Wikipedia may have been an amazing idea in the beginning. Then it got taken over by a bunch of entrenched editors more interested in their own power than the accuracy of the pages' information.
Today I can see mistakes and inaccurate info in every niche I am familiar with. Because of that, I cannot trust it on subjects I know nothing about. I tried contributing and fixing but nothing got through.
Even worse, the level of writing makes it almost impossible to comprehend. Articles are badly organized, unclear and explanations are missing or hard to understand. Again, any attempt to fix the form was rejected. Editors are much more interested in citations and levels of notability.
I gave up. I would gladly pay for an encyclopedia written by actual experts, I see a tremendous value in something like that, but alas the market was killed by the free Wikipedia.
> Wikipedia may have been an amazing idea in the beginning.
> I would gladly pay for an encyclopedia written by actual experts.
While you're entitled to your opinion, this is a case of "the grass is always greener on the other side".
I'm not a fan of the Wikipedia internal politics, but as a user, Wikipedia is one of the best showcases of the Internet and in my opinion the greatest collaboration project in human history.
For the first time we have knowledge available to all, for (almost) free. You want to pay because you're privileged, but that's not the way of improving humanity as a whole, rich and poor, privileged and stuck in a mud hut with a crappy phone.
Of course we can do better, but I find it incredibly dismissive not to recognise the incredible achievement Wikipedia is.
Blame the fact that as a species we're quite tribalistic and selfish, not the collective effort we're making while trying the hardest limit our biases and shortcomings as much as (humanly) possible.
I used to be big on OSS and free for all (maybe because I'm an incredible cheapskate) but I changed my mind.
Every service provided for free is maintained by someone working for free.
After being on the maintainer side, working my ** off and not getting anything but more work without recognition or even a "thank you", I can't say I'm happy or positive towards OSS or services that can't sustain themselves.
The human cost can't be ignored.
At the same time, working for free is rarely conducive of high quality, even when good engineers are behind it.
Even when the quality is good, you can't expect maintenance.
Most of the OSS I use is either unmaintaned, of questionable quality or fake OSS maintained by business to attract/retain developers.
There are famous exceptions in OSS (eg. Linux) driven by a few exceptional (and well off) individuals, but that's not the majority of the community.
Students doing CV building are another segment of people doing OSS and hoping to get paid in recognition.
If it wasn't for the low level OSS got us used to, it would be easier to have a market of small independent developers selling software and maintaining it.
Honestly I feel where you’re coming from, I used to think exactly like you. But I slowly came to my current sad realization.
Right now I do believe that free wrong info is actually more damaging than paid correct info. But I am open to and wish for a third option or a solution which is more inclusive and less "for the privileged".
Could you cite specific examples of wrong or actually harmful information?
That would give more credence to your arguments.
Maybe also link to your rejected contributions to show that you are not just disgruntled because your edits were reverted.
I do agree that there are lots of inaccuracies in articles, but having Wikipedia with at least somewhat helpful information is infinitely better than having nothing at all.
Political content is a landmine, articles are often locked because vandals are often indistinguishable from those with better information but still controversial.
One example: Britishfinance/"Ireland as a tax haven"[1]
Summary: A user, Britishfinance (believed to be Paddy Cosgrave, disgruntled founder of the web summit, a major EU tech event that moved from Ireland to Lisbon as the Irish government wouldn't give him what he wanted) spent about a year primarily editing articles related to Ireland to make a link of claims about the country being a tax haven the most prominent feature of them. Case in point, look at the overview for the article on Ireland after the user edited it [2]. It's since been rolled back somewhat by other wikipedia editors who felt that was a disproportionate amount of space given to that discussion.
But Wikipedia isn't so well equipped to handle this kind of dispute.
1. Ireland certainly has benefited from its tax policies, including both competitive but undisputed to be the right of the country, like having a lower corporate headline tax rate than its neighbours, and
2. Ireland has been involved in tax loopholes, such as the now defunct double irish/dutch sandwich stuff
3. You can find sourced articles for all of this.
So at what point does putting this information as the most prominent information in a wide variety of Ireland related articles cross from being just adding facts to encyclopedia articles to being politically motivated? When one side is an active wikipedia admin and the other side is a bunch of casual editors or users who don't edit, who gets the benefit of the doubt?
