# Wikipedia: Reliable And Easily Fixed, Or Always-Vandalized And Unreliable? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [September 13, 2008, 8:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wikipedia-reliable-and-easily-fixed-or-always-vandalized-and-unreliable/463479 "2008-09-13T20:26:50Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 15\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![BrainFireBob](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/e495f1/32.png) [@BrainFireBob](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainFireBob)\ **Post date:** [September 15, 2008, 4:20am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wikipedia-reliable-and-easily-fixed-or-always-vandalized-and-unreliable/463479/41 "2008-09-15T04:20:28Z")
Wikipedia has gained enough acceptance amongst college students- and consequently, professors- that technical articles that aren’t obscure should rarely be vandalized for long. For a similar reason, I tend to trust pop culture articles in a manner directly proportional to how popular they are- I’d be surprised to find vandalism in a Buffy article, for instance. There are two main problems with wikipedia. One is that some of the editors have gone citation crazy- one understands the reason, but explanatory entries linked to other entries can be hard to cite (definitions of terms, for instance). The other is that some people are obsessed with “their” entries, and it doesn’t seem to be monitored well-enough; for instance, if an account reverses the same edit twice in a row, the article should be locked for further editing and a moderator should be notified. ---
**Author:** ![Tim\_T-Bonham.net](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/46a35a/32.png) [@Tim\_T-Bonham.net](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Tim_T-Bonham.net)\ **Post date:** [September 15, 2008, 5:36am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wikipedia-reliable-and-easily-fixed-or-always-vandalized-and-unreliable/463479/42 "2008-09-15T05:36:15Z")
> [@A\_shameful\_cracka](#): > > For months the article on the Globe statue that was at the WTC said that an undamaged Bible was found inside it. This is pure glurge, but it was there long enough to be referred to by my pastor in a sermon. But that has been corrected now, while your pastor has probably not announced a correction to his sermon. So that would imply that Wikipedia is more accurate than your pastor. P.S. I don’t understand the motivations of people who note errors in Wikipedia, and check back regularly to see that the error is still there, but take no steps to correct it. Why? ---
**Author:** ![A\_shameful\_cracka](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/ebca7d/32.png) [@A\_shameful\_cracka](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/A_shameful_cracka)\ **Post date:** [September 15, 2008, 5:38am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wikipedia-reliable-and-easily-fixed-or-always-vandalized-and-unreliable/463479/43 "2008-09-15T05:38:02Z")
> [@t-bonham@scc.net](#): > > But that has been corrected now, while your pastor has probably not announced a correction to his sermon. > > So that would imply that Wikipedia is more accurate than your pastor. > > P.S. I don’t understand the motivations of people who note errors in Wikipedia, and check back regularly to see that the error is still there, but take no steps to correct it. Why? I corrected it, but I didn’t correct my pastor. ---
**Author:** ![intention](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/e95f7d/32.png) [@intention](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/intention)\ **Post date:** [September 15, 2008, 11:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wikipedia-reliable-and-easily-fixed-or-always-vandalized-and-unreliable/463479/44 "2008-09-15T23:15:25Z")
Many, perhaps most of the Wikipedia entries on Climate Science are piles of dogcrap due to the continuous subversion of William [Connelley](http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fpcomment/archive/2008/05/03/who-is-william-connolley-solomon.aspx), who even made it into a couple of national [news articles](http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fpcomment/archive/2008/04/12/wikipedia-s-zealots-solomon.aspx) in Canada due to his continuous imposition of his point of view on the articles. Long before Solomon wrote the articles above, I had run into Connelley on Wikipedia. After trying (quite unsuccessfully) to get even a small change to a particular Wikipedia article to stick, I gave up. Connelley has more time than anyone, it seems, and no matter what you might think is factual and uncontroversial and well documented, if he doesn’t like it, he makes sure it disappears. As a result of my (and many other people’s) inability to make factual, well documented changes stick to the page (and not just regarding Climate Science), I have become much more cautious about everything in Wikipedia. I like it, I use it, I recommend it … but I don’t trust it in the slightest. It is very valuable to get a first overview of a subject, and to provide a variety of citations to aspects of a subject. But as long as folks like Connelley use it to push their own opinions as if they were straight from the lips of God, as a source for “facts” it is worse than useless, it is downright misleading. w. PS - and for those of you who keep bringing up the Wikipedia mantra of “don’t complain about it, change it” … I tried, as have many others, only to see it all come to naught. Unfortunately, William Connelley is well entrenched with the Wikipedia hierarchy, so his changes stick and everyone else’s changes somehow just seem to slip off the page … curious, that … PPS - Connelley has even used his power as an administrator or moderator or whatever he is called to not only revert a page, but to remove the discussion about the reversion. Someone above said one good thing about Wikipedia was that you could see the debate going on … well, not always. What Billy wants, Billy gets, and Billy believes in the Holy Consensus on Climate Science. To prove it is real, he has taken it as his mission from God to prevent any inconvenient truths from staying very long on the holy pages that are in his charge … ---
**Author:** ![Cervaise](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/cervaise/32/16693_2.png) [@Cervaise](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Cervaise)\ **Post date:** [September 15, 2008, 11:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wikipedia-reliable-and-easily-fixed-or-always-vandalized-and-unreliable/463479/45 "2008-09-15T23:26:12Z")
> [@intention](#): > > Many, perhaps most of the Wikipedia entries on Climate Science are piles of dogcrap due to the Stopped reading. ---
**Author:** ![intention](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/e95f7d/32.png) [@intention](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/intention)\ **Post date:** [September 16, 2008, 1:00am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wikipedia-reliable-and-easily-fixed-or-always-vandalized-and-unreliable/463479/46 "2008-09-16T01:00:26Z")
> [@Cervaise](#): > > Stopped reading. **Cervaise** , it’s probably a good idea for you to stop reading before you got to the facts, those ugly things can injure your point of view if you’re not careful. From the New Yorker Magazine: > [@](#): > > For all its protocol, Wikipedia’s bureaucracy doesn’t necessarily favor truth. In March, 2005, William Connolley, a climate modeller at the British Antarctic Survey, in Cambridge, was briefly a victim of an edit war over the entry on global warming, to which he had contributed. After a particularly nasty confrontation with a skeptic, who had repeatedly watered down language pertaining to the greenhouse effect, the case went into arbitration. “User William M. Connolley strongly pushes his POV with systematic removal of any POV which does not match his own,” his accuser charged in a written deposition. **“His views on climate science are singular and narrow.” A decision from the arbitration committee was three months in coming, after which Connolley was placed on a humiliating one-revert-a-day parole.** The punishment was later revoked, and Connolley is now an admin, with two thousand pages on his watchlist—a feature that enables users to compile a list of entries and to be notified when changes are made to them. He says that Wikipedia’s entry on global warming may be the best page on the subject anywhere on the Web. Nevertheless, Wales admits that in this case the system failed. It can still seem as though the user who spends the most time on the site—or who yells the loudest—wins. So, they ruled in favor of the “skeptic” who had said that Connolley’s views were “singular and narrow” … then they made him an administrator, so he can impose his “singular and narrow” views on everyone else. Brilliant. But then the founder of Wikipedia does the same … from the New Yorker again: > [@](#): > > Even Wales has been caught airbrushing his Wikipedia entry—eighteen times in the past year. He is particularly sensitive about references to the porn traffic on his Web portal. “Adult content” or “glamour photography” are the terms that he prefers, though, as one user pointed out on the site, they are perhaps not the most precise way to describe lesbian strip-poker threesomes. (In January, Wales agreed to a compromise: “erotic photography.”) He is repentant about his meddling. “People shouldn’t do it, including me,” he said. “It’s in poor taste.” > > Wales recently established an “oversight” function, by which some admins (Essjay among them) can purge text from the system, so that even the history page bears no record of its ever having been there. Wales says that this measure is rarely used, and only in order to remove slanderous or private information, such as a telephone number. “It’s a perfectly reasonable power in any other situation, but completely antithetical to this project,” said Jason Scott, a longtime contributor to Wikipedia who has published several essays critical of the site. And it is a power which Connolley has abused in the past. But then, a site from a man who insists that people refer to lesbian strip-poker threesomes as “glamor photography” can obviously do anything they want … w. ---
