We've probably all said that Wikipedia should never be used as a primary source in any study. A recent publication [jaoa.org] gives that philosophy teeth, finding that in 9 of the Wikipedia articles about the 10 most costly diseases, there are significant errors that are contradictory to actual published literature.
Since its 2001 launch, Wikipedia has become the most popular general reference site on the Internet, ranking 6th globally based on Internet traffic.
Wikipedia's prominence has been made possible by its fundamental design as a wiki, or collaborative database, allowing all users the ability to add, delete, and edit information at will. However, it is this very feature that has raised concern in the medical community regarding the reliability of the information it contains.
Despite these concerns, Wikipedia has become a popular source of health care information, with 47% to 70% of physicians and medical students admitting to using it as a reference. In actuality, these figures may be higher because some researchers suspect its use is underreported. Although the effect of Wikipedia's information on medical decision making is unclear, it almost certainly has an influence.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by EvilJim on Wednesday May 28 2014, @02:41AM
why would they need a study to determine something already widely known as fact? off course there are errors, it has internet people writing it's contents... duh! the internet is where uninformed people go to spout assumptions as fact... hence this post.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Sir Garlon on Wednesday May 28 2014, @12:31PM
They needed to do a study so when someone claims "Wikipedia is unreliable," and someone else rebuts with [[citation needed]], the first person can provide the required evidence.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
(Score: 5, Funny) by Appalbarry on Wednesday May 28 2014, @02:43AM
Bears poop in the woods. (Which strangely is not mentioned here. [wikipedia.org])
(Score: 4, Funny) by kaszz on Wednesday May 28 2014, @03:10AM
No shit!?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 28 2014, @01:19PM
Wow, that's an important omission!!
(Score: 1) by HyperQuantum on Thursday May 29 2014, @09:07AM
I guess because that statement would be incorrect for bears living in captivity.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by stormwyrm on Wednesday May 28 2014, @02:58AM
This whole thing is wildly inaccurate. Trolls, jokers, agenda-pushers, astroturfers. If you're using these articles on their own to do anything important, you're insane. I thought this was widely understood given the premise behind Wikipedia to begin with. I use it in my searching for information, and such a search might begin at Wikipedia, but frequently ends elsewhere if the search is meant to be about something important.
Numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by kaszz on Wednesday May 28 2014, @03:26AM
Or you can actually make use of the reference sources to scrutinize the information.
(Score: 2) by forsythe on Wednesday May 28 2014, @06:40AM
I must point out, however, that references on Wikipedia are increasingly falling victim to linkrot. Twice in the past week I've found that citations lead to dead links. One case was known on the talk page, but another, a stubbish article anyway, didn't appear to have been touched in the last two years. In each case, a few minutes of obvious searching didn't turn up a replacement link, so I wasn't even able to correct these things.
That's not all bad, though. From my perspective, the biggest problem with Wikipedia used to be that statements simply weren't cited at all, so there was nowhere else to go from the article. Now the citations are there, and it's simply the rest of the internet that has a problem with sticking around.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by frojack on Wednesday May 28 2014, @07:20AM
On the other hand, there are a lot of situations where they are begging for "citation needed" when the citation is self evident in the statement. I've seen cases where "citation needed" pops up and it is obvious that who ever is tagging the article clearly didn't understand the topic under discussion and demanded a citation for "the sun is hot" or some such statement.
I've found that if it is politics, or religion, there is no point in looking at a wiki article. They are still fighting revision wars over the Truman administration, for pete sake.
But when you stumble into a well written and carefully cited article, you can just tell by reading it, and its a a joy. (Maybe its a joy because its rare?).
You are going to have link rot. It can'b be avoided, there is software that can detect the rotted links, and give you a report, but because of all the gratuitous incestuous links in Wiki (when talking about a president of the United States, is it really necessary to have a link to the United States page), the link check software boggs down quickly, chewing its tail.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 1) by LowID on Wednesday May 28 2014, @08:33AM
If you happen to find link rot, do your part and fix it yourself. [wikipedia.org] More often that not, Wikipedia references can be found cached at either archive.org or WebCite.