All very well and true, but isn't this also a problem in closed encylopedias?? Surely even a paid editor has her biases, and at the very least would have to make a judgement call on whether or not to include that information in the opening paragraph and so on. Wikipedia actually has the advantage here as the discussion is completely open and you can see the all arguments and the process that led to a decision.
Should I believe that the Republic of Ireland's wikipedia entry had an issue with how it talked about taxes, but now wikipedia has corrected that issue?
Yeh if you read the talk pages (which are hard to find and many people wouldn’t even know about) you will find so many people pushing an agenda rather than trying to adhere to some neutrality. Small subtle changes designed to push someone’s world view.
I think it’s so rare these days to find people who can remain objective and leave their opinions at the door. Everyone seems fueled by rage, it’s like their political views are their purpose in life.
> at least somewhat helpful information is infinitely better than having nothing at all
Maybe, at least as long as we still have a good ratio between reliable and unreliable info (whatever that ratio may be). But as long as someone can piggy-back on this reputation, and most people simply take all that info for granted, the effect of a disingenuous Wiki article is far higher than your average FB "fake news". It's that implicit trust that makes a Trojan horse more dangerous.
There is no action being taken to make this process of correcting information more open and transparent, and out of the hands of a few people. Especially since it's been shown in the past that this kind of power was sold for money in PR campaigns, or used for revenge edits.
> the effect of a disingenuous Wiki article is far higher than your average FB "fake news"
Wikipedia doesn't profit by weaponizing misinformation. That's FB's business model.
All those people who stormed the capital. You think they were FB users or Wiki users? The thought of them diligently reading encyclopedia entries and becoming radicalized has me cackling.
And the article for John Wilkes Booth describes him as an "American stage actor" even though that's not what he's known for. If you keep reading the article, however, it's almost completely about what he is known for (a statement true for both cases). That's just standard wikipedia formatting.
"Standard wikipedia formatting" being burying the lead is not a compelling defense. It's damn near misleading.
I find "an American stage actor who assassinated President Abraham Lincoln" to be a ridiculous introduction; it should read "an American assassin who killed President Abraham Lincoln" -- the man's profession is completely irrelevant; he is notable for this one act.
It isn't even consistently applied: Ted Kaczynski is listed as a domestic terrorist, Sirhan Sirhan is "a Palestinian Christian militant," but then Charles Guiteau is a "writer and lawyer."
Ted Kaczynski hasn't been anything other than a domestic terrorist since 1969 when he dropped out of academia at the ripe old age of 27. Sirhan Sirhan didn't have a profession, as far as I can tell he was working at a health food store when he assasinated RFK, and has spent the past 53 years incarcerated for it.
Charles Guiteau had a long career prior to assassinating Garfield, as did Booth before assassinating Lincoln. While both committed assassinations, there was no point in time where you could have hired either to assassinate someone for you, it wasn't either of their professions.
My whole point here is that their professions are not noteworthy, relevant, or interesting, but Wikipedian bureaucracy causes them to be mentioned, and I think it's dumb.
> I find "an American stage actor who assassinated President Abraham Lincoln" to be a ridiculous introduction; it should read "an American assassin who killed President Abraham Lincoln"
One sentence fragment conveys that Lincoln was assassinated, the assassin's nationality, and the assassin's profession in 67 characters. The other conveys that Lincoln was assassinated and the assassin's nationality in 58 characters.
You like the wrong sentence. It's stylistically kooky, too: you need to point out that an assassin killed someone? That doesn't feel a little redundant to you?
> the man's profession is completely irrelevant
Hardly. But mostly it's strange that you'd want wikipedia to make that determination for you. It's not necessary.
> "Standard wikipedia formatting" being burying the lead is not a compelling defense.
