Article: 'Wikipedia is worthless and damaging'

In Soviet Union you could find very good books and articles on non-controversial subjects like mathematics, basic engineering, or chess theory. It doesn’t mean that everything else wasn’t a lie, or that most of the truth wasn’t suppressed.
The same with Wikipedia.
The same, I dare say, with the modern derivative of “universal suffrage” that is still aggrandized as the “best possible” social structure, in spite of its total and obvious failure.

I find it really useful as a baseline to know what questions to ask to get more specialised information on subjects am not familiar with. Yes one should be cautious on believing any single source. After all would you trust Hadley on climate studies without reservation?

i did an experiment many years ago on a well used news site where i would post increasingly obscure incorrect information. It was always corrected by someone the longest period was 2 days before correction. So i have full faith if anyone posts nonsense on any well used site it will be corrected or if blocked another voice will appear on another site.

It is becoming a sort of Inquisition.
A lot of people involved with organized skepticism (e.g. those who run Skepticon) probably see nothing wrong with it, as it supports their views and paradigms quite nicely. They would be honestly surprised and ask, “What’s the big deal with Wikipedia, they’re doing GOOD for the world. And besides, what are YOU doing for the world?”
Organized skeptics tend to be mostly atheists, rationalists and materialists (i.e. brain and mind are one). I don’t dismiss those views, there is nothing wrong with them, and there is evidence to support them.
But you can see where the fanatical versions of those views will lead: trust only those with materialist credentials because anything else is superstition. So because A is false, (sometimes an assumption) B must be true (because A is at war with B). Because religion is bad, atheism is good. Because the religious right are AGW deniers, the atheist left must be AGW proponents. Fallacies galore.

Wikipedia is quite useful but only when used intelligently. The sources listings at the bottom are generally great timesavers in finding reputable information. And finding out whether there is controversy about an article is easy, click the talk page. You can find the alternate view there fighting the good fight to fix the bias.
It’s also useful in ways that are not generally appreciated. For instance, it functions as a pretty good translating dictionary. In the left hand column, you can find the same article in the other language versions of Wikipedia. A click there and you can get the appropriate name in one of several other languages. As the non-english versions grow, the translating dictionary gets better.

Curiously, Wikipedia lacks an entry for the Murray Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect.
Wikipedia is untrustworthy because it explicitly refuses to be guided by a search for truth, and furthermore it cultivates a disdain for the very idea of truth. The whole is governed by an adolescent ethos that colors every topic area, engendering innumerable distortions and perversions of the truth that persist merely because they’re au courant.
Wikipedia’s fundamental contradiction is this: it appeals to a rebelliousness of spirit and an idealistic egalitarian notion that everybody is an authority on some little thing; however, the only exercise of intellectual authority that Wikipedia fully condones on its pages is the citation of an authority published elsewhere. There is no maturation, no development of intelligence, no path towards wisdom. The Wikipedia knowledge-function remains locked in a perpetual adolescence, forever rebelling against what it must inevitably become, in short, one might say it’s a travesty of the commons, a pastiche of all human knowledge.
What Wikipedia does best–aggregating keywords and references for further searches–can be and has been done pretty well by robots. Unless it radically alters its raison d’etre, it risks becoming a joke that nobody finds amusing.

Wikipedia wears dozens of different hats, quite well. A relative few, it wears as hoodwinks.
I would not go along with trying to ‘take down’ or denounce the big Wiki, ‘across the board’, though I’ve been actively resisting various of its foibles, for many years.
A more serious fundamental issue with the Wiki phenomenon, is the reemergence of the old ‘lumpers & splitters’ battlefront, which divided & discredited science in the past. There are several other systemic problems; some persistent, others transient.
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Many websites – such as eg Whats Up With That – could benefit from being more like the Wikipedia website, in certain ways.
WUWT, eg, contains a great amount of information, but despite efforts by Mr. Watts and his helpers, vast realms of content live silent, invisible lives in the Library basement and outlying warehouse. Stuff just does not make it to the public eyeballs.
The classic wiki-wiki is very good at ‘leveling’ content-visibility & accessibility. Its weakness is, it does so at the cost of all organizational (hierarchical, etc) structure. In recent times, Wikipedia has robustly expanded their Category system for providing structure to associate related content.
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I would say, that more valuable than a new Climate Organization (as recently tabled), would be exploration of new structuring & presentation techniques, aimed at better-‘revealing’ what is already in the possession of WUWT, et al.