Anyone can edit Wikipedia, you know.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 28 2014, @11:18AM
I think you missed this part of this comment:
(Score: 1) by joshuajon on Wednesday May 28 2014, @01:59PM
"obvious searching" probably didn't include the wayback machine at archive.org. I actually think this presents a great solution to the issue of link rot. Wikipedia could simply cache a copy of each referenced page so that if it eventually disappears they can serve up the cached reference instead.
(Score: 2) by forsythe on Wednesday May 28 2014, @08:39PM
Actually, it did. I am quite familiar with the Wayback machine (if you search my comment history you'll see I've used it at least once here), but it is not a panacea.
(Score: 1) by bornagainpenguin on Wednesday May 28 2014, @12:48PM
Undid revision...
Reverted good faith edits by Sockpuppet99981
Undid revision 1234567 by IAMCHEESE (talk) tags are there UNTIL there is consensus, that is the purpose OF TAGGING)
There is no need to cite an archive.org wayback machine link. Article in general already suffers from overcitation
That didn't work out too well the last few times I tried my hand at editing Wikipedia and since I have other things to do with my life I moved on. I'm not even talking about controversial stuff here, I'm talking about reverting obvious vandalism and adding links like you're suggesting. It didn't work out because I'm not in the special club.
Citation needed. No, really because in my experience that has been far from true--or do you not allow that observation in this discussion because it comes from personal experience?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Hairyfeet on Wednesday May 28 2014, @06:14PM
I found the same thing which is why i don't bother fixing obvious errors anymore. I found that there was a character on a TV show where someone had "left out" (I found out later that this person is a fanboi that didn't like what actually went on with the show so "selectively edited" out his dislikes) the fact that some pretty severe studio meddling had happened, so I added a couple sentences pointing this out along with the time index on the box set where the writer/director and actor had talked about this and went on. Well not a week later it was removed with a "citation needed" (which I found out later is often a "catch all" excuse the insiders use to delete that which they don't like). Fair enough i thought, not everybody has the box set so I went to YouTube and found an interview with the writer director where he talked at length about this issue and how displeased he was with the studio changing it and went on.
The final straw was a week later when the fanboi not only removed that but went back and removed every change I had ever did for over a year, including obvious vandalism like an article where it said a celebrity had died of "nigger flu". It didn't take hardly any checking to find that all pages to do with this particular show are camped by this one guy and anything he didn't like about the show got "citation needed" right off the page. I really liked the IDEA of crowd sourced information but IRL it isn't any such thing, its a handful of shut ins with no lives lording over their little domain like they were Jimmy Wales himself.
Anyone who doubts it should simply look up "Wikipedia deletionists" in the search engine of their choice to see this is farm from isolated, in fact on anything other than the most banal of data I'm sure you'll find it being controlled by one of a handful of the inner circle.
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
(Score: 1) by LowID on Thursday May 29 2014, @11:51AM
There are rules against that specific stalking behavior, [wikipedia] which can be reported at the adequate administrator noticeboard. [wikipedia.org] I agree that directly fighting those vandals is a waste of time, but if you let other users know about it, they may decide to pick up the fight for you.
(Score: 2) by Hairyfeet on Thursday May 29 2014, @12:38PM
But it SHOULDN'T BE MY JOB to deal with THEIR bad design when a second year programmer could fix it in under 10 minutes! If the same articles are edited by the same person multiple times it should THROW A RED FLAG and be subject to review! It would take...what, 15 minutes to write a script to look for repeated edits by one person?
Frankly the fact that they don't fix what should be such a trivial thing tells me more than enough about what goes on over there, and honestly I have better things to do than deal with some insider troll who has nothing better to do than camp out on the pages of a show that had been off the air 15 years!
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
(Score: 1) by LowID on Thursday May 29 2014, @11:59AM
BTW in small "stub" articles it's not likely that such article camping will happen, so fixing stuff at least in those is usually beneficial and not contested.
