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House Republicans Investigate Wikipedia Over Alleged Bias (www.nbcpalmsprings.com)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[+] -22 points 1 year ago (14 children)

Wikipedia is not accepted by colleges as a reliable source to cite. When you are writing a paper/essay. That should tell you that it isn’t a reliable source for information.

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  • [–] 13 points 1 year ago (5 children)

    It's true that it is not generally accepted for writing a paper or essay, but that does not mean that the information is completely unreliable. While I'm sure that Wikipedia is not perfect with regards to truth, it is more accessible, democratized and readable than many primary sources or peer reviewed articles. Those properties have a lot of value by themselves. Would you not agree?

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  • [–] -5 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    I mean it is comparative to someone saying everything on lemmy is correct because people believe it true. Wiki is a open source so anyone can add to it. Anyone with. Strong opinion or faulty information. Basically just a collection of open source info without regulations.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago

    Nothing stopped someone writing a bogus paper claiming an MMR vaccine causes autism. It being a paper likely gave it undue credit to people who were convinced by it, not that they read it..

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    Right and we also use lemmy, but we still weigh and judge what we read here or at least we should. And we should do the same for Wikipedia, even though I would argue that Wikipedia has higher epistemic standards than Lemmy. The point being, the openness of these platforms is a quality on its own. Wikipedia isn't perfect, but it is far from terrible.

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  • [–] 21 points 1 year ago (5 children)

    That's ridiculous. It's not allowed because it's not a primary source of information. It's a great jumping off point for knowledge and if you need to cite something you can just look through its sources at the bottom of each page.

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  • [+] -22 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    I don’t make the rules for NY colleges.

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  • [–] 25 points 1 year ago

    Their point is that you don't understand why you can't cite any encyclopedia, not just Wikipedia.

    It has nothing to do with the reliability, you just need to cite their source (the primary source) instead of citing the middle man.

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  • [–] 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 child)

    I'm not writing a paper or essay.. so my standards are different.

    Conversely I've tried following a paper to implement an algorithm and suddenly found it used math terms that I couldn't find an explanation for (and unlike the rest of the paper it didn't elaborate shit).

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago*

    I'm not writing a paper or essay.. so my standards are different.

    It actually shouldn’t matter in this case. Wikipedia isn’t a “source” of anything, it simply states facts and backs them with sources (though not always, many articles will have a “missing source” for many paragraphs). It’s also public, so anyone can add things without it being peer reviewed.

    So if you actually care about whether some information is correct, you should check what is the source. And if something is wrong you can do your part and change the text to be more neutral or better phrased. Edits that improve pages are almost always gonna stick.

    In the end it’s all ant’s work to update/fix the huge number of badly written stuff in there.

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