Wiki was getting popular when I was in college over 10 years ago. I recall a history professor telling me not to use Wikipedia as source. I am like, okay, I will just use the source wiki uses, which are pretty solid in my opinion. Wiki came a long way.
Wikipedia does a pretty decent job of eventually being correct, at any given time it can be outrageously inaccurate. Its good to not just use wikipedia entrys and use the sources that are linked there. By using the sources that are cited you are helping to keep wiki trustworthy and helps avoid you using bad information.
It works well to manage the integrity of wiki. I think being able to intuitively navigate between entries by a variety of metrics like edits that have remained unedited the longest/shorest, newest/oldest, etc would be a very good addition to wiki.
Some kind of webarchive of wiki sources would also be amazing so that if the sources disappear or change over time there is a connection to what it was at the time it originally/previously was used as a source on wiki.
And maybe some of this already exists and im just not very good at getting my 4dollars a month worth :P
Wikipedia does a pretty decent job of eventually being correct, at any given time it can be outrageously inaccurate.
Yeah, I agree with this. I work at a high end engineering company, and some engineers have gotten into trouble using things like materials properties that they got from Wikipedia and turned out to be wrong, with unfortunate results. By policy, if we don’t know something like that we’re supposed to ask our tech library to get us the information, and that’s why.
As long as you verify the source still exists. There are so many dead links on Wikipedia.
Archive.org bots replace dead links with working alternatives a lot nowadays. All the more reason to support that modern museum
Please dig a little bit deeper. You may end up with a stack of links to 404 sites instead of actual sources. Just because you copied a citation from WP doesn’t mean the source actually exists, let alone contains the information you seek.
In that case, try using an archived version of the webpage, for example at the Wayback Machine
Nah, you can’t. It’s still a great resource, but you always gotta read it critically.
The thing is that it is very easy to read Wikipedia critically, since it lists every single source they get info from at the bottom of the page.
And here I am fixing missing sources on some wiki articles just yesterday.
Someone has to do the job for everyone else can enjoy it.
Thank you very much for your service my friend.
And very often it’s dead links or sources that don’t say what the article pretends…
That’s why you don’t use Wikipedia as your primary source, you follow the citations. Of course, if you can’t verify that it’s accurate information, don’t report it, but it can be used as a jump off to find a legitimate source if the information you cant immediately verify is useful.
The thing is, if the place you’re getting your information from doesn’t list it’s sources, you can’t trust it. Whenever I’m researching a thing on the internet and I find an article or a paper, I don’t just stop there, I check where they got their info, then I find that source and read it. I follow it all the way back until I find the primary source.
Like the other day I was writing a paper about a particular court case. In the opinions, as in most cases, they use precedent and cite prior cases. So I found the other cases that referred to the thing I was writing about, and it turns out they were also just using prior cases. I had to go 6 deep before I found them referencing the actual constitution for one of them. On another I found it interesting that the most recent use case was so far removed from what the original one was about and it was could probably be questionable to even use it as precedent if they had used the original instead of another case.
Anyway, the point is, always check sources. If anyone says anything on the internet, assume it’s just their opinion until you check and follow the sources…
Are you familiar with Harlow V Fitzgerald, and the full text of article 1983 including the 16 words that went missing in n 1874 when it was “copied” from the Congressional Record into the Federal Register? I’m not a lawyer, but I do want that decision reviewed, since as the law was written and passed by Congress, Harlow V Fitzgerald should have gone the other way.
Wikipedia is an excellent starting point for information - but saying you can absolutely trust it hell no.
Yup, tried to correct something about a motorcycle manufacturer (no road legal model between year A and Z), linked to another Wikipedia article proving what I was saying (road legal modelS in year W to Y, just before Z), the next day the page was back to its previous version. I linked to the article about the road legal model they pretended didn’t exist and they just edited the page back to its previous version…
Wikipedia is the only piece of the internet I would save from apocalipse. Like, seriously.
I don’t know if you’re making fun of me, but, seriously, for me Wikipedia is an enormously valuable resource, much more than, for instance, YouTube (which I use, maybe, twice per year).
Some folks enjoy reading articles. Some folks enjoy to watch, listen and read (captions) at the same time. Some folks rather ask around and learn through conversations.
I’ve understood that it’s generally easier to learn new things when you use many different channels (audio, imagery etc). To many people but not to all.
I use Wikipedia a LOT, but I use YouTube for hours every day and this is funny to me. Twice a year? You’re not outright boycotting, but you really find it so useless that you only go there twice a year? Wild.
According to my app, the whole English Wikipedia with pictures weighs 102.62GB, down to 60,06GB without.
There’s also a mini version that weighs 58,29GB but I don’t know what it contains
Wikipedia 1m Top Articles weighs 43,53GB
It’s less than 90 gig to do a full backup. I can have the sum total of human knowledge on a 1TB external SDD, and still have room for Skyrim and my modlist.
Those images are important, I would keep them. Wikipedia just scrapes the surface of information, a picture can give a bigger insight.
Funnily enough, wikipedia has the answer
That’s only the text without any media. If you wanted to save all media on Wikimedia Commons, that would be about 420tb.
It would also be nice to have a p2p service still up in the internet apocalypse to share all the things we have left.
What if you need to remember how to procreate? I hear there are a number of informative videos about how to out there.
I bought an app by Wikimedia CH that allows to download the whole thing. It’s called Kiwix.
- With the exception of any article that’s even slightly political.
Even for political content it’s damn good. Every time someone on Lemmy points to an explicit article of bias, it falls into one of 3 categories:
- Slightly unfair bias, but still largely true
- Article is correct, Lemmy cannot provide a reliable source proving otherwise
- Article is incorrect, reliable source found, article amended
The third case happened once in an article about a UN Resolution on North Korea, and it was because the original article source was slightly misinterpreted. But yea, basically what I’m trying to say is if a “political article” is “wrong” but you can’t prove it, it’s not the political article that’s wrong but you.
Edit: ITT - People upset with my analysis, but not willing to provide sources to the articles they disagree with
Wikipedia has a claimed positive-bias, in which negative things are often left out of the article. This is more true the lower profile the page is.
And Wikipedia has an overall left-bias, because of the demographic of contributors.
And Wikipedia has an overall left-bias, because of the demographic of contributors.
FROM YOUR LINK
Until 2021, we rated Wikipedia as Center, but changed them to Not Rated because the online encyclopedia does not fit neatly into AllSides’ media bias rating methodologies, which were developed specifically for news sites.
And sometimes it literally is USA propaganda. It’s quite rare, but those articles should get fixed. Changing something like “The guerrilla fighters killed babies” to “The US State Department claimed the guerrilla fighters killed babies, but critics call the claim “wholly unfounded” [source]”.
But yea, as I said, actually a lot more rare than you’d think.
tankies be like
“Wikipedia is unreliable, here’s our wiki where we source reddit comments”
Wikipedia completely slanders people it doesnt like. For example Daniele Ganser who helped to reveal Operation Gladio.