And as I said to the other user above, if you leave the reference in the talk page it will usually be respected and other editors may include if/when the article OWNer goes away. Anyone removing such content from the talk page should be immediately banned, so there's some guarantee that the link to the interview could be preserved there.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Wednesday May 28 2014, @07:12PM
Yes. There was a a time when a reasonably objective study found Wikipedia to be as accurate as the Encyclopedia Britannica. That time is far in the past.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 1) by LowID on Thursday May 29 2014, @11:45AM
If you find such behavior, at least leave a note at the talk page noting the missing information. Comments in talk pages at least are respected, and someone interested in the article may be able to at least know about it and maybe even fix the article sometime in the future. ~~~~
(yes, I'm a regular there)
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Thursday May 29 2014, @12:46AM
Some references has "quote=" in them to help out in such scenarios. Being able to search for the references document may help. Or one has to trust that the fact stayed up since day X when the link was valid as a probability for truth.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Wednesday May 28 2014, @07:38AM
Actually the articles on advanced mathematical subjects are in general quite good. Which probably is because people who don't know mathematics quite well usually don't have the slightest clue what the page talks about, and more importantly, it's obvious to them that they have no clue.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Angry Jesus on Wednesday May 28 2014, @03:08AM
The question that really matters is what are they comparing wikipedia to? Without that, the implication is that 100% accuracy is reasonable. But that's a myth.
Compare it to a doctor. Sure most of the time they are pretty accurate, but that's because most of the time they are dealing with rote diagnoses. I expect wikipedia is pretty accurate for baseline stuff too. But when things get esoteric, just how accurate is the average doctor spending 15 minutes (swag) with a patient? I'd be willing to bet that in a situation like that, the doctor is worse than wikipedia at least half the time.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Noldir on Wednesday May 28 2014, @06:55AM
As opposed to self diagnosing with what amounts to a badly written self help guide? Perhaps health care is different where you live but over here if a doctor determines it's esoteric (for him or her ) in those 15 minutes, I get sent to a specialist for further inspection.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 28 2014, @01:01PM
That presumes he even recognizes it as esoteric instead of assuming that its just a slightly different version of something he sees at least three times a week.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 28 2014, @11:57AM
I think the point here is that they looked at the 10 "biggest" diseases, which by your own logic should be the ones most recognizable and best understood by the medical community. Heart disease, cancer, and diabetes. Presumably, these are a GP's bread and butter (nevermind the specialists), yet even these topics contain 'substantive errors.'
These aren't articles covering the esoteric functions of some obscure enzyme, they're the overview pages. Maybe this should be taken as a sign that those pages - ie, the introductory pages to large topics with broad coverage - have become bloated and unmanageable. Maybe rather than 15,000 words covering everything from genetic mechanisms of cancer to sociological impact and pregnancy, they should focus on actual overview material.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by tibman on Wednesday May 28 2014, @03:13AM
There must be some sort of joke here. "Peer reviewed sources" versus Wikipedia?
SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.
(Score: 1) by Re-Initializer on Wednesday May 28 2014, @08:04AM
To complete the circle, the article is at The Journal of the American Osteopathic Association and according to Wikipedia [wikipedia.org], osteopathy doesn't seem to survive very well in peer-reviewed conditions.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 28 2014, @03:22AM
Wikipedia is not without flaws. That is a standard no one can live up to. What it should be judged against is other publicly available encyclopedias. Against those it shines brightly. In any case, absolutely no encyclopedia is an acceptable source in academia. They are for a general overview and, in the case of wikipedia, a starting point to find authoritative sources.
It seems this group of people have an axe to grind and went for the low hanging fruit.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 28 2014, @04:09AM
Sort of the whole point is that Wikipedia is low hanging fruit.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Wednesday May 28 2014, @07:19PM
Wikipedia used to be a lot better than Wikipedia is. The current reputation is that if a specialist makes a correction to an article, it will be reverted. Whether he uses appropriate citations doesn't matter, but, you know, he shouldn't need to because he's an expert in the field. He's one of the people who does the peer reviewing. (Mind you, if the criticism came from another expert I'd have a different opinion.)
