People who moan about Wikipedia

People who moan about Wikipedia...

Wikiphobia

Lots of people I work with, for obvious reasons if you know me.

jaymc, you work for an actual encyclopedia. Your coworkers are disqualified for having a vested interest. (One of the few.)

Honestly, though, the thing could really use an editor. There are so many entries that may not have disputable facts, but are simply poorly written. How do you dispute that?

you dispute it by saying that having an editor would be against the whole point of the thing

i like that wikipedia is occasionally unreliable, it forces users to be more engaged and critical of what they're reading instead of just taking everything at face value. it's a good lesson.

xp No, I mean, how do you convince wiki dorks that an entry is fine except it should be more readable? I know what THEY would say.

Yeah, Kenan, but some people I know have built it up into this evil destructive force whose name they can barely bring themselves to utter. Yes, I know it's our competition, but you're deluding yourself if you don't think it's useful in any way at all.

It's perfect for some things, very very wrong for other things. It can handle trivia, obviously, and specifics of certain types of subculture, and it's ok with science. But the nuances of historical events, it generally just shits on.

It's great as a starting point for research. Many of its articles are very well-sourced, with extensive footnotes that point the reader to more authoritative sites and publications.

I suppose I've found that it's good with facts, generally, as long as they are hard, verifiable facts. But for the kinds of things that need to be filtered through a human perspective for any sense to be made sense of them, the consensus approach fails.

one too many "sense"s there

I think science, and maths even more so, is one of its weakest links. After the first para the articles descend into a mess of specialised and incomprehensible jargon.

Yeah, Kenan, but some people I know have built it up into this evil destructive force whose name they can barely bring themselves to utter. Yes, I know it's our competition, but you're deluding yourself if you don't think it's useful in any way at all.

― jaymc, Friday, August 28, 2009 8:01 AM (26 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

this is an issue with libraries/librarians too (with wikipedia specifically and the internet in general), though i'm sure lots of reference librarians use wikipedia as a starting point for answering questions

I don't know anyone who moans about it! Only people who go on about how it's about as accurate as a real encyclopedia (dunno, feel free to disagree), it's great and democratic, etc. etc. etc.

more of a conservapedia guy

Honestly, though, the thing could really use an editor. There are so many entries that may not have disputable facts, but are simply poorly written. How do you dispute that?

Uh, by editing it?

After the first para the articles descend into a mess of specialised and incomprehensible jargon.

With references! I'm sure that if you care, it's useful. Fine with me if it starts talking way over my head after the first paragraph. I'm the unwashed mass that just googled "tetraacetylethylenediamine" -- what did I expect?

I expect easily digestable summaries of a topic! That's what enyclopedias are all about surely; the references should point to more specialist material, not the other way around. Most of the maths topics look like extracts from graduate level textbooks.

What entries are you think of? I never expect anyone to boil down for me math that I wouldn't understand at any rate. How do you summarize an equation?

The other day I was in the middle of a long car ride and had a burning desire to know when sunglasses were popularized, and when glass was first commonly used. A few minutes later, Wikipedia had provided me strangely detailed answers on both questions, and it was back to twiddling the ol' thumbs. Wikipedia 1, pre-Wikipedia world 0

xp, Stuff like The Reimann Hypothesis, which crops up in all sorts of populist maths and science scenarios. Perhaps giving a non or not overly mathematical account is hard, but wikipedia doesn't even try.

you want someone to tell it in story form or something?

yea man, from what i've read that is an incredibly complex idea, i dont really know what else wikipedia could do?

Once upon a time, there was an unresolved mathematical problem. It was brought by a stork!

as someone who works in the library industry, the only way i would use wikipedia for research is to scroll to the bottom of the entry and start clicking the links there--i would never ever send someone a link to a wiki page as a primary source. i can't really think of *how* its useful in a research context except those links at the bottom.

I'm sure if I trawled the popular science section at a bookshop I could find a decent treatment pretty much devoid of equations. Of course it would requre some mathematical knowledge but jumping right in with the formulas is unnecessary and off-putting.

xp Those links at the bottom are essential for writing or editing a wiki entry. They're not throw-aways, they're rather insisted upon.

you know the great thing about wikipedia is that if you have a problem with an entry you can, you know, rewrite it... xp

i like that wikipedia is occasionally unreliable, it forces users to be more engaged and critical of what they're reading instead of just taking everything at face value. it's a good lesson.

very OTM

Those who can, do. Those who can't... no I'm not expecting a mass of talented popular science writers to appear out of nowhere and rewrite dozens, hundreds, thousands of articles. I'm just sayin', like, in an ideal world... sorry for wanting the moon on a stick ;_;

as someone who works in the library industry, the only way i would use wikipedia for research is to scroll to the bottom of the entry and start clicking the links there--i would never ever send someone a link to a wiki page as a primary source. i can't really think of *how* its useful in a research context except those links at the bottom.

