In university my entire dorm floor was in on insisting to my ex that it wasn’t “Big Bird”, but instead “Big Bert” (as opposed to regular sized bert)
It came up for the 100th time at a party, and I was like “go ahead, look it up” and was able to get in an edit JUST before the page load. “Big Bird (Or “Big Burt” for Canadian rebroadcast)”
It lasted for maybe 20 seconds, but it was all we needed.
And than there is the fake toaster inventor who only got found out nearly a decade later because the thought the joke got out of hand
Censorship sucks, giving credit rules.
Good stuff. I’ll switch it
Very cool of you to do so!
It’s the right thing to do, unless there’s an obvious reason as to why it’s censored
A problem with Wikipedia is that experts are not allowed to contribute to their areas of expertise because they’re “biased”. I know a professor at a top university who used to spend his free time editing Wikipedia outside of his specific area but in his broad area of expertise as a method of disseminating science knowledge to the public. When the higher-up Wikipedia editors found out who he was, they banned his account and IP from editing.
Having the lay public write articles works when expertise isn’t required to understand something, but much of Wikipedia around science is slightly inaccurate at best.
Can you share the author/topic?
Wikipedia welcomes expert contributors, but people editing articles about themselves is a big no-no. You’re also not allowed to do promotion of your pet theories, even if you’re “expert”.
I can’t without doxxing myself more than I’d like. It wasn’t an article about himself, nor his research. This was about 10 years ago, so the rules may have changed. I’ll take a look and edit my post accordingly if so.
Things appear to have changed; thanks for drawing my attention to that. I may start editing some articles in my broader area.
Nah fuck this attitude, if you ever tried to use Wikipedia for an actual research project you’ll know how dubious those “”“sources”“” can be.
It’s actuslly an exercise one of my TA friends sets for students when they’re just learning to research things properly. She gives them a claim on Wikipedia and and asks them to find the primary source for it. So they end up spending hours following chains of citations, until they are checking out old books from the library to try and find excerpts that some blog post that was cited in a paper that was cited in a newspaper, that was cited in a different blog post that was cited in another news article that was cited by Wikipedia claims exists, just to find out it doesn’t.
But seriously, don’t take Wikipedia seriously unless it cites a primary source directly.
In this day and age, where newspapers will publish any bullshit dictated by their corporate / billionaire owners, and any idiot can publish a book, how do we know the sources themselves are even valid? Like just because it’s physically printed doesn’t make it any more true.
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You’ll regularly find a link to a secondary source that contains a reference to a primary source. If you just want generically available historical, scientific, or broadly epistemological knowledge, its great. If you want an on-the-ground testimonial from an eye-witness, it may give you the start of a breadcrumb trail towards your destination.
That said, the bias endemic to Wikipedia is largely a product of its origins - primarily English, western media focused, heavily populated by editors from a handful of global north countries. If you want to learn about the history of a mayoralty in Saskatchewan going back to the 18th century, its a rich resource. If you want to find out the political valence of the major political parties of Nepal or Azerbaijan, you’ll find a much thinner resource.
Some of that is a consequence of the editors (or absence of them) around a particular topic. Some of that is a consequence of the moderators/admins graylisting or outright blacklisting sources. Newer sources - 404media, for instance - aren’t tracked while older sources that have changed management significantly and lost some of their trustworthiness - WSJ, CBS, National Geographic, as recent examples.
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Let’s see some please.
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That’s not bs though. That’s just an omission of some information that you feel passionately about. You could become an editor and add the missing information.
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If it’s so big. Fix it. If you can’t fix it but proving the facts, it’s not a fact. If you can prove it, and change it, do it. That’s literally what Wikipedia is about
Honestly I think it comes from a misunderstanding regarding secondary sources vs primary ones. Wikipedia, as well as encyclopedias and textbooks, are secondary sources. It’s not good practice to cite secondary sources without primary ones, but a lot of people (namely, teachers) don’t grasp why which leads these sources to get classified as bad.
That, plus Wikipedia is accessible without the usual gatekeeping and money behind what textbooks and encyclopedias have, which adds to the sources “credibility.” Money means marketing, including constant email campaigns targeting people like me trying to validate whatever textbook they’re peddling. (And in case you wonder if they’re evil, they sometimes offer kickbacks to adopt their expensive textbooks for my university classes).
Fedi users already get that, though, as that’s a common problem FOSS usually has. Point is, wiki lives in a weird place because no, you shouldn’t cite it just like you shouldn’t cite textbooks, but yes, it’s perfectly valid so long as you check those sources. And, speaking from experience, some students really don’t understand as I see citations for so much worse.
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Oh, snap, it is so on!