All the experts that I've heard of who has tried to contribute their expertise to Wikipedia have given up. Of course, this *is* a biased sample, because those who have been frustrated are more likely to speak up, but I've not heard someone report a contradictory experience...not in the last 5 years.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by gman003 on Wednesday May 28 2014, @03:50AM
In other news, serious flaws have also been found in newspapers, magazines, novels, encyclopedias, scholarly reports, federally-funded studies, stand-up routines, blogs, twitter feeds, webcomics, cookbooks, textbooks, sourcebooks, source code, machine code, holy texts and personal opinions.
No flaw was found in the scientific method; however, experts warn that there may have been a flaw in their flaw-detection method. Citizens are advised to take everything with a grain of salt, unless at risk for cardiovascular disease in which case a salt substitute is recommended.
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by mhajicek on Wednesday May 28 2014, @04:25AM
Clap, clap. Flawless!
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 28 2014, @04:38AM
serious flaws have also been found in newspapers
We're not talking little Page 23 items here.
Dewey Defeats Truman [washtimes.com]
-- gewg_
(Score: 0, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 28 2014, @04:08AM
Medical people calling other people are error-prone, because, you know, medical journals are such paragons of scientific rigor and integrity.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by bzipitidoo on Wednesday May 28 2014, @05:05AM
Wikipedia isn't accurate? We've heard this before, many times. It's not a helpful and useful diagnosis. Wikipedia is far too big to be treated like that. I'd like to see a breakdown into categories. I suspect we would find certain kinds of articles are far more accurate than other kinds.
Math and Computer Science articles are very good. Other areas of hard science are also quite good, though because of Wikipedia's home on the biggest success of CS, the Internet, coverage of CS is I think more complete than of other sciences. Though other subjects also have impressive coverage that completely outstrips any paper encyclopedia. Like, in Astronomy, can find an article for nearly every star that has ever been mentioned in a science article. Actually one of the pages in those subjects that is most difficult to keep intact and accurate is the main page about CS itself. Too prominent. Whereas a page about an obscure subject in CS, like, say, the BPP class, tends to be fairly stable. While there are plenty of nutcases out there who want to erase all mention of biological evolution, factual treatment of such subjects seems to be weathering such opposition handily.
Can't judge how well articles about the softer sciences stick to facts, as I don't know those subjects. But I should not be surprised if there was a constant low level of disagreement, both polite and not so polite.
Articles about living politicians and famous people tend to have some whitewashing. Articles about corporations may be worse, having more propaganda than fact.
I would have thought history, except recent history, would be fairly safe from politics and tampering by people with an agenda, but no, have to view those articles with skepticism. The Serbs cited the Battle of Kosovo in 1389 as justification for the genocide they tried to commit in the 1990s, and had it existed then, would no doubt tamper with the article, try to slant it to put the Serbs in a better light. I would not put too much trust in articles about the history of the ancient Middle East. I can certainly see Israel and Palestine both manipulating articles about events all the way back to the Kingdom of Israel circa 1000 B.C., to bolster their respective claims. Christians, Jews, and Muslims could also fight over these articles. Other articles on history no doubt have biases and distortions that carried over from earlier material.
(Score: 2) by evilviper on Wednesday May 28 2014, @12:17PM
Except that's not true at all. I've seen plenty of HORRIBLE articles about computer science and technology, with extensive and pervasive fundamental errors in them. As with all of WP, their quality is no better than the knowledge of the last person who edited them, and there are lots of subjects that lots of people THINK they know a lot more about, than they actually do. Many articles, including hard sciences, devolve into a spiral of myths and legends, with anecdotes promoted as fact.
The current winner is Fractal Antennas:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractal_antenna [wikipedia.org]
It has been systematically corrupted by employees of Fractal Antenna Systems to read like a promotional piece for their products and founder. Any information pointing out limitations, problems, or counter evidences gets removed, or at least white-washed. After all, you can always write-up a press release with no burden of standards, then cite it as support to your claims.