Maybe more for reference than for research:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_IP_protocol_numbers
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cisco_IOS
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_management_system
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_probability_distributions

ooh, that's a good distinction, i think--the difference between reference (like using Wikipedia, as I have, to look up what songs are on a particular album) and research

i can't really think of *how* its useful in a research context except those links at the bottom.

That's all I'm talking about. Here's an example I've been using recently: I needed to find a comprehensive list of all Olympic athletes who've had their gold medals stripped. The only place I was able to find all that information in one place was this Wikipedia page. I have no idea of whether it's truly comprehensive (in fact, the article even notes that "this list is incomplete"), but no other single source gave me that much information at once, and it was all impeccably cited, with links to Sports Illustrated articles, AP reports, etc., that all checked out. Without Wikipedia, I would have had to resort to cobbling all the information together myself, which would have been prohibitively time-consuming. And the material I'm editing is now more accurate.

cool

Agreeing with Kenan here, because ... I think I have twice tried rewriting entries on stuff I care about, stuff that was badly written and formatted. (I don't mean "badly written" in some arguable or pedantic way, just like straight-up sentences-missing-periods, fragments, misspellings, etc.) Both times the changes were reverted as being, iirc, insufficiently substantive -- like fact-based changes were useful but aesthetic/writing ones were somehow just pointless meddling? I don't know much about Wikipedia's editing process/politics; maybe there was a reason I missed; but you'd think that if someone was willing to contribute 45 minutes of proofreading and basic line-editing to an article, that'd be considered valuable.

(That's just in terms of one reason it might actually be less well-presented than it could be.)

I shouldn't say "rewriting," I guess, just sorta copyediting

I've tried both basic copy edits for grammar and punctuation, and big-time rewriting involving rearranging and reorganizing. (Moving a fact about someone's professional life from the "early life" subhead to the "professional life" subhead, for example.) In any case, edits are generally greeted with a kind of "Who the fuck do you think you are?" attitude, no matter how much perfect sense they make.

The trick, I think, is to be excruciatingly specific about every edit you make in the comments, down to the last comma splice. It's laborious.

Once you make the mistake of attempting to thoughtfully editing something that's wrong/ incomplete/ badly written, etc. only to have it immediately reverted, that cures you of the urge to edit Wikipedia, unless you're a masochist or looking for an argument with a stubborn, possessive idiot. Now I pretty much limit myself to correcting punctuation. (Why do so many people leave periods off their sentences nowadays? Drives me mad.)

Once you make the mistake of attempting to thoughtfully editing edit something

(Just kidding. I am the king of dumb typos.)

ha, of course

(and yeah, no period, but this is ilx)

The Riemann hypothesis entry doesn't look that bad to me, but maybe it would be simpler if they started by saying something like "The Riemann hypothesis would, if true, give a great deal of information about how prime numbers are distributed among the natural numbers."

For someone like myself, who's not a professor but extremely interested in science and maths, wiki is almost unreadable for those things (compared to many other places on the web anyway)

Chickipedia

wikipedia is in the death-grip of overenthusiastic amateurs

The Riemann hypothesis page is very poorly organized, that's true. The Wolfram MathWorld pages are better, but they're written by paid staff.

one thing nobody can deny about Wikipedia: if you are interested in a topic, this is the #1 place to go to find out if that topic has ever been referenced in an animated TV comedy or obscure song

troof

Also, if you were ever in (or interested in) a band that was pretty damn obscure, here you can write the history without having to start a website.

Apparently Futurama was one of - or the - first comprehensive articles started on Wikipedia :/

I think science, and maths even more so, is one of its weakest links. After the first para the articles descend into a mess of specialised and incomprehensible jargon.

Yeah, this is nuts, at least as far as math is concerned. Wikipedia has very quickly, and sort of shockingly, become the best publicly available compendium of mathematical knowledge that has ever existed. I mean, yeah, there are formulas and specialized terminology -- that's because that's what math is. You can indeed go to a bookstore and read books on the same topics without any formulas. And these books will generate some kind of vague impression of the subject. But when you want to look something up, you want the actual fact you're looking for, not a hand-wavy gesture!

trayce i'll give you $10 to delete the whole article and replace it with "bite my shiny metal ass"

Haha!

