Article: 'Wikipedia is worthless and damaging'

ShrNfr says:
April 29, 2014 at 11:20 am
I suppose it has to do with the topic, but I agree with Andrew that most topics tend to return to a factual basis over time. Certainly, the ones I have had any participation in were heavily reviewed in a reliable fashion. Those topics were mostly in history, so not much controversy there. Sadly, as is pointed out, other topics tend to take grief at times.
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ShrNfr:
Those who control history control the present. Try reading Wikipedia articles to do with Islamic history, Balkans history, the Crusades, European colonialism, Chinese history etc. I haven’t checked the Armenian Genocide but no doubt that one is highly contentious as well.
For many history articles, including some in the history of science, it is hard to find articles untainted, if not completely warped, by the biases of supposedly NPOV editors. I’ve only edited three articles, but in two cases, it was to correct egregious errors, one concerning the history of the Turbot War on the Nose and Tail of the Grand Banks (1995, Canada vs. Spain and Portugal) and one about a female botanist and entomologist. Just checked back and noted that the turbot war article apparently has ‘multiple issues”. I doubt I’ll bother with it again.

as a repository of DEFINITIVE knowledge – Wiki is pretty poor! But as a general collection of knowledge it’s not too bad. It has to be read the same way as any media item/article – i.e. with complete scepticism and followed by judicial checking and cross referencing before use of any contents by the reader!

Google used to artificially place Wikipedia results on top as a quick and reliable way of dealing with page fraud. Now their algorithms do a much better job of finding and presenting topic-specific specialty sources so I don’t waste time reading Wikipedia and trying to figure out how reliable the content is.

Come on now. Everyone knows Wikipedia is the place where you find track listings for your favorite old record albums. It’s a great resource to look up capital cities, check for celeb birth dates, learn the scientific name for honey badgers, etc. But only an idiot would look for anything more than that. I once did an experiment. I’d noticed that the entry for “Fascism” seemed to look different every time I looked at it. So I started checking it every Monday morning for a couple months. It was shocking how often that page was completely rewritten. The mumbo-jumbo that those yahoos continued to come up with was simply staggering. Wikipedia is often nothing more than a bunch of self-indulgent twits with way too much time on their hands, and way too much worthless education.

Wikipedia is perfectly fine…
as long as there is no need for accuracy

Maybe Wikipedia should get a massive injection of funding from the Koch brothers, along with editorial control over the content. If they don’t do it, a guy like George Soros eventually will.

Steve Garcia – I wasn’t an editor, but what you say sounds familiar. I grew up in the same town as Jon Stewart. (I was older, didn’t know him.) Stewart’s wikipedia entry said that Stewart faced strong anti-semitism in town and at school because it was a WASP-y area. Balderdash, I thought, the town had a 10% Jewish population, many of my friends at school and in my neighborhood were Jewish, and anti-semitism was rarely seen or spoken. So I corrected the entry. But someone immediately reverted it, claiming their citation proved it. I looked at the citation, an interview, it just had Stewart making some jokey comments about his childhood, no mention of anti-semitism. I corrected the article again, it immediately got reverted by someone else. I didn’t care that much, so I let it go.
I do find Wikipedia useful for many things, but any topic that touches on our Secular Religion – feminism, climate change, racism, ‘income inequality’ – is probably going to be useless. Except perhaps as a window on such thinking, though I see enough of that elsewhere.