Wikipedia - do you trust it?

Sir Digby Chicken Caesar

I was googling for something, and the google results page contained a few sentences that I didn't see when I opened the main wikipedia page..

kind of changes the whole tone of the piece

current wiki version
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_Peters

cached version

http://209.85.129.104/search?q=cache:YApHiKXTBmkJ:en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_Peters+joan+peters&hl=en&gl=ie&ct=clnk&cd=1&client=firefox-a


whatever people open that page (or any other) are just getting basically propoganda for whatever side of the argument... really it's absolute bollocks.. kind of dangerous to proper education.
should the truth be democratic? do you use wikipedia often and do you/should you take it seriously?

FlutterinBantam

No and nooo

aidan_walsh

I use it as a starting point, never as a single source. But that said I have never found glaring problems in most of what I have used it for. However, they would be mostly technical items, so it would be easy enough to verify whether an item is inaccurate, unlike what you have demonstrated above.

I wuldn't trust it as far as I could throw it.

I would never use it to research something I didn't half know already.

Its fun to read though

vorbis

its reliable for the most part.

regarding the original article. I thought there's nothing wrong with the current article ! The removal of what was an opinion and the leaving of the factual information is to be commended no?

InFront

why trust it?
There is so much more dependable and comprehensive sources of information out there. Accepting information from frequently unknown sources with precious little references and too many biases is quite a silly mistake in my opinion. Using wikipedia in a debate, by the way, is about as useful as saying "my mate told me he thinks..."

skywalker

aidan_walsh wrote:

I use it as a starting point, never as a single source.

Bingo. Generally there's plenty of sources at the end of wiki articles (the technical ones would be mostly what Id be looking up, unless up looking up stuff for funzies) and they are generally speaking solid primary and secondary sources.

Goodshape

Trust is a strong word.

I respect it for what it is and it's become an integral part of any knowledge-finding I need to do but I would be sure to double-check any 'sensitive' information I come across.

I do really like it though, I think it's one of the best examples of the Internet being used right. And any article on there that's worth a damn will have it's sources and references stated - so double-checking isn't usually too difficult.

I have come across a few glaring errors, usually obvious vandalism, though I am often impressed with the speed and persistence with which they are corrected.

A true Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy really... often inaccurate it may be but it is, at least, slightly cheaper than the alternative.

aidan_walsh

According to Jimbo Wales (in an article on Aaron Swartz's blog) the impression most people have of who writes Wikipedia is inaccurate.

http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/whowriteswikipedia

"The idea that a lot of people have of Wikipedia," he noted, "is that it's some emergent phenomenon -- the wisdom of mobs, swarm intelligence, that sort of thing -- thousands and thousands of individual users each adding a little bit of content and out of this emerges a coherent body of work." But, he insisted, the truth was rather different: Wikipedia was actually written by "a community ... a dedicated group of a few hundred volunteers" where "I know all of them and they all know each other". Really, "it's much like any traditional organization."

The difference, of course, is crucial. Not just for the public, who wants to know how a grand thing like Wikipedia actually gets written, but also for Wales, who wants to know how to run the site. "For me this is really important, because I spend a lot of time listening to those four or five hundred and if ... those people were just a bunch of people talking ... maybe I can just safely ignore them when setting policy" and instead worry about "the million people writing a sentence each".

So did the Gang of 500 actually write Wikipedia? Wales decided to run a simple study to find out: he counted who made the most edits to the site. "I expected to find something like an 80-20 rule: 80% of the work being done by 20% of the users, just because that seems to come up a lot. But it's actually much, much tighter than that: it turns out over 50% of all the edits are done by just .7% of the users ... 524 people. ... And in fact the most active 2%, which is 1400 people, have done 73.4% of all the edits." The remaining 25% of edits, he said, were from "people who [are] contributing ... a minor change of a fact or a minor spelling fix ... or something like that."

Smellyirishman

I generally use Wikipedia to get a basic grasp of something or get a quick description. Mostly technical terms but a variety of other things too. For this purpose, it's fantastic, it's hard to bull about facts (and they are easily corrected). However, any opinions or tangents are generally ignored. So with respect to my usage, yes I trust Wikipedia. Of course, it is not the only place I consult.

jdivision

I wouldn't trust anything on wikipedia and neither should anybody else. It can provide accurate information but most entries I've read are biased, particularly those related to politics. If you do use it always seek a better source for confirmation afterwards

Feral Mutant

Goodshape wrote:

A true Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy really... often inaccurate it may be but it is, at least, slightly cheaper than the alternative.