Couldn't Jimmy Wales run google ads for, like, a week, instead of plastering his puppydog eyes up there begging for money?

what happened to his pr0n empire? can't believe the world has stopped wanking

http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/2010/the-science-behind-wikipedias-jimmy-appeal/

lol https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/idkjdjficifbfjjkdkiimioljbloddpl?hl=en-US

I gave them money. But the puppydog eyes still don't go away.

xp, Stuff like The Reimann Hypothesis, which crops up in all sorts of populist maths and science scenarios. Perhaps giving a non or not overly mathematical account is hard, but wikipedia doesn't even try.

― ledge, Friday, August 28, 2009 10:22 AM (1 year ago) Bookmark

I can't believe nobody pointed out the Simple English wikipedia to this guy!

http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riemann_hypothesis

its great for retards, like me

but sometimes... its not simple enough. the Simple Simple wikipedia might be better :(

Couldn't Jimmy Wales run google ads for, like, a week, instead of plastering his puppydog eyes up there begging for money?

The more I look at those stupid banner ads day to day, the more attractive he starts to become. D:

http://i.imgur.com/2enEZ.png

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/07/17/west-virginia-u-hire-gender-gap-focused-wikipedian-residence

abt a 'wikipedian in residence' job hosted at a university

Is there some kind of backlash against Wikipedia? In a number of contexts over the last year or so I've seen people critical of Wikipedia, or maybe more accurately of people who use or read wikipedia. But it seems to be in more of an abstract or conceptual sense rather than in regards to anything in particular Wikipedia was bad at or had got wrong

certain aspects of it are very bad due to heavily motivated editors with various agendas - you see it especially on topics that are controversial for national reasons - these editors also tend to very vocal about their disdain for the bias of wikipedia (eg for assigning the wrong nationalities to pre-nationalist historical figures) which gets picked up on even by people who don't explicitly share these agendas

I think there is more awareness that their NPOV is not neutral and promotes a certain kind of howeverism regarding things that should not be howevered - this awareness is in line with a broader rejection of the claims of supposedly neutral institutions and international bodies and is too chaotic to pigeonhole as a good or bad trend in general

there is also rampant sexism cisheteronormativity on the platform (but still not enough for many)

if the criticism is coming from the right it's probably about them not taking alternative facts seriously enough or being too democratic in certain respects and the trends I've noticed may be the opposite of the complaints you're hearing depending on the sources

I have a good long list of problems with wikipedia, but in this age of spewed out AI bullshit it suddenly looks like one of the greatest achievements of the internet age.

certainly in the last decade I've gone from telling students "don't use wikipedia" to saying "please go to wikipedia for a general overview and a list of useful references, but don't cite it of course"

I've seen more of a move to positive attitudes toward wikipedia, and I think it is because of the increasing presence of AI and the general enshittification of the web.

I can't tell if there's a specific direction the criticism is coming from, its more something low level I've gradually noticed over time. Today I saw a response tweet which said "using wikipedia as a source" and then a clown face emoji. By itself I wouldn't have even registered but I had a "what, again?" type of moment and in combination with a lot of similar background stuff over the last year or two it did register

I feel like the criticisms are largely abstract rather than pointing out specific cases (which is something different), some falling into a kind of "read a book instead" type of territory, but it also feels like they're coming from different directions.

I normally see this from right-wingers and cranks of various types (anti-vaxx, 5G etc) tbh

I suspect there’s a huge overlap with the anti-vax crank crowd and the Conservapedia wingnuts.

While thats undoubtedly the case, I don't generally come across much content from those areas. I'll have to make a note of the context when it happens again

There was an interesting article a while back either by or about someone who devotes a lot of time to editing Wikipedia pages on Nazi military figures that are suspiciously positive or elide the war crimes they were involved in.

I imagine that's a combination of sympathizers and nationalists on top of military historians generally just being macho boneheads who worship violence and hate context

the whole nazi collaborator who is a european national hero phenomenon is a real fucking problem and those articles are some of the worst offenders - is croatian wikipedia still run by neo-nazi/neo-ustase/cathfash scumbags? their POV is definitely overrepresented in english language articles esp smaller ones although their most egregious lies usually get removed eventually

there seems to be a bit soft hindu nationalist agenda promoted by some contributors on S and SE asian history but maybe that also reflects orientalist biases in the sources

wherever there is genocide you find apologism to varying degrees and it seems particularly bad on australian history related articles which is disappointing but unsurprising

Wikipedia is a beautiful thing, but when you really know about something and look at the wiki it's often evident how much is missing, or sometimes incorrect. But when you don't know about something it's all too easy to take it at face value.

Also there is a cottage industry of podcasts that are just based on reading a wiki and riffing. And I think it's a growing universal pet peeve about someone using the term "research" and meaning they read a wikipedia article.

Is there some kind of backlash against Wikipedia?