Very clear.
Secondary examples include:
Dictionaries, Encyclopedias (also considered tertiary);
Tertiary examples include:
Dictionaries and Encyclopedias (also considered secondary);
They do have a handy table later though:
| Primary | diaries - world war |
| Secondary | biography - world war |
| Tertiary | encyclopedia - world war |
Wasn’t arguing I just posted the link to source from the wiki article like my teachers would have wanted 😜
I’m on the fence about not citting primary sources. And especially in the sciences, where it’s actually the slow, boring, long process of many publications and many datat sets coming together to conclude something 'in the aggregate '. Like I’ll usually go to a review or meta analysis paper as a citation, because it’s combining and comparing the results across studies.
And really, a living document like Wikipedia is more like that kind of review or meta analysis paper.
I’m not disagreeing that were taught to go for primary sources, but in some ways, they’re actually less reliable than secondary sources if those secondary sources are taking in a a broader collection of primary sources, which something like Wikipedia is.
Actually, are you sure a meta analysis isn’t a primary source? Having worked on one in the past, you’re often having to reanalyze data and the finished product is quite unique.
Even “structured literature reviews” I think count as primary sources, since the author adds to the literature their own perspective and they are generally peer reviewed.
That said, when you cite things professionally, you will often have hundreds of sources. Most researchers, legal scholars, etc., just keep a database of their citations for easy callback. It’s important because at the upper levels, different authors might speak of the same objective findings in two different ways and with two different frameworks, so the aggregate loses that.
It’s not something non-professionals necessarily need to care about, but you do want to train undergraduates on that proper methods so they’re ready if and when they go to graduate school.
I agree that in general meta analysis stands apart, but I brought it up because it’s so often coupled with a deep review of material like a review article would hold. It’s also totally valid to cite a review article as a primary source, but I tend not to prefer this in my writing. My reasons for this are two fold, first, one of my memories was a curmudgeon who insisted on going all the way back through any chain if claims and citations to find, originally source, and reevaluate each claim. And, in doing so, regularly found irregularities and misattributed statements or just straight up mysteries of where the hell someone got something from. Its a pita, but it pays to be detail oriented when evaluating claims a domain has just accepted as table stakes.
This litterally happened to me recently where I was trying to figure out how this, fairly well known author had determined the functional form they were fitting to a curve. And like, three or four citations deep and a coffee with a colleague of theirs later, it turns out “they just made that shit up”.
Back when I was in school they outright censored Wikipedia. Fuck that shit
Same here, but everyone used it by…just siting the sources at the bottom of the page. It was honestly the dumbest logic ever. Professors telling you, you can’t use Wikipedia because anyone can edit it, but being ok with the literal source the Wikipedia article used for its info…just made zero sense.
Wikipedia is wonderful… for most things.
The main demographic contributing to and editing English Wikipedia are young, highly educated white men from western countries. It will portray on average the bias that most of these people espouse. So it will have racist bias, misogynistic bias and pro-western bias.
That said, it’s still probably less misogynistic and less racist and less pro-western than your average outlet, because it filters out some of the most blatant false narratives and propaganda from conservative sources such as FOX.
That’s why I only get my information from lemmy comments that dont cite their sources
I only get my information from Hexbear comrades who share links ;)
When one takes a step back, it’s obvious that our own societies have their own ingrained systemic biases. All our journalists and other writers will have biases that they and us might not even notice are biases, since we believe they’re just fact.
AI datasets have run into this problem plenty of times, for example when government regulation has told insurance companies not to use factors like ethnicity or races in certain calculations, but it turns out that some ended up indirectly doing it anyway since postal codes approximated race in many regions. There are layers to systemic biases.
Just as an anecdotal side note, just this year I found a typo (92 instead of 82) contradicted by a quote attached to the cite reference later in the paragraph, and very easily noticed if one checks.
I only use VPNs so I can’t fix it.
Wikipedia is unreliable for politically controversial topics, I’ve seen multiple articles on the Gaza genocide with specific claims citing fucking Times of Israel with no other supporting evidence whatsoever, Times of Israel has been caught lying more than once and shouldn’t be used as a source at all. Each article is only as good as the sources cited and they’re not all equally well sourced, it is entirely possible to insert false info into articles especially if you’ve got a well funded organization behind the effort, and even if it is eventually caught and corrected it will already have served as useful propaganda for anyone reading the article in the interim.
Wikipedia has major process issues that make it unreliable especially in the long term. Editors are given a ton of power to wield, the process of giving them power is not something the laymen is involved in, once they have power it’s fairly entrenched and hard to remove, and bias absolutely occurs. For the most part the bias is tempered but it is seen more heavily in articles like Gaza, Crimea/Ukraine, Venezuela, war on terror, Autism, transgender issues, war crimes of Japan, articles related to colonalism, articles related to big tech controversies, etc.