In the past, anything on WP about multimedia, codecs, physical media (CDs, DVDs, etc), was worthless garbage spouting misconceptions and misunderstandings as facts, and that may possibly still be true.
Digital Audio Broadcasting used-to be among the worst pieces of trash hit-pieces on the internet. Now, it has substantially changed, and I don't intend to waste my time keeping track of it. But I did quickly find it still claims "AAC+ is approximately three-times more efficient than MP2", citing an old puffed-up press release from interested parties, who conveniently compared the results from tests using utterly different methodologies to arrive at numbers that make their product sound good, but have zero factual basis.
Hydrogen cyanide is a delicious and necessary part of the human diet.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 28 2014, @05:41AM
Right on the money and laced with acid. That's why I come here.
(Score: 0, Redundant) by caffeinated bacon on Wednesday May 28 2014, @05:44AM
The 'researchers' went on to find that water is wet, the sun is hot and they are now studying bears to see where they shit.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by RobotMonster on Wednesday May 28 2014, @06:20AM
Too busy to RTFA, but I am curious -- did they bother to correct any of the articles they found lacking?
Seems a bit pointless to point out that Wikipedia has errors (duh) without also correcting them (see, it has less errors now).
(Score: 3, Insightful) by jimshatt on Wednesday May 28 2014, @06:44AM
(Score: 2) by dublet on Wednesday May 28 2014, @11:11AM
Your post has an error in it.
"If anyone needs me, I'm in the angry dome. [dublet.org]"
(Score: 1, Troll) by jimshatt on Wednesday May 28 2014, @11:39AM
(Score: 2) by RobotMonster on Wednesday May 28 2014, @02:43PM
There, FTFY.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 28 2014, @12:18PM
That stock response is one of the more annoying retorts from Wiki supporters. It is true one is free to make edits, but their argument is that they are compelled to make the article fixes. What if you're not looking at some kind of trivial change? Is it worth my time to make major edits on some topic that I came across while browsing? Maybe, maybe not.
Years and years ago (over 10) I was one of the first contributors to a page on a scientific topic on which I had a certain level of expertise (the field in which I got a Ph.D.). A shell page was set up for the topic, and I picked it up and started adding to it. Some where along the line someone (a frustrated English major?) decided that the whole page should be redirected from the subject, to the singular version of the topic. So you change it back, but he insists the topic should be in the singular ("elephant" vs. "elephants", for example). What do you do? From the standpoint of the scientific field, it is not used that way unless it is specifically used in a narrow sense as an adjective. But Mr. English major insists he is correct. Eventually, what I did, was say "fuck it," this isn't worth my time spending considerable time and effort building up a page on which I know a considerable amount, only to get in a pissing contest with a pedant. Sure I can "just fix it", but at some level it isn't worth my time and effort.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 28 2014, @12:57PM
Instead of testing, again and again, the accuracy of Wikipedia (do the new studies find anything not already covered in the older ones?), maybe someone should do a sociological study of Wikipedians and their typical behaviour.
(Score: 2) by RobotMonster on Wednesday May 28 2014, @03:17PM
I think it's astonishing that Wikipedia has worked out as well as it has. If nobody bothered to make corrections or add content, there'd be nothing there. Yes, it is not perfect, but it's far more comprehensive than any encyclopaedia I had access to in the olden days. It's rare that I try to look something up in Wikipedia to find nothing there.
I can understand your frustration with Edit Wars, though I've not participated in one myself. When I've submitted minor corrections, I just leave them be -- let the community do with them what it will. I don't even have an account... ...if your foe truly was a pedant, they should have ceded to your position assuming you actually were correct. Wikipedia needs pedantry, that's kinda the point! Perhaps the edit-wars need to be moderated by real-world qualifications: my PhD on this subject outranks your English degree - edit denied!
Isn't worth your time and effort? Depends on what value you put on the warm inner glow you get from improving Wikipedia. I certainly haven't devoted any significant time to that myself; I don't tend to look up things I already know about, and have plenty enough other things that need doing before I go looking for more.
