As someone who's contributed to Wikipedia and seen how the sausage is made: that's stupid. Even Wikipedia itself considers wikis (including itself) to lack sufficient authority to be cited as a source.
Such citations could be easily gamed (if you cite a particular change) or are useless (the content you cite may not be there in the future), and are obvious pathways to "citogenesis."
It's probably better for the user to search the original URL themselves on the Wayback Machine. If you cite with a Wayback Machine link when the original link still works, you're just creating needless work for a non-profit. An archive isn't a CDN.
> or at least creating
I agree on creating.
Do you also expect universities to have an archived version of every article and book their professors cite?
this could then be stored on a university server for future reference.
Relying entirely on a single nonprofit (archive.org) to provide a honest snapshot of every cited link, at the time of citation, sounds much more unreasonable.
Yes. Libraries should be able to back-reference every citation that is included in every paper that they publish, and so should the journals. That is paramount to the scientific method. Anything that you have not verified yourself should have a clear citation that you're able to prove.
While certainly this kind of story is common throughout history, in this case, there's absolutely no documentary evidence of the event, and what little evidence exists points in the other direction. This is not just the weight of evidence -- it's what all current historical experts believe. It's what all major encyclopedias say about the event. Nonetheless, the Wikipedia editor clings to a bad reference (in an extremely biased book) that makes an off-hand assertion. This assertion, in turn, is sourced with only a single citation to a 1960s-era historical novel that a) didn't actually support what the author claims, and b) essentially made up signficant details of the event in question, based on popular movies and rumors of the time. It's garbage all the way down.
Nevertheless, anyone who edits this article to reflect accurate current knowledge is immediately embroiled in a war with the editor, because unfortunately, there's no "trusted source" that says the opposite of the bad citation. And so the lie remains. To fight this battle would require escalating the issue and possibly getting the editor removed. Who has time?
Again, this is a minor historical event that nobody cares about, and you still cannot trust it as a source. I have seen enough things like this across Wikipedia that I no longer trust it for anything that might intersect with modern political opinions.
[1] "should be" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in this sentence. Unfortunately, too many people have had their higher reasoning centers liquified by partisanship, and cannot acknowledge inconvenient facts even when they're blatant.
Maybe in Wikipedia it's just more open, so you notice it more?
I've also noticed bias, especially in anything political (or that admits different political or ideological interpretations, such as history). However, I think you have one thing backwards: the more obscure and niche a topic is, the more likely you'll find it biased, since it has fewer editors looking at it.
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Edit: reply to breezybottom, as I'm rate-limited:
> Encyclopedias in general are not primary sources, and should never be cited.
Note this is not what I'm arguing. I mentioned Wikipedia as a source of information, which it is, not as a primary source to be cited.
Every source has bias, but wikipedia has the additional problem that anyone with a torch to burn, regardless of experience or knowledge, can become a dictator for the content on a topic.
Say what you will about encyclopedias, but they generally farm their writing work out to subject-matter experts, and at least try to be neutral in their editing.
> I think you have one thing backwards: the more obscure and niche a topic is, the more likely you'll find it biased, since it has fewer editors looking at it.
Maybe, but the point remains: this bias has fully permeated wikipedia.
I think it's less likely, because other encyclopedias are written by paid professionals (or at least some cohesive group whose reliability you can evaluate).
> Maybe in Wikipedia it's just more open, so you notice it more?
I think it's more likely on Wikipedia, because no one there is getting paid, so you have to ask yourself, what's their motivation for doing so much work? Sure you have the altruistic gnomes, just laboring to do a good, fair job for its own sake. But you also have people with an axe to grind, propagandists, and other obsessives, and they contribute to basically propagandize their POV. The dumbest ones get banned, but the smarter ones learn to twist the rules and use things like slow long-term persistence to get their way.
People get annoyed when I say "The Jungle" by Upton Sinclair is a novel, as is "The Grapes of Wrath" by Steinbeck, and are not appropriate as a historical reference (outside of being a literary cite).