**Author:** ![Cervaise](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/cervaise/32/16693_2.png) [@Cervaise](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Cervaise)\ **Post date:** [September 16, 2008, 5:38am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wikipedia-reliable-and-easily-fixed-or-always-vandalized-and-unreliable/463479/47 "2008-09-16T05:38:02Z")
> [@intention](#): > > it’s probably a good idea for you to stop reading before you got to the facts, those ugly things can injure your Stopped reading. ---
**Author:** ![intention](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/e95f7d/32.png) [@intention](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/intention)\ **Post date:** [September 16, 2008, 8:42am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wikipedia-reliable-and-easily-fixed-or-always-vandalized-and-unreliable/463479/48 "2008-09-16T08:42:40Z")
> [@Cervaise](#): > > Stopped reading. Thank goodness. ---
**Author:** ![Blake](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/a9a28c/32.png) [@Blake](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Blake)\ **Post date:** [September 16, 2008, 10:25am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wikipedia-reliable-and-easily-fixed-or-always-vandalized-and-unreliable/463479/49 "2008-09-16T10:25:24Z")
> [@Cervaise](#): > > Stopped reading. That’s certainly in the spirit of this sight. Bury our heads in the sand and ignore any viewpoint we disagree with.:rolleyes: ---
**Author:** ![Ximenean](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/x/aca169/32.png) [@Ximenean](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ximenean)\ **Post date:** [September 16, 2008, 10:54am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wikipedia-reliable-and-easily-fixed-or-always-vandalized-and-unreliable/463479/50 "2008-09-16T10:54:56Z")
I have generally found Wikipedia to be accurate, apart from articles on contentious issues, as noted above. I certainly use my browser’s Wikipedia quicksearch continually. But the big problem for me is the poor quality of the writing, and it’s getting worse as more and more people join in. You see more instances of the same point being repeated, sometimes within the same paragraph, when somebody chips in their little contribution without having read the whole article. Or people putting minor or irrelevant details right there in the introductory paragraph. Things like that. I don’t seed any way to stop it it with the current Wikipedia model. It’s great for accumulating facts, but terrible at marshalling them into lucid, coherent articles. ---
**Author:** ![HMS\_Irruncible](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/hms_irruncible/32/7394_2.png) [@HMS\_Irruncible](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/HMS_Irruncible)\ **Post date:** [September 16, 2008, 12:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wikipedia-reliable-and-easily-fixed-or-always-vandalized-and-unreliable/463479/51 "2008-09-16T12:07:25Z")
> [@A\_shameful\_cracka](#): > > I’ve tried correcting errors in Wikipedia, and found myself embroiled in edit wars and temporarily banned because somebody who was opposed to any kinds of changes to an article repeatedly reverted it. Once I added a long list of guitar songs that were in non-standard tunings to an existing article after noticing that a lot of famous songs were not on it, and had it deleted because I did not have any cites. I linked to articles about these songs and transcriptions, and still had it reverted. Apparently there was someone who, for whatever reason, did not want that list added to and obsessively reverted any edits to it. I’ve seen that list and I found it interesting, FWIW. But lists are a big problem on Wikipedia, they tend to mushroom into a bunch of random, unimportant, uncited crap faster than anything. You probably hit an editor who had a peeve about “listcruft”. You’d think there isn’t much to dispute or mistake about guitar tunings, but you’d be surprised at some of the unchecked things that can accumulate on lists. Lists will also throw a main article way off-balance too (if the article is 3 paragraphs and then the list is 3 pages then there’s a problem). ---
