wikipedia as a source

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I don't own anything except my voice.

[Pirpul]

There was someone who admitted to slowly enlarging one of the us states (I forget which one) and like, 5 minutes later his years of work were reverted.

[EmptyMTYT]

When we were told not to use wikipedia I just did and used their sources

[baintreachas]

the other day I saw a huge error on Wikipedia and when I reloaded it a minute later it was already gone. The duality of mankind

[DKaya-zxnb]

Why does this post look yellow like its an ancient text

[Fuerto]

I'm a teacher. I get asked a lot by friends and family what my view of Wikipedia is.

I usually summarize it as Wikipedia is a lot less reliable than students think it is, but a lot more reliable than adults think is.

[possiblymaddie]

The best way to look at Wikipedia is as a diving board, from which you can jump into any number of Olympic Sized information pools. But you gotta actually dive, not just stand on the board

[flynnbrooks]

Meanwhile there was a guy that kept making Mississippi a tiny bit bigger everday for years until one random kid snitched on him

[moriya]

I was taught in college that Wikipedia isnt a good source because it's a database of other sources. Not explained in grade school

[trianglemoebius]

Wikipedia is *mostly* reliable, but it has some pretty major flaws - it admits this openly, so anyone saying otherwise is saying they know more about the content of Wikipedia, than the people who make most of the content for Wikipedia (policies are decided by a special team consisting of the most dedicated editors).

One of the flaws is that listing sources doesn't mean much if those sources are, themselves, biased. Another is that Wikipedia has a tendency to overcorrect for this by "both sides-ing" arguments way too hard.

[crimsondragon]

The human desire to correct people is quite a powerful force.

[honestwong]

The biggest problem is circular referencing

iirc there's this one guy that faked some history about a town on wiki, the town's website copied that information from wikipedia and referenced wikipedia, then wikipedia referenced that website as a source, and now it's information with a source

once people start using wikipedia as a source these will happen

[Katsewara]

I have followed references on Wikipedia that CONTRADICT the Wikipedia article.

[DistortedHaze]

It’s always important to accept Wikipedia isn’t fully reliable, especially on more recent & political events - the team are people with strong biases which they sometimes allow to trump objectiveness. However, they are still the most generally reliable website on the internet so yeah it’s better to use it than other sites but always good to keep in mind that they aren’t infallible either.

[BloomBlanche]

"People can write anything on Wikipedia" yeah, for like 5 minutes

[xen]

This post was filmed in mexico, but the american film version of mexico

[RandomGuy-uhuu]

Wikipedia is great for cursory glances at things. Like general information on many differing topics, but it can get a bit hazy when doing deep dives. Database access at libraries are a good source for those more intense information if ya can get it.

[EVILBUNNY]

Pretty sure my school was IP banned from editing any Wikipedia page or article and I HIGHLY doubt we were the only institution to receive such honours.

[Patton-wjte]

Two of my friends made themselves the principal and superintendent of our school on there a year ago and it’s still up

[WizardEli]

I got my ip banned cuz i was editing articles, they do not play abt that shit

[dirtydeedsdirtcheep]

That has been screenshoted so much it's becoming one of those old books