When there is a heated, with a lot of strong and exaggerated arguments on both sides, and I don’t know what to believe, or I’m overwhelmed with the raw information, I look at Wikipedia. Or even something that is not a current event, but the information I found on the internet doesn’t feel reliable.
I’m sure some would find flaws there, but they do a good job of keeping it neutral and sticking to verifiable facts.
No, absolutely not.
For purely scientific articles Wikipedia is great. But anything remotely controversial or even political on that site should be taken with a grain of salt.
There’s too many editors out there who enforce their biases and wage war on such articles.
This is why you don’t take anything at face value. Check the sources, which you should be doing on Wikipedia anyway.
A wikipedia sources list is not some sort of list of all available data on a subject. It’s a list of what information was used to build the article.
On anything remotely divisive, there will be available primary sources for multiple viewpoints, and obviously a slanted article will largely contain sources supporting its slant and leave out sources that don’t. Just checking the sources can easily result in the illusion of consensus where there is none.
I’m going out on a limb and assuming basic fact checking skills here, yes.
But the fact that a lot of editors fight about such issues means that it ends up being somewhat neutral, no?
Found you! While he appears to be way more than a Russian troll, he was indeed very insulting in his edit summaries. The admin also appears to be an invested contributor to the article who merely coincided with this event; it seems they were merely resolving this discussion. Pending edits (ones that require approval) are separate from the usual edits people fly by.
The issue I’ve come across is vindictive or mean editors who ‘own’ pages and refuse to allow changes to ‘their’ article.
Case in point, when a rather well-known bishop was convicted of child molestation I edited his article to add that information.
Boom, reverted, no reasons given.
Anytime I added the block of information back to the article he or she reverted the changes. Wikipedia was no help, so now I refuse to edit Wikipedia articles or even treat them as factual - too many editors have their own agendas.
If you know the policies and how to find your way around Wikipedia, and are certain that you’re right - you can generally have the truth prevail (as long as you have reliable sources backing up your claims).
The real trick is to know the policies and where to complain that they’re not being upheld. In your case you should goto the BLP noticeboard, and ask for an uninvolved editor’s help in figuring out how to, or whether the information should be added.
This generally gets others interested in advocating for the truth.
See, it sounds like that’s another way of saying “If you don’t have a ton of spare time and nothing better to do with it, don’t even try to edit Wikipedia”
Depends whether your edits are consistently bad enough that they’re reverted every time.
If so, then yeah, you shouldn’t be editing Wikipedia.
“Citogenesis” I chuckled:) XKCD is great
Oh and here’s the wiki article on the subject! With a link to the comic no less:
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Isn’t there a slight problem with relying on Wikipedia for evidence about how reliable Wikipedia is?
Also, check the article’s talk page—for controversial topics, the article usually represents a consensus that was reached after comparing and discussing different sources, debunking misinformation, etc.