The fact that a “legitimate” academic text cited this novel as a sole reference is an indictment of the entire book.
So I asked him about TGoW. He said it was an exaggeration, as was most of Steinbeck's work.
As for TJ, Sinclair could have done it as an actual history book, i.e. putting down the results of his rigorous research. But he didn't, and so he could make up whatever he needed. The entire book was a pitch for socialism.
Before the collapse of Google Books, when for a brief, glorious moment Google came closest to achieving the dream of making accessible all the world's knowledge, I could much more easily trace back historical "facts" to a single popular book in whatever field, but then keep going back through older material and often find contradictory accounts and narratives.
History is messy. There's of course what actually happened, but almost immediately narratives start to branch. Then at some point, years, decades, or maybe centuries later, narratives converge back to a single "truth", typically based upon a single, popular author's gloss. There can be some subsequent divergence and reconvergence, but that first convergence really seems to be nearly as defining if not more defining than the actual event(s).
When I saw the edit “war” (in reality it was the same editor and multiple different people making the same edit over years), I did research into the sources being cited because I was interested.
Based on what I found in the primary literature, I would have made the edit, but I gave up when I saw the situation.
I find wikipedia is really vulnerable to Gell-Mann Amnesia where any article about a topic on which you are very familiar has blatantly incorrect information, but then you open a different one and read it as though it were true. Of course this is true of other sources, famously newspapers, but I think wikipedia is more vulnerable, especially on topics that are very emotionally salient to its power editors.
I can totally see how this kind of question would intersect with climate activism though.
Whenever I catch something like this, I wonder how many things like this are in there that I don't notice. And this one isn't even really touching anything that is controversial.
Of course for most things you should have no need to refer to Wikipedia at all, and hence also no need to cite it.
But Wikipedia must always be cited if you use it, otherwise people reading your work (including Wikipedia authors and other scholars) cannot trace the provenance of the ideas you discuss.
In the research, there are often long paths that lead to the ideas: lunch room conversation -> paper 1 -> web search on term seen -> paper 2 -> web search on another term seen -> wikipedia page -> another wikipedia page -> original source (paper 3) -> paper 3's citation list -> paper 4 -> fact for your own paper
We always cite only the very last item in the chain, paper 4. I'd might cite other papers I've seen, but only if they are relevant. I was taught that the tertiary sources, like encyclopedias, are never to be cited, unless they have original facts which cannot be traced to other sources.
This of course also happens plenty when Wikipedia isn't involved, but for whatever reason people seem to have the mistaken idea that citing Wikipedia is inherently bad. There's no rule against citing Wikipedia, or tertiary sources in general, from professional work.
When a later person (e.g. a scholar or Wikipedia author) is trying to understand your work, it's incredibly helpful to know where some claim or idea came from. Otherwise they have to jump through extra hoops to trace the actual attributions and figure out where mistakes came from.
Wikipedia's original research policy is not relevant to what works you should cite in academic papers. A Wikipedia article is not supposed to contain the original research of its authors, because it's the wrong venue for such work, and because when such material is added it typically turns out to be nonsense or spam, but rejecting it on the grounds that it is unsourced is much easier.
What do you mean by "gamed"?
My favorite version is when topics are stuck decades ago and newer sources are rejected as an attempt to make the topic look real
Those two things are not alike. Nobody can view themselves as sufficient authority to be cited as their own source.
(The late Victor Mair was an exception; he was happy to "support" his own claims by citing wikipedia articles that cited unsourced claims from him.)
Academics require primary source evidence - e.g., experimental or documentary. Wikipedia is a tertiary source; by policy it forbids primary sources and requires secondary sources.
The visitors to answers.com fell into two very distinct groups: consumers and contributors (we called them the community). It was difficult to convert consumers into contributors: most of the easy questions on answers were already answered, so one of my experiments was to present an answered question as unanswered to the consumer, asking them to answer e.g. "what kind of hat was abraham lincoln famous for wearing." Anyone who answered was encouraged to register, and our community team would reach out to encourage them back. Uptake was low.