Wikipedia is perfect, reality is sometimes inaccurate.

Rb

Wouldn't trust it as a referencable source, but it does make for some interesting reading.

Kwekubo

As a rule I never use any one site as my sole source of information, but I tend to use Wikipedia as my starting point. As long as you use Wikipedia intelligently you'd be hard pressed to find another site with such a wide breadth of info, and with links to corroborating sources.

Ruu_Old

I use it for computer and techie related topics which would be fairly easy for me to go through and pick out what looks funneh.
It does provide plenty of reading as mentioned.

biko

Is it that time of year already ?
And sure, you can use it to start with but not any single source on the net is enough these days, unless it's a proper site (cnn.com, .gov or such).
Particularly since pretty much anyone can alter the wiki page.

Mr. Presentable

I use it occasionally, but it's written by idiots like me so I don't trust it. I also don't trust statements by others who cite it as their reference.

There are surely thousands of well informed contributors to Wiki, but as anyone can make an input it can never be "qualified".

NoDayBut2Day

I use it to gain a little background knowledge before beginning actual research. For the most part, I trust it to an extent.

Dave!

I usually use it as a starting point or to get a quick understanding of something. Then I'll start googling for other websites and incorporate their information into my understanding. The more sites I read the less likely I'll have wrong information. Then I move onto books and read a few of them.

eg. I'm trying to understand the Middle East better at the moment. I've read a load of wikipedia articles about Israel, Lebanon, Palestine, colonisation, the various wars, the various militant groups, various personalities... Then I googled for a few websites on the subject and got about 5 or 6 different timelines and a few articles, so I read through them. Now I'm alternating between 2 books - a general history of the Middle East, and a book on the 6 day war.

Thus, by the end of all this reading, I will hopefully have some insight into what the f*ck is going on and why!

zuutroy

It was proven to be more accurate for science articles than Brittanica by an independent study which was published in one of the worlds best journals.

Black Swan

Trust Wiki? LOL! "To err is human!" An open source for compounding errors...

Dudess

zuutroy wrote:

It was proven to be more accurate for science articles than Brittanica by an independent study which was published in one of the worlds best journals.

Interesting. I wouldn't mistrust it, since it's monitored and generally well written/edited. However I wouldn't rely on it alone either. Good as a starting point. A major concern is that, even though it's monitored, there might be a considerable amount of time before errors are spotted. I looked up Clint Eastwood on it yesterday and there was a big section with a load of incomprehensible waffle written by some nutter. Deleted today though.

Boston

zuutroy wrote:

It was proven to be more accurate for science articles than Brittanica by an independent study which was published in one of the worlds best journals.

Yea, but brittanica isn't exactly a place most professionals would look for (or publish their) articles in.

Capt'n Midnight

yeah it's a great place to start, and yes there is quite a lot of wiki vandalism

http://uncyclopedia.org/wiki/Wikipedians

“Hisss! Nasty Wikipedianses! Try to hurtses Gollum! Uh, I mean...Oscar. Wilde, that is."

Wikipedians may truly be considered Gods on Earth. As they edit articles, the ideas in their head pass from fiction to fact. For example, rainbows were originally black until 1978. They are still black, but thanks to wikipedia we all generally agree to say that they are multicoloured. Wikipedians rarely abuse their power.

The_Minister

I would use it to grasp the basic concepts that I do not undestand, or to give myself a basic knowledge of a subject. Never more than that. I would use it to discover what a troll was etc.
I would never trust it for politics - look at the PD page, and you will see that it is biased against them.

Dudess

LiouVille wrote:

Yea, but brittanica isn't exactly a place most professionals would look for (or publish their) articles in.

Yeah, I remember when I was 19, I used the World Book (similar to Britannica) as a reference for a college essay. The lecturer who was correcting it didn't even try to hide the fact that he thought I was an idiot.

zuutroy

LiouVille wrote:

Yea, but brittanica isn't exactly a place most professionals would look for (or publish their) articles in.

Ehh what? Scientists compared two encyclopedias, wiki and britannica, and found wiki to be more accurate. What does it have to where people publish?

zuutroy

Dudess wrote:

Yeah, I remember when I was 19, I used the World Book (similar to Britannica) as a reference for a college essay. The lecturer who was correcting it didn't even try to hide the fact that he thought I was an idiot.

Nothing wrong with it really. It's just assumed that if it's in World Book or the likes then it's common knowledge and the reference wouldnt be required.