**Author:** ![Jackmannii](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jackmannii/32/311_2.png) [@Jackmannii](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jackmannii)\ **Post date:** [September 16, 2008, 1:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wikipedia-reliable-and-easily-fixed-or-always-vandalized-and-unreliable/463479/52 "2008-09-16T13:14:05Z")
It’s still a good idea to be wary of any Wikipedia article on a subject that is controversial enough to be the continuing source of heated online debates. Health quackery and the vaccine-autism non-connection are good examples. However, I’ve seen evidence that in a few of the most egregious cases, administrative people have cracked down enough to keep the worst excesses damped down or eliminated. As one starting point for research, Wikipedia is O.K. ---
**Author:** ![Acsenray](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/acsenray/32/4519_2.png) [@Acsenray](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Acsenray)\ **Post date:** [September 16, 2008, 2:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wikipedia-reliable-and-easily-fixed-or-always-vandalized-and-unreliable/463479/53 "2008-09-16T14:06:06Z")
My biggest problem is that in the vast majority of articles, the writing is absolutely atrocious. Sometimes I spend a few minutes trying to correct awkward wording, but most of the time I can’t be bothered, because there’s so damn much of it. ---
**Author:** ![Indistinguishable](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/90ced4/32.png) [@Indistinguishable](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Indistinguishable)\ **Post date:** [September 16, 2008, 8:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wikipedia-reliable-and-easily-fixed-or-always-vandalized-and-unreliable/463479/54 "2008-09-16T20:07:45Z")
> [@Usram](#): > > But the big problem for me is the poor quality of the writing, and it’s getting worse as more and more people join in. You see more instances of the same point being repeated, sometimes within the same paragraph, when somebody chips in their little contribution without having read the whole article. Or people putting minor or irrelevant details right there in the introductory paragraph. Things like that. > [@acsenray](#): > > My biggest problem is that in the vast majority of articles, the writing is absolutely atrocious. Sometimes I spend a few minutes trying to correct awkward wording, but most of the time I can’t be bothered, because there’s so damn much of it. I’m not sure if it’s getting particularly worse, but, still, despite my fervent love of Wikipedia, I have to agree with this; as I’ve said, my main disappointments with the project are in such matters of style, rather than in terms of factual accuracy. ---
**Author:** ![Sampiro](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/2acd7d/32.png) [@Sampiro](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sampiro)\ **Post date:** [September 16, 2008, 8:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wikipedia-reliable-and-easily-fixed-or-always-vandalized-and-unreliable/463479/55 "2008-09-16T20:20:47Z")
A lot of professors and librarians would have strokes rather than say this, but I _love_ wikipedia and use it all the time. It’s a great introduction to most topics. I use wikipedia all the time. It becomes fairly easy to tell which articles are and are not well written and reliable, one big giveaway being the presence or absence of endnotes (and of course if I’m looking up _Gilmore Girls_ [a show I’ve never watched] for a general overview, I don’t particularly care about scholarly). For research that is scholarly I still use it when I’m not that well versed in the info on a subject. It provides (often at least) good external links and good bibliographies.) The advice I give students about Wikipedia is the same I use myself: \*It’s generally an excellent place to _begin_ research, but _never_ a good place to cite it in a paper \*Never accept as factual or include in your writing anything from wikipedia that you can’t verify through another source, but instead, follow the links or footnotes to wherever any factual claims came from, and cite those instead. (This not only increases reliability, it also makes the professors happy.😉 \*Use it _only_ as the beginning of research. \*If you see an error, correct it and cite it. \*Ignore anything factual that doesn’t have a source or anything that sounds like opinion. [Citizendium](http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Welcome_to_Citizendium)is a site by the editors/owners of Wikipedia that has the same standards of evidence and citation as any print encyclopedia and is considered the refereed version of Wikipedia. Unfortunately it’s also a fraction of 1% of the size. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wikipedia-reliable-and-easily-fixed-or-always-vandalized-and-unreliable/463479.md?page=2)