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Wikipedia - "I made it up"

The Wiki is really peer review taken to totality. We share information, and it gets criticized, modified by our peers. Poorly supported information is weeded out, well supported information persists and enters our knowledge base.

Thus, the Wiki is a reliable source of knowledge over time, but we must be aware that any snapshot of it may contain worthless and even false information. Lacking a source of guaranteed true information, the Wiki is a very good substitute.

Hans
 
MRC_Hans said:
The Wiki is really peer review taken to totality. We share information, and it gets criticized, modified by our peers. Poorly supported information is weeded out, well supported information persists and enters our knowledge base.

Thus, the Wiki is a reliable source of knowledge over time, but we must be aware that any snapshot of it may contain worthless and even false information. Lacking a source of guaranteed true information, the Wiki is a very good substitute.

Hans
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But then again, Hans, peer reviews can easily be based on peer pressure, and telling your peers what they want to hear, such as happens in universities where peer pressure determines most subjects.

But true skeptics can slice through the bogus to find facts upon which to build foundations of truths, whereas the false skeptics only want what is fed to them and that is acceptable in their peer groups as as to remain groupies within the group and continue in their group faith.
 
Davidjayjordan said:
But then again, Hans, peer reviews can easily be based on peer pressure, and telling your peers what they want to hear, such as happens in universities where peer pressure determines most subjects....
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Apparently you have never been involved in the governance of a university or have a bizarre idea of what "peer review" entails. Or both.
 
Whether or not this chap lied about his qualifications is to me secondary to the accuarcy of his articles......if they were accurate and of a decent academic standard, then frankly i don't care about his qualifications
 
The Wiki can provide references to follow; but is, itself, useless for citation. Any "fact" in an article there can go permanently missing a minute after you cite it. Worse, many bogus topics are in the control of proponents. If you pick a quack topic (acupuncture, homeopathy, chiropracty) you might not realize that it is nonsense.

Wiki has an absurd policy of "neutral point of view." For some reason, the statement that "naturopaths have an education comparable to MDs" is neutral; but saying their education is vastly inferior is not neutral (despite being factual).

Wiki is junk.
 
Brian the Snail said:
I definitively think Wikipedia should be treated with caution. .
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The first article posted stated:
He was unmasked after The New Yorker magazine referred to Essjay's contributions to the site and how he would spend up to 14 hours a day editing, "correcting errors and removing obscenities".
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Someone needs to tell The New Yorker that wiki isn't a reliable source at times.
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Brian the Snail said:
Then again, all sources should be treated with caution.
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Particularly The New Yorker. Another egg-sucking source is Dan Rather. If he doesn't have a fact he pulls one out of his ....you know what.
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In a phone interview with Ryan Jordan his only comment was...
How dare they question my atha*ity!!
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Gene
 
JJM said:
The Wiki can provide references to follow; but is, itself, useless for citation.

snip

Wiki is junk.
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well sure, if you're writing any kind of academic paper then you're hardly likely to use Wiki as a cite. However, on a board such as JREF, wiki can provide a good paragraph or two with which to begin a discussion. I disagree that "wiki is junk" - if it's used incorrectly then it's junk - but that's the fault of the user, not the wiki project.
 
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geni said:
Generaly you should not be citeing encyclopedias.
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School children are often allowed to cite authoritative encyclopedias; but many educators exclude wiki from that. I have never cited an encyclopedia in a publication. However, if I isolated a compound from a plant, I would have no compunction about looking in an encyclopedia (and citing it) so I could state the territory in which the plant grows.

The bottom line on sources, a point Feynman made, is that the more important a fact is, the more important it is to see the original literature.

I wrote "Any "fact" in an article there can go permanently missing a minute after you cite it" and you replied:
geni said:
That depends on how smart you are in citeing:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Cite?page=Egypt
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I am afraid I don't understand your point. For example, when I looked-up naturopathy in 2005 it said "naturopaths are medical doctors" which is wrong. They think they are better than MDs. That claim (to being medical doctors) is no longer (or wasn't last I looked) in wiki. Many of the other grandiose claims remain.
 
andyandy said:
well sure, if you're writing any kind of academic paper then you're hardly likely to use Wiki as a cite. However, on a board such as JREF, wiki can provide a good paragraph or two with which to begin a discussion. ...
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But, that is one of my points- those paragraphs may be gone, or greatly revised, when a person looks them up. That could really confuse the discussion.
 
I don't know what anyone's issue with Wikipedia.

It's not perfect, but on the whole I've found it to be impressively reliable, accurate and fair.
 
