of these up, they are straight from the above-linked site:
Age of the earth:
All verifiable evidence indicates that the Earth is only about 6,000 years old. Yet with circular reasoning and implausible assumptions, liberals insist that the Earth is approximately 4.54 billion years old
Creationism:
Creationism is the belief that the earth and universe and the various kinds of animals and plants were created by God or some other supreme being … Creationism is contrary to the religion of evolutionism. Biblical creationism is primarily based on: the compelling testimony provided by God’s wondrous creation …
Evolution:
The theory of evolution posits a process of transformation from simple life forms to more complex life forms, which has never been observed or duplicated in a laboratory … most United States high school biology teachers are reluctant to endorse the theory of evolution in class.
Causes of homosexuality:
The causes of homosexuality are attributable to man’s sinful nature, nurture and environment, and personal choice.
Global warming:
The global warming theory is the liberal hoax that the world is becoming dangerously warmer due to the emission of greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide. Liberals have used the theory of man-made global warming to seek rationing by government of life-saving energy production and consumption.
Theory of relativity:
Noteworthy are sections 3 (“Lack of evidence for Relativity”) and 4 (“Experiments that Fail to Prove Relativity”), and also this:
Some liberal politicians have extrapolated the theory of relativity to metaphorically justify their own political agendas. For example, Democratic President Barack Obama helped publish an article by liberal law professor Laurence Tribe to apply the relativistic concept of “curvature of space” to promote a broad legal right to abortion … Applications of the theory of relativity to change morality have also been common.
The unreliabilty of Consevapedia doesn’t make Wikipediadia any more reliable, though.
No, but it adds a humorous break to the discussion!
As I said, I agree with Amateur Barbarian that Wikipedia has a deliberate inertia to editing even when the information is authoritative. Other than that, I can’t say I’ve found a lot of errors in it myself, but I’m not really a big user. I don’t look to any single source for truly unbiased coverage on anything controversial, but on fairly factual matters (like, say, whether or not the earth is older than 6000 years! ;)) I’m usually OK with assuming that if it’s in Wikipedia it’s probably right, at least for casual purposes. I think most would have to admit, notwithstanding the above problem, that they (and the whole Wiki concept) has overall really done a remarkably effective job.
In my cases, it wasn’t the kind of consensus opinion that might sway a historical or other “interpretive” entry one way or the other, but verifiable fact being presented by a known expert - the latter of which shouldn’t have made any difference one way or the other, if the citation was valid.
One thing WP’s dragons are ridiculously strict about is “original research” - in one case I was posting a corrected quote from a book… and because I wasn’t citing the correction from another published source, it was summarily struck. I guess reading the book the entry is about constitutes “original research” in WhippyLand.
Due to controversy, the article for Dag Hammarskjöld has completely omitted a section covering his personal life (a standard section of a Wikipedia page), despite many biographies covering his (closeted) homosexuality. The “Talk” tab summarizes the discussion.
I once added an entry to a list of possible meanings of an acronym, namely a scientific usage that they didn’t have listed. All the other meanings were in the form of links to Wikipedia articles, but there was no article to link to for my entry. Can’t remember if I just left it unlinked or made an external link, but whatever I did wasn’t deemed satisfactory and a perfectly valid and useful definition was made to disappear several days or a week later. The unwritten (or maybe written) rule seemed to be “if there’s no Wikipedia article for it, it doesn’t exist.” The system isn’t perfect. OTOH I’ve also added small updates to various articles and they seem to have stayed put as far as I bothered to notice.
Now I’m curious. How does the curvature of space promote abortion rights? I mean, good for the curvature of space, but I’m not seeing the connection. I’m going to use relativity to argue that it’s my wife’s turn to take out the garbage. Hey, it’s worth a try.
XKCD called the phenomenon that Arch Trout describes Citogenesis.