When Wikipedia was first announced I didn't believe it could work. Some would argue that it hasn't, but they are wrong -- it has more breadth and depth than any traditional encyclopaedia that came before it, and I'm pretty sure that it beat Encyclopaedia Britannica on a general accuracy survey.
But really, my annoying-retort stock-response is the heart of the Wikipedia model, and if somebody is not prepared to submit corrections I don't think it is reasonable for them to complain that it isn't error free.
As for why I've just spent so long responding to an AC..., hmmm.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 29 2014, @02:03AM
No shame in responding to an AC. We're people too. :)
And I appreciate your thoughtful reply.
(Score: 3, Informative) by evilviper on Wednesday May 28 2014, @12:00PM
Only obscure articles with few or no followers are easy to modify... These are high-profile articles, where they'd have to be skilled WP diplomats and willing to invest substantial time and effort to avoid every one of their changes being reverted by somebody for some reason, even if minor technicalities.
It's a bit like saying it's pointless to complain that Google Maps has an error, without doing the cartography and delivering it free-of-charge to Google for inclusion. It's not trivial, nor is likely productive, long-term. Smacking Jimmy Wales over the head is the only thing that gets WP to improve. Changes to the rules for biographies or living persons, comes to mind.
Hydrogen cyanide is a delicious and necessary part of the human diet.
(Score: 2) by RobotMonster on Wednesday May 28 2014, @02:40PM
I'm not trying to suggest that the Wikipedia model is perfect, but if you've gone to the trouble to do a "study" on Wikipedia accuracy, you should at least submit your observations to the relevant pages; if some ass-hat wants to keep the inaccuracies, despite you citing references etc, then writing about that would be a more interesting paper than what they'd published, and would point to problems with the Wikipedia community beyond "it has errors in it" (e.g. "90% of valid corrections to Wikipedia articles are reverted by ass-hats, despite excellent references being provided").
If Google Maps ran on the crowd-sourced Wikipedia model, I'd agree with you. They should have at a minimum pointed out the errors on each article's "talk page", otherwise they haven't even "complained to Google" -- they've only complained to their Sat-Nav that there's an error in google maps. That doesn't help anyone, but might make you feel better, depending on how creatively you swore...
I'm not aware of the issues here -- care to elaborate?
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Wednesday May 28 2014, @06:07PM
There are a LOT of cases where people find incorrect information about themselves on Wikipedia and are unable to correct it. In one I read recently (though I can't find a link at the moment) someone discovered their middle name was incorrect. They edited the page and fixed it, and the change was reverted with '[citation needed]'. One newspaper gets it wrong, and that's suddenly a more authoritative source than the person themselves! According to Wikipedia, you are not an authoritative source on yourself.
Not that I have any suggestions on how to fix that -- how you prove the person is who they say they are and also aren't lying to make themselves look better -- but it's a common story/complaint.
(Score: 2) by RobotMonster on Wednesday May 28 2014, @11:58PM
Thanks for the elaboration. I don't know whether to laugh or cry.
It seems a common thread that your real-world-qualifications need to count for something in Wikipedia edit-wars...
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Thursday May 29 2014, @11:53AM
Yeah. Now if only we could prove those.
Shame we never got decent PKI implemented -- sign the wikipedia article with the same public key you used to sign a journal article and that would solve the problem quite nicely!
If you're an academic you could probably post something to your university-provided website; since it's a .edu that'll probably be sufficient assuming you have some reputation there as well...but anyone else? I don't think even an actor's personal website (not that they *personally* control such things anyway) would be considered more authoritative than, say, an error printed by the New York Times. Perhaps if you're famous enough you can get the local papers to write an article about the Wikipedia controversy and use their interview of you as an authoritative source? lol
(Score: 2) by evilviper on Wednesday May 28 2014, @10:18PM
Quite the contrary... Widespread inaccuracy on WP IS an important story. A random "ass-hat" on the internet is not. Maybe an extensive investigation on the politics of WP would be interesting, but that would be far beyond the expertise of those who did this study.
The idea that the only, or best, way to address inaccuracies is "within the system" is provably false. BLP below is one example where media exposure resolved long-standing problems, where editing of WP was unsuccessful.