InFront

Tbh if you're using wikipedia or even brittanica for your college essays, then you probably don't have a very deep insight into the material, and you're not likely to get it from either of those places either.

Whatever happened to specialist textbooks and journals?

Boston

zuutroy wrote:

Ehh what? Scientists compared two encyclopedias, wiki and britannica, and found wiki to be more accurate. What does it have to where people publish?

Neither are particularly respected in scientific communities is what I mean. Their grand for light reading or whatever, but you wouldn't reference them in anything serious. They are what they are basically.

It's just assumed that if it's in World Book or the likes then it's common knowledge and the reference wouldnt be required.

That's not it at all. You'd never get thought less off for referencing something, but you would for using an unreliable source.

Boston

InFront wrote:

Whatever happened to specialist textbooks and journals?

I use journals all the time, and specialist textbooks. Trinity(as do all colleges I'd imagine) spends millions in subscriptions to journals.

zuutroy

LiouVille wrote:

Neither are particularly respected in scientific communities is what I mean. Their grand for light reading or whatever, but you wouldn't reference them in anything serious. They are what they are basically.

ah ha!...now I get you. Although I always thought the old World Books were seen as fairly resepcted. For an undergrad project, I wouldnt mind someone using them.

LiouVille wrote:

That's not it at all. You'd never get thought less off for referencing something, but you would for using an unreliable source.

See above. I think they're seen as reliable Again at undergrad level I'd have thought the lecturer would be complaining about the use of it where its not required rather than its lack of respectibility.

zuutroy

LiouVille wrote:

I use journals all the time, and specialist textbooks. Trinity(as do all colleges I'd imagine) spends millions in subscriptions to journals.

Me too....I wonder if the day will ever come when some weighty journal has and article that has Wikipedia as a reference!

Dudess

InFront wrote:

Tbh if you're using wikipedia or even brittanica for your college essays, then you probably don't have a very deep insight into the material, and you're not likely to get it from either of those places either.

Whatever happened to specialist textbooks and journals?

I was a very immature 19-year-old. And it was 1997 so I wouldn't have been using Wikipedia. Looking back, I agree with the lecturer. It was basically unbridled laziness on my part: **** going to the college library. That means having to actually look through books. Just drag the World Book off the shelf in my parents' good room. Silly, silly girl I was.

Boston

Never going to happen. Unless wiki changes completely. all the respected journals have strict requirements and review boards and all the rest. The Co-opt approach to knowledge wouldn't be thought highly of. When you say something in a journal article you ahve to back it up with proof(experimental results for instance). That proof is checked and rechecked before the article is published.

Sad Professor

I love wikipedia! Is it reliable and trustworthy? Absolutely not, but that funnily enough is what I appreciate about it. The fact that anyone can change it and the constant revising that takes place as a result makes the talk/discussion pages fascinating reading, especially on controversial/political issues. And while I know strict objectivity is still the goal of most wikipedia editors, being able to also read all the opinion/spam/deleted stuff greatly aids my understanding of something, I find.

Being able to look into this process and contribute to it is what makes wikipedia so important IMO.

1huge1

For the most part I trust it but a lot of times there if evidence of biased opinions

3greenrizla's

I just wikeed (if thats a word) wikipedia, and not too far down the page it said

There has been controversy over Wikipedia's reliability and accuracy, with the site receiving criticism for its susceptibility to vandalism, uneven quality and inconsistency, systemic bias, and preference for consensus or popularity over credentials. Information is sometimes unconfirmed and questionable, lacking the proper sources

so no I wouldnt trust it 100% but as others have said it is a good starting point.

mloc

taking it as what it is, an encyclopedia, i think its as close to ideal as you can practically get.

what you use it for, on the other hand, is limited by the fact that it is an encyclopedia. I wouldn't use any sort of encyclopedia for college work. That's what journals and academic textbooks are for.

vesp

ronoc wrote:

I wuldn't trust it as far as I could throw it.

I agree. How could anyone trust something which is written by people who peddle propoganda ? I remember reading articles on it once which only people like real IRA hardliners could agree with. Wiki has no credibility and nobody uses it nowadays .

aidan_walsh

nobody uses it nowadays

To paraphrase a certain well known internet figure, oh really? I've lost count of the number of times a Wikipedia article was referenced on internet forums, and telling people to look something up there has become almost as common as telling people to reference Google.