I feel the opposite. there was a humongous backlash against Wikipedia when it first emerged, because at the time it was fledgling and not as well managed, so articles were more easily vandalized or filled with nonsense, but it practically is a legitimate encyclopedia at this point.

you can still find nonsense on some pages here and there, but pages on major topics are usually well regulated.

encyclopedias have always been full of shit. I read an EB from the 30s a while back - did you know the irish are quarrelsome and ungrateful and never satisfied? once you put that in print you're fucked forever. wikipedia has the potential to be a much less awful way to transmit knowledge but it needs constant ruthless criticism all the time to keep it on its toes

I have real concerns about the ways it packages and instantiates knowledge and influences how we conceive of things but as a widely accessible resource in a world of academic paywalls and evangelical parents you could do a lot worse (unless you're croatian I guess)

I have a good long list of problems with wikipedia, but in this age of spewed out AI bullshit it suddenly looks like one of the greatest achievements of the internet age.

― This is Dance Anthems, have some respect (Camaraderie at Arms Length), Friday, April 12, 2024 8:30 AM (three hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

otm

i mean it's still better than nothing xp

i have a queasy feeling we're on the precipice of a kind of informational dark age. it wouldn't surprise me if in 20 years we will look back and wish that structural biases in wikipedia articles about croatian history was the worst of our problems

i mean i do agree with you though. but this is a message board and sometimes i can't resist the temptation to "argue" ... although maybe it's more my inclination that things are only going to get more depressing / horrifying

i love Wikipedia just going on and reading about where Laura Branigan grew up and shit

where Laura Branigan grew up

Croatia I believe

Some music genres on Wikipedia are described quite humorously, like you can palpably perceive the bickering that led to the careful word choices and hedging

It's embarrassing sometimes how many of my attempts at everyday conversation begin with something like "I was reading Wikipedia and..."

Part of teaching grade school from 2000 onward was the stock speech about the dangers of Wikipedia (meanwhile, I'd be on there 20 times daily for my own purposes). What you were really trying to avoid was them cutting-and-pasting whole sections into some research assignment--easily detectable, of course. I still remember a grade 8 girl who handed in something for an art assignment with terminology that could have come from Clement Greenberg. I gingerly pointed out that she didn't write this and couldn't do it again, which, being a good student, really upset her. Eventually it became more a case of "Okay to double-check facts, but that's all."

xps it is mostly much better than it was 10 or even 5 years ago but I don't want to fall into complacency because it could always get worse again and it's still bad in enough ways to complain for hours. I harp on the croatian thing because those people are a particularly extreme representatives of the same forces that are currently attacking libraries and whatnot (much like their grandparents were particularly exteme representatives of the worst of the tendencies of their or any time)

also because I don't care if the pope ate spaghetti with trans sex workers the other day his church is still actively supporting the revival of a movement in which priests literally killed children with hammers - obviously the save the children crowd couldn't give less a shit but more people should and probably would if it was covered more - rant over

encyclopedias have always been full of shit. I read an EB from the 30s a while back - did you know the irish are quarrelsome and ungrateful and never satisfied? once you put that in print you're fucked forever.

lol

on a less awful note I like when you can tell that a bunch of people questioned whether this band counts as pop-punk and eventually decided it did after adding 5 sources

My favorite thing to do on Wikipedia is read plot synopses of panned movies with infamous plot twists

Also to read the talk page archives for the Buttocks article and read the heated debates from 2005 on the ethics of including nude butt pics

did anybody make a documentary on that person who made up like hundreds of articles of fake Russian history?

oh wait what now

omg hate that you just gave me this rabbit hole - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhemao_hoaxes

I love her and will defend her unreservedly

there was also that american teen who wrote most of the scots wikipedia based on his memories of trainspotting or whatever

xps I remember a controversy some time back over a wikipedian using their own work to illustrate the human feces article. I think it got taken down in the end for being unrepresentative in its colour and consistency

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FoANYbrXgAUbpht?format=jpg&name=medium

sometimes i can't resist the temptation to "argue"

This is a side issue but I don't see the inherent negativity on this. I feel like collectively, over time, people have been increasingly skipping straight to the answer (or to different answers) as though they are self-evident. Which isn't all that useful for things you don't have an answer to, or an answer that isn't held particularly firmly and could be changed. "Arguing" is part of that process, even if its other people arguing. I think wikipedia is a positive, I'd come across some pretty abstract and conceptual about why it wasn't, so hearing more substantive points about why it might not quite be the case is good, as is rebuttals to them

One thing I like to use Wikipedia for: now that I finally finished a months-long muddle through Nabokov's Bend Sinister, I can go to Wikipedia and find out what it was about.

Wikipedia is not great for that, in my experience… I try to look for pages on universities’ websites and stuff