Dark Jaguar said:
There does need to be more information on historical stuff, but I hardly see the presense of extensive articles on fiction to be a bad thing. It's not like those articles are pressing against the articles on world war 2, crushing it. People aren't "flipping open the book" so to speak and landing on the page about Mario and Luigi.
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The problem, as I see it, is consistency. Sometimes the information I find useful is not as detailed as the information I find useless. Some areas are too complicated, and others are too scarce. Published encyclopedias usually have some sense of importance that Wikipedia lacks. It seems full of fanboys and amateurs who fancy themselves experts.
 
Psi Baba said:
Examples, please?
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Wikipedia doesn't say anything about itself in the article about worship, and I believe it with religious fervour, so there must be no one here that worships Wikipedia. ;)


I have to agree with those that thingk that this particular event is yet another tempest in a teapot being exaggerated in the media. How surprised can anyone be that someone has falsely represented their credentials? Sadly, it's not like that practice is unknown in the rest of the world and there are enough people involved with wikipedia that this guy is probably not the only lying twit.

The only way I could see this changing someone's opinion on the usefulness of wikipedia is if someone knew so little about wikipedia that they did not know it could be edited by anyone. If you didn't trust it before, this probably doesn't help. If, knowing its nature, you trusted it before, what does this change? It's just one guy...


ETA This is not to say that I think that misrepresenting your credentials is not a big deal. I think catching anyone at that is a pretty good reason to never trust anything that person says again, no matter how contrite they seem. I don't think the media would have thought the story was as exciting if it turned out that a small fraction of the copy-editing done in the Encyclopedia Britannica was done by someone who lied on their resume.
 
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Wiki is a community effort in the sense of 'it takes a village.' What that means is any peer review includes the village idiot. You got to love democracy.

Gene
 
Always be skeptical of what you read. After all, the first book published using the printing press was the Bible.
 
JJM said:
School children are often allowed to cite authoritative encyclopedias; but many educators exclude wiki from that. I have never cited an encyclopedia in a publication. However, if I isolated a compound from a plant, I would have no compunction about looking in an encyclopedia (and citing it) so I could state the territory in which the plant grows.
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Would be more logical to go to a primiary or perhaps secondary source for that information.

The bottom line on sources, a point Feynman made, is that the more important a fact is, the more important it is to see the original literature.
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Never seen a paper calculating the charge on an electron. Generaly I use data tables for that kind of thing.

I wrote "Any "fact" in an article there can go permanently missing a minute after you cite it" and you replied:I am afraid I don't understand your point. For example, when I looked-up naturopathy in 2005 it said "naturopaths are medical doctors" which is wrong. They think they are better than MDs. That claim (to being medical doctors) is no longer (or wasn't last I looked) in wiki. Many of the other grandiose claims remain.
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You cite the version (which is what the cite tool I linked to does for you) Wikipedia keeps pretty much every version of every article that has ever existed.
 
lionking said:
A report in the Melbourne "Age" today about "one of the most prolific contributors and editors" to Wikipedia being not a professor in theology and law but an unqualified 24 year old. He contributed to 20,000 entries using such sources as "Catholicism for Dummies" to correct srticles.

Wikipedia is often used as a source in this forum. Perhaps now it should be treated cautiously - or not used at all!
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i found mistakes in the 2nd article i ever saw on wikipedia. i fixed it only to have waaaay too much debate over a tv show article.

I think the problem with it is determining its accuracy at any given time. things change so much, and ive seen people change articles specifically to troll a forum and no one reverted the entries. it was something silly like 'authentic mexican food contains no cheese'.

Another thing I hate about wikipedia is that they break their own rules ALL THE TIME. the article for GNAA has been up for deletion way more times than allowed by wikipedias own rules, its just that GNAA is a trolling group that hates wikipedia. They have done some seriously famous trolls and so people keep voting to keep it because of that, but mods dont care. encyclopedia dramatica chronicles a lot of stuff on wikipedia that people arent supposed to see.

I dont know if I can paste the address for the votes for deletion page for GNAA (a record 18 friggin times, and deleted depsite no consensus being reached) because it contains the n word, but there is a link in this encyclopedia dramatica article: WARNING NOT WORK SAFE.

http://encyclopediadramatica.com/index.php/GNAA#Wikipedia.2C_YHL

there is the problem of making tons of sock puppets to do whatever you want to wikipedia as well.
 
JJM said:
But, that is one of my points- those paragraphs may be gone, or greatly revised, when a person looks them up. That could really confuse the discussion.
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but that's largely irrelevant. If you're basing your argument on wiki, well then that would be a problem.....but if you're just basing a discussion on it, it really isn't. Indeed, it would be of value to the discussion to ask why it had been edited, and to compare the two versions if they conflicted.
 
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