Burying the lede would involve putting the information you're burying somewhere other than the middle of the first sentence of the first paragraph.
Maybe you missed the part where I wrote about their notability rules. Boothe was notable because of an assassination. At no point was his stage career even worth mentioning.
Booth assassinated Lincoln in the theater while Lincoln was attending Booth's play and the fact everyone there knew he was an actor contributed directly to his escape from the scene. Just because you are uninterested in context does not make it irrelevant.
I think, if you looked a bit closer, you'd find that Wikipedia is more opinionated about certain topics than others. On Wikipedia, Ted Kaczynski is a domestic terrorist first, and a mathematician second, but Bill Ayers is an education theorist first, and a domestic terrorist second. I don't really see any "standard" here. To my eyes, the bias is fairly consistent - somewhat left of American center plus a little bit of libertarian - not dissimilar to hacker news.
I mention Bill Ayers specifically because I asked a friend if they had heard of the Weather Underground recently and they said "sounds familiar, remind me?" And I said "Google Bill Ayers" and they paused and then said "the elementary education theorist?" And I said "lol, yeah, that's funny." That first sentence is what shows in Google results on mobile devices - it matters.
He was part of the weather underground years ago, he has spent decades as an education theorist since then. Education theorist is his current profession. Ted Kaczynski abandoned his mathematics career in 1969 when he was 27, and has spent the past 40 years either bombing people or serving time for doing so.
Similarly, Donald Trump is described as an American politician and the 45th president in his opening sentence, with discussion of his past in business and as a media personality reserved for later in the article. The standard wikipedia introduction is to list common aliases, nationality, and their current/last profession.
I will also note that on my mobile device if you google Bill Ayers, the first two sentences of his wikipedia article come up. The entire second sentence is about his involvement in the Weather Underground.
There is plenty of paid correct info out there. You just need to look in the field of data that you're interested in.
I'm pretty sure the days of a general data encyclopedia are past us. The amount of data to gather to make it useful is going to insanely expensive, and will in general be available from many sources for free, thereby decreasing its value.
I think if you just read the articles without following the footnotes you can easily get the impression that Wikipedia is a good encyclopedia. The writing quality is often pretty good, which unfortunately makes it more deceptive as to information quality.
Of course Wikipedia has some unique problems due to its fundamental structure, but on the whole it is roughly as accurate as other Encyclopedias [1]. But not every study agrees [2]. See also [3]. It seems to be also be field dependent, and I have to say that personally, as a mathematician, I have never seen anything wrong in any article about mathematics.
I don't know that I've ever seen anything strictly _wrong_ in an article about mathematics, but I've certainly seen articles giving equations without defining what any of the variables are and using using very field-specific notation without defining or referencing it, making them impossible to read unless you know enough about the topic to reverse-engineer what they're talking about.
And I'm not talking something like using a Dirac delta without referencing it; I'm talking about pretty esoteric notation that is really only relevant to the topic of the article.
And of course plenty of the math articles are just not very coherently written (and yes, plenty are quite good).
I'll go ahead and admit that I'm a dummy: I find anything related to math on Wikipedia to be an incomprehensible nightmare. There's a consistent failure, in my view, to consider the audience. It's like people are writing to impress a technical in-group rather than to inform the general public.
Maybe I should try the Simple English pages instead. :-/
I think you're spot on, for what it's worth. The context for my comment above is that I have a math PhD, and even then a lot of the articles are an unnecessarily tough read. For the general public they are pretty impenetrable...
Can you point to a few examples just to make sure we are talking about the same thing? I use wikipedia for math, physics and engineering topics frequently and generally do not have too much trouble understanding it, possibly with a few cross-referenced articles.
I have seen occasional weird writing, but this is usually either some esoteric subject or just an initial writeup on a narrow topic -- that is, an inexperienced author trying to fill a void, not someone staking out territory or looking for recognition. Just my experience.
If I had examples off the top of my head, I would have cited them. I'll see if I can find time to do some digging through my browser history, but this is a multi-hour endeavor that you're asking for here, so I might not be able to get to it.