Likewise, the community did not often consume the content on answers -- they were very used to/comfortable with going out on the internet to find information, since it's what they did to answer questions on the site.
The point here is that the people contributing to wikipedia are a small subset, and possibly significantly disjoint, from the people the article is concerned won't go to wikipedia anymore because AI is now answering their questions.
And since wikipedia has no advertising, those people's absence won't be directly felt -- possible exception: I don't know the demographics of wikipedia's periodic fundraisers. Clearly if half their funding is coming from casual visitors, then that's an issue.
There is a lot of momentum and good will behind wikipedia. I don't want to deter anyone from doing more/something to support it, but I also think reports of its imminent demise are premature.
I don't know how scientific journals manage to exist but technically it could be as simple as a link to the user page on the university professors profile page.
There are also plenty of pseudonymous Wikipedians with credentials that they keep secret or vague. As long as they don't edit pages where they have an undisclosed conflict of interest, that's also fine.
Credentials can lend someone credibility in discussions. They just don't grant special editing privileges.
If an editor is an expert in a field and you can verify it it would be most useful to the encyclopedia to treat them as such. This is not actually a special privilege but how people normally do things.
I can gather citations and glue them into an article but someone with actual expertise knows which parts are important, what isn't and what is missing.
Wikimedia is of course free to have an encyclopedia project to entertain children with to much time on their hands but they will continue to lose good editors. You can't have both.
If you disarm the man before throwing him into the alligator pit he won't survive but it will be great for the alligators.
As an example, there is an American author B.B.Alston whose popular books for children were translated into dozen languages.
He has a page on Polish Wikipedia: https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/B.B._Alston
But my attempts to make him a page on English Wikipedia keep getting rejected -- failed to establish notability. The fact that he won some awards and kids read his stories on the other side of the planet is apparently not good enough for Wikipedia.
It gets accused of that more now because of the rise of MAGA and the like.
Pray tell - from where do you get your ideologically neutral information?
And then the admins decide what gets deleted and what is allowed to remain.
Almost anyone can edit it though they seem to have blocked Larry Sanger the co-founder for being a pain.
The question is whether it is a bias to honest citation of sources that are expected to be factual. As long as they maintain that culture they are doing the best they can.
The currently accepted 'knowledge' framework has been vigorously defended in WP since its beginning. When the label 'pseudoscience' appears in the first few paragraphs, you can usually depend on content highly critical of any threats to the orthodox (if they're even allowed mention).
Academics are more likely to defend the current paradigm. Traditionally, anomalies often go unmentioned in published papers.
All evidence for the existence of meteors was denied for centuries after Newton declared that outer space is empty - until the late 18th century, when ignoring the evidence became too burdensome.
You may be raising criticism genuinely, but you're fighting a very uphill battle because many of the people who cry about Wikipedia bias would want, e.g., the article on Communism to start as it does on Conservapedia:
> Communism is a left-wing anti-democratic and violent ideology dedicated to overthrowing capitalism, replacing it with an unelected "dictatorship of the proletariat" by technocrats and an atheist elite.
which is, for lack of a more honest and concise word, retarded.
I’ve routinely heard “Wikipedia is becoming ideological,” and it’s usually action flip as to whether they thinks it’s too far to the left or right.
Edit: wow, downvoted for asking this. Really, it's very simple: one should be able to make it explicit what bias they mean. If they don't, maybe they fear to show their own biases and be called out? Downvoting is the coward's way out.
Edit 2: I'm rate-limited, but I find this answer very puzzling:
> Rather, it's a recognition that it's not worth it to engage when the odds of the question being honest are slim.
That goes directly against HN guidelines. Assume the best version of a comment, not the worst. My question should be fairly straightforward to answer.
https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/reliable-sources-how-wik...