It’s something they desperately need to address because the right wing nutjobs are gunning for them and are very well funded. They 100% are going to try to put people into the editorial process or convert people who are already there to swing bias (if this hasn’t happened already). The right wing has managed to do this with the us government, they can and will do it to Wikipedia
I completely agree, though they have an interesting policy where they themselves cannot be a primary source of information but can only quote secondary (news) sources.
The aim of this policy is to stay as impartial as possible, so that a Wikipedia page can link to another page, but not cite another Wikipedia page as a new source.
Great in theory, but the reality is that they remove hundreds of pages of content where the primary sources of that page (usually a news website) is no longer accessible (archive.org or otherwise).
Right-wing news media can therefore win in the longrun by simply keeping their news sources always online and available for Wikipedia to source, since left-wing news media is more likely to have expired links. Overtime this will compound to a right-wing bias.
The best thing for anyone to do therefore is to fund the archiving sites. Archive.org in particular is a crucial piece of news infrastructure keeping Wikipedia balanced.
I registered a domain and wrote an article to try to get a submission through. It worked for a few months, but was removed after that. Very vigilant.
The saddest part is when I was in college we weren’t allowed to use Wikipedia as a source (even if we listed its sources in the works cited) but today citing ChatGPT would be accepted.
but today citing ChatGPT
There is no way that’s true
I do not know about whatever institution the person above is talking about. However where I am at the moment you can use LLMs as a source, the citing of that is long and painful bit you could do it. I should note that it is heavily frowned upon by others to use generative ai, so most people I know use it as a summaryziation tool.
summarization, in case you ever need it in a crossword puzzle
Thank you <3
I’m not sure why this comment is downvoted, it’s not incorrect and also acknowledges that generative AI is a bad source.
Nearly every type of source, no matter how good it is, has an official way to cite it. There are even guidelines on citing in person conversations, social media posts, tiktoks, etc.
People are allowed to cite it, but that doesn’t mean they should be. Especially in an academic setting lol.
imo another big concern is that half the search results are now LLM slop. Someone might be trying to avoid generative AI and still end up citing a slop article that they didn’t realize was AI.
Sources:
https://guides.library.ubc.ca/GenAI/cite
https://apastyle.apa.org/style-grammar-guidelines/citations/personal-communications
Instead of listing the source on wiki, why not just use hard link and avoid wiki to being with?
The point of the lesson is to hide your tracks or show that you’re not completely lazy. Would you just list “library” as a source? They don’t care you use wiki, they care you incorrectly listing sources.
We did. I’m just saying the professors were all like “do not use Wikipedia as a source” but never suggested using the citations from the article nor seemed to notice. I’m speaking strictly on a high level about what was considered an acceptable citation.
Wikipedia pages are synopsis’s and have a viewpoint of the person writing them. You use wiki like a library to find the sources to use and cite.
Why would they suggest and tell you how to “cheat” the system? If you’re not smart enough to realize Wikipedia isn’t a source itself, you are exactly why this lesson needs to be done lmfao.
Wiki would be like asking the librarian what the book is about, then using them as the source, you realize how silly this sounds now yeah?
Ok, fine. I’m not critiquing their directive. Just saying what it was at the time. Ergo, I’m not making the news, just reporting it.
It’s STILL like that. I’m sorry for explaining why they specifically do something.
You wouldn’t use the librarian as a source, but all the books she told you about can be listed. Then write what they said and see if they notice.
Same situation, different era.
The point is that Wikipedia (in theory) doesn’t make any argument about anything. It simply mirrors or summarizes information. Using Wikipedia as a source is somewhat similar to listing “the notes I made during class” as your source. Your source list is not meant to simply list where you got the information from, but actually list the origin of that information.
Citing ChatGPT would definitely not be more accepted than Wikipedia anywhere. You may get away with it, but that doesn’t mean it’s actually accepted.
And then there’s the scots language wiki;
The quotes used in the article sound like something Groundkeeper Willie would say. Im not sure why anyone would take them seriously.
afaik Wikipedia shut down the Greenlandic language version to prevent this exact situation, apparently the language used there was getting very poor
Man why people so mean. I highly doubt he did actual damage
I think this person has possibly done more damage to the Scots language than anyone else in history.
Apart from Christopher Lambert in Highlander.
The famous French Highlander!
Lambert, Lambert, what a prick.
Meanwhile, my cousin and her friend were listed as honorary citizens of our village for a few months.