And to be clear, I am not talking about people staking out territory or looking for recognition. I am talking about articles being so badly written they are functionally indistinguishable from being "wrong". Yes, you can decipher them with enough outside knowledge and some other references, but it's pretty tough. And this is not a majority of mathematics articles by any means. But the problem is that if you don't know enough you can't tell whether you're looking at such an article or not, unfortunately...
P.S. I just took a quick look at just my recent-ish Wikipedia edits, and https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Limit_superior_an... was correcting a small but obviously wrong claim. Which is, to be clear, not the sort of issue I was referring to in my comment about badly-written articles.
Every time the post title contains "wikipedia" out come the same complaints. I say what I always say: can you please point out a specific incident where you saw wrong information, tried to correct it, and were overturned?
It's an important question. Sometimes I see rejection of actual good material,so it happens. Often it's well-meaning noobs running afoul of either the essential complexity (encyclopedias are hard) or the incidental complexity (Wikipedia's a bit of a beast). And sometimes it's people who are sure that THEY ARE RIGHT and HOW DARE THOSE PEOPLE. So we always need to look at specific incidents.
If you are a deployment engineer/Windows desktop dev, check out the article on installers. [1] Most of those are obsolete, small and pretty much useless. The one we've been using for 15 years is not listed. Check out the article history. Every time someone tries to update it and add modern, actually useful tools, someone else comes from the woodwork and deletes it. Some of the deletionists don't know what a repackager is.
OK, digging through recent history, the 12:23, 22 October 2020 deletion removed tools like Advanced Installer, InstallAware and RayPack. These are tools that actual deployment engineers, repackagers and Windows software developers use every day to do our job. They are also recommended by Microsoft for MSIX. [1]
I have no idea why they don't meet Wikipedia's "notability" criteria or why such a 10 or 20 years old tool has or hasn't its own page - and I don't care. The list left (other than InstallShield and WiX) is a joke and you can plainly see that none of those editors has any expertise in the field. The end result is that that article is useless or worse for anyone reading it. Which I thought was the whole point of Wikipedia.
Got it. The edit somewhat cryptically refers to WP:WTAF, which is an essay titled "Write the Article First"; its point is basically that one shouldn't litter articles with references to things that aren't actual pages.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Write_the_article_fi...
That you don't care about core Wikipedia values means that your attempts to edit it will always be frustrating for you. I get that they can be mysterious to outsiders, but unfortunately they're necessary. In particular Wikipedia isn't a place for people with expertise to come write things. It's a place where people with no particular expertise use expert material elsewhere to create an encyclopedia. That means every item must be traceable to reliable sources (which they call verifiable) and articles must have enough sourced material that you can write a basic article from it (which is what they call notable).
If you are an expert on this, then I'd suggest you write a signed article in some publication with a reasonable editorial apparatus, or in some other way that qualifies as a Wikipedia reliable source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources
Then you can mention the article on the talk page and a Wikipedia editor can look at incorporating the material. Or if you think a reliable source already exists, try mentioning that. But no, you can't just put in things you think are true on Wikipedia if you don't have sources. Because however much it might help for this specific case, allowing that generally would quickly make Wikipedia a garbage heap.
There was extensive discussion on the talk page about criteria for inclusion and one of those criteria is that only software that has a dedicated wikipedia page or with citations showing notability should be included on the list. It doesn't matter that you know something belongs on a list, you need to show that it belongs on the list.
Which I'm sure is a reaction to self-promoters trying to edit the page in hopes of boosting their thing to prominence. People who don't edit Wikipedia have no idea how much of a problem spamming attempts are. This can easily lead to beleaguered editors who are inclined to stomp on anything that looks like it might possibly be spam. That's a terrible experience for well-meaning first-time contributors and I'd love to see it improve. But I get how they end up that way.
I don't really bother to contribute to any prominent pages on main Wikis, because in my experience it almost always required fighting with people with huge egos following arcane rules and procedures which they certainly took a lot of time to design and develop but which don't seem like productive use of my time, especially when people who designed them are going to fight me on every step.