The mention of marxism is puzzling, but re: the Middle East / Israel, I think it's impossible for any kind of written publication to report anything relatively recent on this topic that won't make anyone enraged about bias. So it seems a bit unfair to claim this is how Wikipedia is "being lost to ideology", because this is a property of the various Middle East conflicts, not of Wikipedia. Let me emphasize: nothing that could be written anywhere about the Middle East or Israel, today or in recent years, can possibly avoid enraging a large number of people all over the world.
Based on what you're saying, I think your real issue is that your own ideology and biases clash with whatever you perceive about Wikipedia. If Wikipedia had a less "marxist perspective of history" (!) or relied more on whatever you think is more reliable about the Middle East and Israel, then we'd have another commenter claiming Wikipedia is hopelessly biased in the opposite direction.
Unfortunately this boils down to "I don't like it", which is very subjective and very hard to evaluate in a neutral way that everyone agrees must mean "Wikipedia is being lost to ideology", as you claimed.
I think we all agree political and recent-ish history are mired in controversy and these divisive topics are problematic in Wikipedia, but ultimately hard to report on neutrally anyway. I guess they could settle for a insincere "neutral" tone that left everyone unsatisfied; Wikipedia supposedly tries to do that.
> The middle east articles involving Isreal use a lot of sources known to be unreliable like middleeasteye and Al-jazeera.
Good luck finding any written publication of any kind that everyone will agree is unbiased and reliable on this topic, and that won't upset a significant number of readers.
Re: specifically Middle East Eye, Wikipedia's own article on it is critical and highlights controversies. As for using it on articles about the Middle East, it would only be a problem if it was the only reference, but this doesn't seem to be the case in a cursory search I did. So aren't you effectively asking they ban some sources but left others, which ironically would introduce bias? Same with Al-jazeera or any other news outlets you dislike.
> The fulfilment of ethical obligations to support knowledge communities, however, requires support from institutions of higher education. Currently, most academics are evaluated on their scholarly and research achievements, teaching performance, and service duties to their departments. Public service, like contributing to Wikipedia, goes largely unrecognised, if it is even counted at all. If academics are to fulfil their responsibilities to protect knowledge and knowledge communities, institutions must recognise efforts like contributing to Wikipedia and provide resources and support. Doing so may also help to address the public’s eroding trust in higher education itself, as a greater commitment to serving the public would reassert the role of universities as stewards of knowledge that exist to serve humanity – a role shared by Wikipedia.
[0]: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/like preposition sense 4
It's not like anybody really thinks Webster's Second International (1937) is definitive any more.
That is why we are building latentpedia.org.
I also remember the whispers and chatter outside of and around the 'papers. Those whispers etc would reinforce a later article.
What is happening now with news ie top down dissemination of world events is not new but what is different today is the immediacy of commentary by the hoi poloi - you and me and who knows what from across the world ... and bots.
I think we have to get to grips with the fact that an event happening within one corner of the world measuring an inch squared can rock up on the agenda of anyone, anywhere across the entire world.
Libraries and encyclopedias were my mainstays until Wikipedia came along. Many libraries still have a current affairs section that covers the news.
Concerns on Wikipedia dying because of a lack of editors, and that being due to AI? Wikipedia's community often makes it very clear they don't want editors, and there's a whole lot of people who have actually tried to contribute who will tell you of the unjustifiable miserable time they had when wanting to do a good deed, that has been a considerable problem for I don't even know how many years now, why would I care about AI redirecting traffic possibly reducing the influx of editors when there's a far larger, more evident, long-standing problem?
Promoting quoting Wikipedia as a source is madness. It begs circular logic. Citogenesis is already a considerable problem, can we not kick it into overdrive? Please? Wikipedia being at risk is one thing, but asking for a cancer to be spread upon academia, I'm sorry but we are not at a point in which reputation can be squandered like that.