Saying that it has no credibility isn't entirely accurate either - if you read back over the posts here you'll see there is a very visible divide on people's opinion on it based on what they're looking up.

sceptre

Dudess wrote:

Yeah, I remember when I was 19, I used the World Book (similar to Britannica) as a reference for a college essay. The lecturer who was correcting it didn't even try to hide the fact that he thought I was an idiot.

As encyclopedias go, Britannica's a little more respected than World Book, the latter being primarily written for ten year olds.

vesp

vesp wrote:

nobody uses it nowadays .

Lol

rogue-entity

I trust the content on wikipedia as much as I would trust what someone tells me. It is great for findout general information and facts, but, they are not guarenteed to be accurate. So for any research project, I will look it up in Wikipedia to get an idea, and then follow the reference links and cite those as my sources. What I like best is how articles are improved upon and updated, often with good citations and reference links.

Hobbes

vesp wrote:

I remember reading articles on it once which only people like real IRA hardliners could agree with. Wiki has no credibility and nobody uses it nowadays .

Wikipedia is supposed to have a neutral point of view on all its documents. So if that wasn't the case you can either edit it or add to the discussion of the page.

It is hard to notice the amount of work put into just one page. Steorn for example, I watched that when it was a couple lines of text, to a press release, to a full investigation of what was going on. In between all that there was various vandalism, non-npov, fake information put in. But all was checked.

Also the level of moderation is quite high. For example anytime boards.ie mentions wikipedia the Pat Kenny article gets vandalized and reverted shortly afterwards.

Anyway, no an article in Wiki shouldn't be taken as gospel always check the citations. But also always check the discussion as well, as it can tell you a lot of the parts that may be non-NPOV or causing issues.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Penny_Arcade_comic-20051216h.jpg

smallpaws

I love wikipedia, but probably not as much as I love the Onion's take on it:

Wikipedia Celebrates 750 Years Of American Independence
Founding Fathers, Patriots, Mr. T. Honored....





http://www.theonion.com/content/node/50902

It's like anything, really, you have to check your facts in other sources and use your best judgment.

Rabies

I wouldn't use just Wiki for a research project or something else important. Multi sources and compare.
For general basic info I wouldn't have problem.

Dr_Teeth

Mordeth wrote:

I was googling for something, and the google results page contained a few sentences that I didn't see when I opened the main wikipedia page..

kind of changes the whole tone of the piece

current wiki version
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_Peters

cached version

http://209.85.129.104/search?q=cache:YApHiKXTBmkJ:en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_Peters+joan+peters&hl=en&gl=ie&ct=clnk&cd=1&client=firefox-a


whatever people open that page (or any other) are just getting basically propoganda for whatever side of the argument... really it's absolute bollocks..

I don't see anything wrong with the current page. It states a few facts, mentions her book was controversial and links to a page which discusses it in detail, which is the right thing to do.

TerrorFirmer

I have always found it to be very accurate when I am using it for historical purposes, which is almost on a daily basis.

I've spotted one or two small mistakes but nothing that would sway my general opinion of the articles. It's a good and for the most part very reliable source.

Dudess

sceptre wrote:

As encyclopedias go, Britannica's a little more respected than World Book, the latter being primarily written for ten year olds.

Yeah, I used to love it at that age! In fact, come to think of it, the World Book provided my sex education! (it was Ireland, it was the late 80s - dark, dark days)

Zombrex

I love wikipedia to bits. Want to find out about something, anything, you can be sure there will be a wikipedia page on it, everything from pornstars real names (and birthdays) to Quantum Mechanics

As someone else said it is like knowing someone who knows (or thinks they know) a bit about everything. I would trust it as much as I would trust the information I from people on this website about video games or the English football leagues (for example).

I would never ever use Wikipedia as a source in anything important I'm writing, and I agree 100% with schools and colleges who ban it as being used as such. It cannot be trusted as a reference, and no one should use it as such. As Rabies says, multi-sources and compare. But once you realise that, it is great.

One interesting side effect of Wikipedia is that it has also caused people to look at the more serious encyclopedias to see if they are that perfect a source of material. And surprise surprise, while they can be good, they can also contain factual errors, and mistakes.

Because you are never sure if you are reading bullsh!t, Wikipedia makes you go to the source of something if you need to reference it seriously or learn more about it. That is a good thing! And something people should have been doing with the traditional encyclopedia instead of putting all the trust in them alone.

smallpaws wrote:

I love wikipedia, but probably not as much as I love the Onion's take on it:

LOL .. brilliant ... the Onion is the best