There are some younger and less entrenched projects where one could make a difference without wasting time on BS (like Wikidata or Wiktionary) and there are less popular areas which aren't controlled by wikifeudals, but changing something otherwise requires too much effort for what it's worth, IMHO.
And yes, if there's any conflict of interest (usually political or ideological), the only thing you can trust is the links, and even those should be presumed to be selected in a biased manner. Of course, this also applies to any random article in 99.999% of the press, so it goes... It's still a valuable resource for topics not consumed with public controversy.
> in my experience it almost always required fighting with people with huge egos following arcane rules and procedures which they certainly took a lot of time to design and develop but which don't seem like productive use of my time
This echoed my experience before I left a Wikipedia project (one of its language variant). I have been vocal with the direction one of its most active admin is trying to head the project to, as well as the not-so-positive treatment of inexperienced users. Many of the legitimate complaints against this admin was pretty much ignored or stalled. Ultimately, I decided that it's not worth my efforts to try to push for a more friendly environment, and I have decided to leave. I still help with some offline activities and movement-related function, but chances for me to return to being the contributors again are slim.
> I don't really bother to contribute to any prominent pages
That's one of the secrets for being left alone. Improving jealously-guarded pages - or bio pages that are overseen by PR folk - is like walking on thin ice.
Stay away from politics and celebs. There are lots (millions!) of pages in hundreds of topics that have been rated as high-importance and need lots of TLC ... and don't attract turf-guarders. There are lots of pages where people have added 'citation needed' (so easy) ... when they could have just added a good citation instead. Correct a spelling. Clarify a passage. Add a high-quality external link ... might save someone some research and let them spend that time improving the article. Might be better than the article will ever be. None of those are likely to attract attention, all improve the article.
Start small, build over time. You can draft something in a sandbox, then ask for an opinion before you invest hours. Yep, there are (many, many) rules - and they change over time. There are pages where you can ask for help. If someone reverts something, calmly discuss it. A copy of your work is never gone, it's in the history. Come back in a year and try it again!
The thing is, I'd like to help, but I'm not dedicated that much as to mount a multi-year siege campaign to fix some error in Wikipedia, even if I know it's wrong. Life is short, TODO list is ever-growing and I have only so much attention to be spent on fighting petty bureaucrats. I just know Wikipedia is not to be trusted in any controversial subject, because the advertised idea of finding truth by consensus is false in practice - it's pushing the point of whoever knows the arcane bureaucracy best and is most obsessed and out-games everybody. The factual truth plays very small role in these games.
That last bit was intended to be humor, smsm42. Although it can be fun.
I totally understand not having the time. I research a lot, and WP's very helpful. So I like to pay back, and if it takes me an hour to discover something, I might add that. Takes a minute. Stick a cite next to a couple of sentences, 99.8% solid. (Unless they have a secretary keeping an eye on their bio. ;-)
Look, anything you have time to improve ... 5 minutes ... can be helpful. I gave several examples. Adding a bit here and there is unlikely to attract 'petty bureaucrats'. They exist, but so do bees. I might hear from someone twice a year, and one of them will be a thanks. It's not like it was 10 years ago.
Anybody who complains, easy to look at their qualifications. Logged in or anonymous? How many edits lately? Sound reason for revert? If not revert back ... and walk away. If so, then: that's collaboration for ya.
When it comes to controversy, WP can be a best bet, in the citations. MANY eyes look those pages over.
> Wikipedia may have been an amazing idea in the beginning. Then it got taken over by a bunch of entrenched editors more interested in their own power than the accuracy of the pages' information.
Then there are also the people with ideological axes to grind, and the community's seeming belief that it's fine to merely reform a problematic user to just the barest level of acceptability.
Unless you find some forgotten corner, being a Wikipedia editor requires an inhuman level of patience or obsessiveness, which probably ends up turning off a huge number of potential contributors.