>Doing so may also help to address the public’s eroding trust in higher education itself, as a greater commitment to serving the public would reassert the role of universities as stewards of knowledge that exist to serve humanity – a role shared by Wikipedia.
And there's even acknowledgement! But that somehow makes it worse because one of the main reasons academia has lost reputation is the same one that often gets called out on Wikipedia: political bias and agenda pushing.
It's like there's a fire in a building and a huge stack of papers on another, in which a guy is playing with matches, and the argument is that we should move the fire from the former to the latter. I honestly think that if this sort of advice was listened to, the consequences would be terrible.
Yet at the same time their CloudFront WAF decided to block IP coming from Singapore ISP...
So much on defending open.
We need "open access" knowledge systems with known authors who are sponsored by non-profit and educational organizations and its their duty to defend their reputation.
Humanity needs more openly accessible curated and factually checked information and "open to modify" systems are bad at in all.
but that's not how Wikipedia works. articles about noteworthy or controversial things have activist commissars and/or paid shills watching every edit, and unless your edit aligns with the narrative they wish to present, it will be undone with essentially "because fuck you" as the reason.
its value is still considerable, of course -- there are far more neutral things than controversial ones, and most of the articles about those are fine. everything even remotely political, however, is thoroughly subverted.
Wikipedia tries to kick the bucket by going with what "reliable" secondary sources say. Thus the goal is not to say the capital T Truth, but to essentially sumnarize academic knowledge.
To steal a saying - its the worst method except for every other known method.
If anyone has a better idea how to determine what is true and what isn't - i'd certainly be very interested.
Social sciences like politics, history and economy are harder to replicate with the scientific method, however repeated observations, statiscial information as well as qualitative analysis with evidence-based research can still provide replicable analysis.
> If anyone has a better idea how to determine what is true and what isn't - i'd certainly be very interested
This kind of excuse is often cited to shut down any discussion, especially in history, politics and economics. I find it deeply anti-intellectual and dogmatic. As long as evidence and counter-evidence is followed, it should be possible to discuss alternative interpretations and solutions.
How do you propose to discuss "alternative interpretations and solutions" if you believe that doing so is "anti-intellectual and dogmatic".
I'm honestly confused how you could respond this way to my comment. It sounds like you are criticizing yourself (?)
One thing that might help a bit would be to tag or color code specific statements with a confidence factor. So a statement sourced only from a single trash site like the NY Times or Fox News would be red, whereas another statement sourced from multiple independent scholarly journals would be green. Or something like that.
Primary sources aren't really considered reliable on wikipedia (with some exceptions), so if such a situation is happening (and you have a source for whatever version you think is correct, since just trust me bro doesn't go far on wikipedia) and you can't resolve it on the talk page, probably time to escalate the situation.
Not saying that doesn't happen, but do you have an example of such a page?
I feel this is the kind of discussion that would really benefit from a number of concrete examples.
You really believe that applies here?
Its hard to say its relentless when not a single piece of evidence has been given so far.
Its hard to say its tangential when it speaks to the original poster's thesis.
Nobody is actually showing us why the problem they choose to highlight is significant enough to torpedo Wikipedia altogether (or even that is a more important problem than all the others mentioned).
Also, nobody here is starting a long argument to waste people’s time. They’re simply saying “your one paragraph proclamation is completely unconvincing”.
Not at all. Mainly because this is asking for the first line of examples, not repeatedly bogging down the conversation with constant requests for additional evidence.
Also it matters because in this kind of vague remarks that Wikipedia is unreliable, or that articles are wrong, almost always the people claiming this fail to provide specific examples, instead relying on some general feeling of frustration and shared belief that it must be true. But if they provided a specific example of a factually incorrect article, maybe other people would disagree. Or if they provided an example of ideological bias, maybe it would turn out the complainer is in the minority in believing that was biased. And if it turned out that this were controversial topics that most encyclopedic articles struggle with in some form, maybe it isn't a problem with Wikipedia. So examples matter!