I never read a Wikipedia article without at least scanning through the “Talk” page. It’s almost better than the article at times. Or at least entertaining. 🙂

My anecdotal comments certainly aren’t research, but… if the topic is not so controversial, then I find wikipedia to be a great place to learn… given the sting of the hot-topic edits and rewrites, I seldom admit that any of my information is sourced from wikipedia, lest I be ridiculed for using it. The other day, I collected lists of CAGW-damning quotes from CAGW-authorities (like Ottmar Edenhofer, IPCC official: “we redistribute, de facto, the world’s wealth by climate policy” and “This has almost nothing to do with environmental policy, anymore.”) I found that some of the internet’s lists were quoting sources out of context. I expended about half an hour on one case, and as I was finishing up on what really happened, I stumbled across the wikipedia entry on the subject, and found it to accurately deal with the misquote. I need to follow “Scotty the Red”, who advises that users read the ‘talk’ pages of wikipedia as well as the central article – that, probably, will alert the user to how controversial the topic may be. My advice is that you should read the wikipedia article on the subject as part of your first-pass research, take notes from all of the sources (not just those mentioned in wikipedia), and then independently research those notes… Several times now, my habit of avoiding wikipedia has caused me to waste a considerable portion of time doing my own searches, only to find (later) that wikipedia had already summarized and indexed all the sources that I found by myself. Topics that are ‘cold’, politically, like the definitions of units-of-measure, and physical constants, all seem to be well represented in wikipedia entries.

Alberto Zaragoza says:
April 29, 2014 at 2:17 pm
PS: that’s about the English-language version. The Spanish one is still rambling about the hyperinflation in Zimbabwe – which just happened to end five years ago.

I also found the Spanish version of wikipedia more biased that the English one.
If you look for tantalum in the Spanish version (tantalio), in the production section says:

Producción
El tantalio se extrae del coltán (columbita + tantalita) cuyo mayor productor es la República Democrática del Congo, con cerca del 80% de las reservas mundiales estimadas.

(It says that the main producer is the Democratic Republic of Congo.
If you go to the English version, it says that:

The primary mining of tantalum is in Australia, where the largest producer, Global Advanced Metals, formerly known as Talison Minerals, operates two mines in Western Australia, …

And for Congo it says:

Coltan, the industrial name for a columbite–tantalite mineral from which columbium (i.e. niobium) and tantalum are extracted,[34] can also be found in Central Africa, which is why tantalum is being linked to warfare in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (formerly Zaire). According to an October 23, 2003 United Nations report,[35] the smuggling and exportation of coltan has helped fuel the war in the Congo, a crisis that has resulted in approximately 5.4 million deaths since 1998[36] – making it the world’s deadliest documented conflict since World War II. Ethical questions have been raised about responsible corporate behavior, human rights, and endangering wildlife, due to the exploitation of resources such as coltan in the armed conflict regions of the Congo Basin.[37][38][39][40] However, although important for the local economy in Congo, the contribution of coltan mining in Congo to the world supply of tantalum is usually small. The United States Geological Survey reports in its yearbook that this region produced a little less than 1% of the world’s tantalum output in 2002–2006, peaking at 10% in 2000 and 2008.[31]

Some people still want to keep alive that silly urban legend that says that the Congo civil war is our fault because we need that Tantalum for our mobile phones.