The material would be connected to my RL identity. It’s also since been… abraded away, leaving a less interesting entry, but it served its purposes.
I have probably contributed at least that many small fixes, updates or one-sentence additions. I still do, when the mood strikes. Most survive but a truly irritating number are reverted within hours, if not the hour - and I am talking about rewriting a sentence for better clarity without changing a jot of meaning or content.
WP is like the US - a “completely classless society” with a solidly stratified hierarchy, the upper ranges of which guard their privileges jealously and exercise their power because they can. You have to be one of them, or stay below their radar to be any kind of successful contributor.
I rarely see any blatantly false information on Wiki. I have sometimes noticed missing information or incomplete lists though. Still, it seems to me, Wiki often has the most complete information available online for many topics.
Blatantly false information is not the problem; in most cases, it’s corrected by the herd mind within hours. Incomplete entries usually mean that not enough people are interested to collect and add the information.
The problem with Wikipedia was concisely summed up by Mr. W.P. Rogers, whose insight is only enhanced by his thoughtful choice of initials. “It ain’t what we know that causes us trouble. It’s what we know that ain’t so.” It is the entries in Wikipedia that contain questionable information that are the problem - not whether it has the atomic weight of ruthenium correctly listed to the sixth decimal place. WP appeals to a decreasingly sophisticated user base that tends not to question anything they read there, because so many experts have assured them that every single entry for a chemical element couldn’t be accurater.
My cite for the last is the increasing number of “journalists” who will repeat anything they find there as a fact they actually got from a reliable source.
I was in tears laughing at the River Suck entry as it stated something like “The River Suck joins the River Swilly near Athlone to form the Suck-Swilly.” It was left unedited for a long time.
All of that may be true but I question how far one should generalize it. Such as my experience with Wikipedia has been, including browsing subject areas that I do know something about, I may have had minor criticisms here and there but I’ve never really turned up what I would regard as a tendency to wholesale bias or selective omission. What I have run into, in general discussions touching on controversial areas, is claims along the lines that “Wikipedia is unreliable and useless”, especially in pseudo-controversial areas like the basic facts of climate change – that is, areas that are being aggressively spun as controversial but are actually well established science.
This is a trope that always seems to be employed by those who strongly advocate views that are far removed from the mainstream science. Those who condemn Wikipedia this way are generally equally quick to condemn authoritative scientific sources, too, for the same reason. And this is because Wikipedia tends to be resistant to that kind of spin – it tends to be representative of the mainstream consensus in its overall treatment of major scientific topics, by virtue of requirements like citations to credible sources. You can see how this causes distress among advocates of fringe viewpoints, conspiracy theorists, etc.
I’m just concerned that your well-meaning comment, while no doubt justified by your own subject-matter-specific experience, could be interpreted so broadly as to discredit an otherwise generally sound source of information. Question what you read in Wikipedia, by all means – you might be reading a recently hacked page, or it might be wrong for some other reason – but don’t dismiss the entire venture, because it’s an extremely useful resource.
TL;DR version: It ain’t that bad. 
It helps to remember that some people. and organizations, consider what appears on Wikipedia actually matters, a lot. In which case there may be an unending effort to change, delete, and otherwise spin an encyclopedic article to appear as as a politically correct one.
And the OP didn’t ask for example of that as well. In fact, that has nothing to do with the “debate”, whatever the debate actually may be. [[citation needed]]
According to his online journal, Neil Gaiman had something similarhappen with a bit of business that he made up for his book, American Gods. So mythology is being re-written in wikiality.
Actually, encyclopedias are also best used as a starting place. They don’t pretend to be primary sources.
That is awesome
OMG
For the most part, Wikipedia is a terrific starting point for, well pretty much anything. I also enjoy the regular updates and the “this day in history” section.
Purely anecdotal, but I was banned from editing the Elvis Presley section because of a compulsive editor whose raisin d’être appears to be “proving” that every celebrity is gay. Used the same user name as I do here. It was a very unpleasant experience so I rarely edit anything anymore.
This Simpsons quote seems appropriate:
Bart: So Dean Martin would show up at the last minute and do everything in just one take?
Homer: That’s right.
Bart: But Wikipedia said he was passionate about rehearsal!
Homer: Don’t you worry about Wikipedia. We’ll change it when we get home.
Thats not what my mates neighbour in the pub says .
And he should know, he once met somebody who knew a scientist or something , who told him differently .
I don’t want anyone to change it that’s what I’m afraid of.
So what? Wikipedia keeps track of all edits pretty much indefinitely, such as this former article on the zipper storage bag.
[My bold]
[slight hijack]
So, does anybody know what the thing is question is?
Yes
Do you have a legitimate cite for that statement of fact?
I imagine that would be unpleasant, and you have my sympathies if you were just doing useful edits in good faith.
But I’m curious about what those edits were (I went back to about 2011 in the edit history and couldn’t find them). There is absolutely nothing in the article that suggests or even hints that Elvis was gay. His marriage to Priscilla and many of the women he had affairs with are mentioned. At most, one might infer from the short “sex symbol” section that his image had bisexual appeal which, given the citations, is probably true and is not at all the same thing.
I’m in no position to defend Wikipedia and have no special interest in doing so – and as I mentioned upthread, an editor there managed to piss me off, too. But that was only because they were being overly cautious and conservative about edits. Which is rather the opposite of being unreliable “because anyone can edit it”. I sense that a good deal of the criticism being directed against WP is either based on isolated incidents or just over the top hyperbole. If this is not the case, specific concrete examples to the contrary seem oddly lacking.
In a perfectly ironic sense, not according to Wikipedia. There is the author himself spilling the secret, which you can wacth on video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_5joGrA0HTA&t=536 (that should start right before the secret is revealed, saving you much time)
And of course, it’s on Wikipedia, in the talk pages, and history of several articles. But none of that can be considered a source for use on Wikipedia. The edits that so amused the author are still there in the history, but the current articles (as I type this), do not tell what actually happened. Hence it’s a perfect example of how WP can be horrible. A very interesting story, and facts, about a popular work, do not appear on Wikipedia.
The short version is that he created a third Goddess, made her up, and it ended up being in the Wikipedia article, as if it was real historic Goddess from Polish mythology. The Wikipedia article was the original source of the 2008 book that stated it as fact, and when the author saw what happened,the Wikipedia article was defended against any change, based on the book cited, that originally got the info from Wikipedia. A recursive mess that even the source couldn’t fix, since the actual author of the book isn’t considered a valid source about a book. Here’s the money shot, where the Wikipedia article is edited to claim that the author, who created the Midnight sister, used the historical three sisters in his work. How ironic. he made up a God, then Wikipedia ended up claiming the made up God was actually a historic God from Polish literature. Priceless.
Just watch the videos. It’s hilarious.