> most users of AI products do not click the links to Wikipedia, choosing instead to accept machine-generated outputs without further verification. If this practice continues, readership on Wikipedia will continue to decline.
This is the same mechanism by which Wikipedia drained readers from news outlets and academic papers that it cites for information.
I play the tiniest violin in the world for Wikipedia editors that now suffer from the same thing they did to the news media.
Of course agreeing on collective facts is extremely messy.
Show me a better attempt, please.
Likely some other librarian disagreed with some inclusions and certainly many readers disagreed with the content. They must have had a system for all of this. It was far less open than Wikipedia.
IIRC, they seized all scrolls from all ships in the port, in many languages. They likely had many "errors" according to other librarians and many readers.
It is hard to imagine a worse attempt at establishing a collection of commonly accepted truths than Wikipedia. Scientific journals are overwhelmingly better at weeding out falsehoods and hoaxes, despite the history of successful efforts to dupe reviewers. University libraries are also better at collecting knowledge, and in fact the entire industry of journal publishing began at university libraries. That knowledge is not locked away from the masses, it is just less convenient to access than Wikipedia.
Even Wikipedia has had to accept that a certain amount of oversight and review is necessary. There are some topics that attract bad actors, paid shills, state-sponsored propagandists, etc., and Wikipedia had to introduce "protected pages" to deal with such things. Add a structured review process and more rigorous citation requirements and those "protected pages" would be a lightweight version of academic publishing.
Maybe at free collective facts. If you want to pay: JSTOR and Google Scholar, for example; textbooks; or any of the endless scholarly encylopedias, guides, and review papers, especially on specific topics. And if you don't want to pay: shadow libraries, or the reference room of an academic library.
I am not deeply familiar with the process of peer review, but is it open? As far as I know, it is confidential on purpose, correct? Doing all of this with an open moderation trail is what makes Wikipedia truly ambitious, isn't it?
I have spoken with a few Reddit mods, and Chad, creator of automod and reddit's 12th hire about this topic. Everyone agreed that truly open moderation would be the biggest shit show ever. Yet, that is ambition of Wikipedia.
Can you imagine what Dang and Tom would have to deal with if all of their moderation was open? I might have some disagreements with HN moderation, but open moderation is not something I would wish upon them.
Yes, the reviewers' comments and the authors' rebuttals are generally confidential, and there are good reasons for doing it that way. One significant reason is to allow the reviewers to make their comments freely, without worrying about how those comments might be perceived by the public or how the authors' reputations might be impacted; likewise with the authors' rebuttals. Another reason is to avoid tainting the review process in situations where a paper is rejected from one journal and re-submitted to another -- the second set of reviewers should not know that it was previously rejected, nor should they know why it was previously rejected.
On the other hand, the peer review process is "open" in the sense that there is no explicit credential required to be a reviewer, only expertise in the field (typically determined by publishing papers -- in principle someone with no formal education could publish enough papers to start getting invitations to be a reviewer). It is also "open" in the sense that anyone can submit a paper for review as long as it adheres to formatting (page layout, font size, etc.) and length requirements.
I propose our leadership cut funding and fine any program in the US where a professor is not actively working in their field at a minimum part-time. These people are so out of touch it is literally sickening when you think of all the negative downstream effects. Citizens should demand better of their tax dollars - academia in its form today is a cancer that is holding back your youth from greatness and robbing our nation of the qualities that made it great, kneecapping our young talent for independent thought before they even figure out who they are.
Whether or not that has any effect on the real world is not their concern. The academy is proud of their record of interest in things that have no applications whatsoever in the real world and ideas that turn out to be extremely harmful if applied. The people pretending that academia is some sort of vocational system were wrong and are to blame for the academics doing exactly what they were expected to do.
Although yes to the idea that taxpayers shouldn't have to fund running everyone through university. The academics are often opposed to the taxpayers, it isn't fair to make the taxpayers fund them.
If you want job training, get certifications.