A Wikipedia deletionist resulted in a movie going without an article for months, despite my efforts to at least give it a stub page. The film was by no means an obscure arthouse production or anything like that, the not noteworthy objection was pure nonsense. Someone other than me eventually won that battle.
A StackOverflow deletionist deleted my question, fortunately after I got a decent answer, on the grounds that it was a duplicate of an existing question. The explanations in the answers were indeed similar, but the symptoms were quite different, especially from the point of view of someone who doesn't already know the answer. (It turned out I had made a false assumption about the way parentheses are treated in regex. Unlike in many contexts in many languages, it doesn't only affect precedence.)
I would expect that to happen and be appropriate since eventually most questions will have been asked and most articles written. If you put aside information on new things in the world, those two sites are approaching a "finished" state so there's surely not much of value that anyone can add anymore. Of course, they may still be overzealous in deleting.
> I would gladly pay for an encyclopedia written by actual experts, I see a tremendous value in something like that, but alas the market was killed by the free Wikipedia.
There are definitely pros and cons. My wife is a professional musician and teacher so at home we have a copy of the "New Grove" encyclopedia of music, which is the industry standard "proper encyclopedia" for music. Each article is written by a specific expert in that subject, This leads to them being tremendously detailed and informative. The downside is the process of compliation is slow and so even if you have a subscription to the electronic version it will be behind (sometimes years behind) the very latest research.
I was quite happy to see one of my projects mentioned on Wikipedia for the first time, in the reCAPTCHA article. I've discovered it from the list of referring sites shown by GitHub Insights, and then the mention disappeared.
Looking at the edit history of the article, someone added it a year ago, and then 204.132.216.84 has decided recently that a genuinely informative section must be removed from the article, because they thought it's "self-promotion for browser extension".
Hi, I'm glad you found it useful! I don't feel that strongly about the issue to make a case for it, it was just a bit sad to see an article become less informative because of an editor's paranoia, and me being denied immortality :P.
As a chemical engineer, I must say that I was never disappointed with the content of the Wikipedia pages. Of course, as I have spent 3h/day for the past 15 years improving fluid phase equilibria calculations for the chemical industry, I see where the articles have limits for this stuff, but what is available is sound.
I would be interested in knowing your field of expertise where you find errors.
If you try using Wikipedia as a research aid in almost any field and try to follow footnotes a lot of the time you will wind up with broken links or a garbage source. It's not that there are not some Wikipedia pages that are not good. It is the case that it's very challenging to tell when a page is good or bad without following the footnotes. Sometimes you will find a good source, but at least in my experience most of the time you will try to follow citations and see it ends in either 404 or a trash pit.
There are also lots of situations like if you are looking for things such as statistics related to a war, if you use Wikipedia to start your research you will wind up clicking through to all kinds of trash sources that waste your time when there are compendiums of statistics through either government reports or print references that you could have just used with library access in a fraction of the time that you spent sifting through a sea of web feces.
> Then it got taken over by a bunch of entrenched editors
You're assuming this is not enabled and supported by the WikiMedia foundation. I believe you are wrong. That is, what you see when you try to edit values are those "entrenched editors", but those are just the front lines.
Certainly, some policy and customs are set by virtue of being an active editor; but more fundamental and site-scale issues are just as certainly discussed, decided and acted upon - infrastructurally - by the foundation.
Wikipedia has always suffered from inaccuracies. IME it's gotten better, not worse, over the past few years.
I don't read many of the politically interesting articles though, maybe that's what you're complaining about? Wikipedia has never been the right platform for that though.
Today I can see mistakes and inaccurate info in every niche I am familiar with. Because of that, I cannot trust it on subjects I know nothing about. I tried contributing and fixing but nothing got through.
Even worse, the level of writing makes it almost impossible to comprehend. Articles are badly organized, unclear and explanations are missing or hard to understand. Again, any attempt to fix the form was rejected. Editors are much more interested in citations and levels of notability.
I gave up. I would gladly pay for an encyclopedia written by actual experts, I see a tremendous value in something like that, but alas the market was killed by the free Wikipedia.