Fixing a few specific errors on WP is just treating the symptom, while the disease (low standards on WP) keeps progressing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Biographie s_of_living_persons [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliability_of_Wikipe dia#False_biographical_information [wikipedia.org]
Hydrogen cyanide is a delicious and necessary part of the human diet.
(Score: 2) by RobotMonster on Thursday May 29 2014, @12:07AM
Yeah, okay - you've made some good points there.
I wasn't trying to suggest that that it was the only or best way, merely that it should be your first port of call.
Clearly the system has issues; personally I'm amazed it works as well as it does.
Any thoughts on how to improve the system?
Clearly real-world-qualifications need to be taken into account during edit wars.
(Score: 2) by evilviper on Thursday May 29 2014, @09:13AM
I had some at one time, but Citizendium got even further than I had. Created by the Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy doesn't want to talk about.
http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/CZ:Why_Citizendium% 3F [citizendium.org]
Hydrogen cyanide is a delicious and necessary part of the human diet.
(Score: 2) by evilviper on Thursday May 29 2014, @09:31AM
For much more of the scathing indictment of Wikipedia, including some of the reasons I stopped my major contributions, see the following:
http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/CZ:Introduction_to_ CZ_for_Wikipedians [citizendium.org]
http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/CZ:Why_I_contribute _to_CZ [citizendium.org]
Hydrogen cyanide is a delicious and necessary part of the human diet.
(Score: 2) by Sir Garlon on Wednesday May 28 2014, @12:45PM
Next question: if they attempted to correct anything, was the correction thrown out by some asshat editor who wants the article to remain inaccurate? "Improvement" to a Wikipedia article means meeting the unwritten agenda of whatever clique or individual is camped out and defending it.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
(Score: 2) by RobotMonster on Wednesday May 28 2014, @03:20PM
That would make a far more enlightening study, and could potentially lead to improvements to the Wikipedia model. But no, much easier to point out the obvious!
(Score: 2, Informative) by dak664 on Wednesday May 28 2014, @12:53PM
The article finds "statistically significant discordance" between wikipedia assertions and the results of searches by physicians (mostly residents). "Significant" refers to the statistics. No examples of discordance are given, or indeed whether any were of medical significance. They could have all been spelling errors.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 28 2014, @07:42AM
Dead tree lovers say that you shouldn't use Wikipedia as a reference. By attacking Wikipedia specifically, they are suggesting that we should use a paper encyclopedia, without actually saying so.
What they should be saying is that you shouldn't use an encyclopedia as a reference, or even "don't forget that Wikipedia is an encyclopedia".
Compared to other encyclopedias, Wikipedia is doing at least as good, if not better. Plus, it usuually has links to the actual references, something I haven't seen in any other encyclopedia. This means that while you shouldn't use Wikipedia as a reference, you can use it for finding the references you need.
Oh, and some dead tree lovers spout the "you shouldn't trust Wikpedia" crap every time Wikipedia is mentioned. Not everything needs references. If I'm writing a PhD, yes. If we are arguing over the difference between a back hoe and an excavator, my Wikipedia link trumps your nothing.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 28 2014, @11:24AM
I have this problem with my paper encyclopedia too. I keep poking the references at the end of a topic with my finger, but nothing seems to happen.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 28 2014, @02:02PM
That's not what I meant.
You get references? I haven't seen that in any encyclopedia over here.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 28 2014, @08:59AM
The "Journal of the American Osteopathic Association" ?
Maybe they were not too happy that Wikipedia describes Osteopathy as "a type of complementary and alternative medicine." (read: quack)
(Score: 1) by VitalMoss on Wednesday May 28 2014, @03:39PM
To be honest, couldn't one argue that different subjects could/would have different levels of reliability? I mean, I've found their History facts to be (at least mostly) sound. The medical field is a lot more closed than other areas, so mistakes are expected.
(Score: 1) by NickM on Wednesday May 28 2014, @08:45PM
From the article:
Therefore that whole article is bullshit...
I a master of typographic, grammatical and miscellaneous errors !