Where does Wikipedia rank in terms of humanity's greatest achievements?

The only thing I truly dislike about Wikipedia is how consumerist it is.
There's articles on wars that have maybe a few paragraphs but your favorite band has a 10,000 word article

Wikipedia is absolute trash in terms of its information quality. Taking a bigger picture view of things, it's extremely dangerous for the following reasons:

1. It monopolizes information. It is the second or third Google result for almost any given topic. People wanting to know about X will tend to know what Wikipedia says about X. This means any misinformation in the Wiki article becomes dramatically amplified.

2. It is part of an ever increasing trend that caters to people's curiosity and their unwillingness to navigate complexity or spend lots of time engaging a topic. In this sense it tricks people into thinking that vast, complex topics can be reduced to a few strings of facts.

>"I know that Nietzsche wrote a book called Thus Spoke Zarathustra, that he died trying to save a horse, that he is associated with the phrase "God is dead" and that he is sometimes called a nihilist. Therefore I know about that which the name Nietzsche refers to."

3. It propagates institutional power by reflecting corporate and government interests (such institutions often write their own articles, or edit articles relevant to their interests).

4. It presents political conflicts in terms of the two or three most widely held views, and attempts to achieve a false position of neutrality by giving equal article space to each.

5. Its writers are typically online and gather information from easily available online sources. Listicles and shit-tier web journalists (there are a ton of them) then join the blogosphere in regurgitating this information. The same information then gets recycled, and is accessed in proportion to how prevalent it already is. The easier a certain chunk of information is to find, the more readily it will be reposted, giving a memetic quality to information that does not reflect its actual content.

>it is a great way to find sources

You have no idea how to research do you?

It's biased towards what people are interested in. Expand the wars articles.

How do we fix wikipedia?

Brilliantly said. I'm going to copy and paste this everywhere.

Can't fix what's already perfect.

wikipedia is powerpoint of history

Encyclopedia Dramatica already did

Well, I meant for secondary sources, not primary sources. IIRC wikipedia generally bans primary sources. In my field, I would never use Wikipedia except maybe to find what journal articles other people had considered relevant to a topic, but for layperson surface-level research on a topic, it's fairly solid. Definitely good to cast a critical eye, though.

>4. It presents political conflicts in terms of the two or three most widely held views, and attempts to achieve a false position of neutrality by giving equal article space to each.

This. This is one of the worst things about Wikipedia, and it's not just political conflicts, it's any topic that is remotely politically charged.

If an article has a "Criticism" section, that section will be a war zone for the critics who want every negative thing that was ever said about the topic and write long paragraphs summarizing each source. Then the people who want positive portrayals either delete the info and are accused of censorship, or start finding positive views and add more junk to the article.

A mod or someone is brought in to arbitrate some type of balance so that it looks neutral, and the page ends up having too much info, in the criticism section, and too little info, in every other section, at the same time. Sometimes a whole other article is made for "criticism of...", and that just becomes another battleground for positive/negative views.

All those other points are great too, I've read articles on people or their books/project that sound like it was written by their publicist.

Impossible to say really, will it be lumped together with the rest of the early internet as being a conveyor of readily accessible information? That's the basis for the UN's declaration of Internet access as a human right.

The "wiki" colloquialism will probably have a long life though.

>not posting based Chrysippus

The second point is on spot, great example with Nietzsche: that's literally all I know of him

Great post

It's pretty phenomenal actually. You can access more information with a click than entire generations of scholars would have had at their disposal.

You're way off base and exaggerating things.

1. Just because Wikipedia returns highly in Google search does not mean it has a monopoly on information. Wikipedia's information can be used by anyone else, and there's nothing stopping you from scrolling down. It's like saying McDonald's has a monopoly on fast food because there are more of them out there.

2. And you think a passing interest with some salient facts is inferior to complete ignorance? You think that being able to quickly look up basic facts about a person/place/event is detrimental because it spares you from having to do detailed research? Most curiosity would run out long before anyone got up and drove to library to research something. The user can decided how far into a subject he or she wants to go. You are also over-focusing on subjects pertaining to the humanities. Wikipedia is fabulous for scientific and medical information which has minimal perspective bias. Try and convince me the Wiki entry on special relativity or malaria isn't nuanced and superbly informative.

3. As opposed to what? The rubbish that our universities turn out and call 'scholarly research'? Do you realize how much academic literature is locked behind a paywall today? JSTOR and other sources like it actively retard the dissemination of knowledge, and it is even worse considering that much academic research is publicly funded but unavailable for public inspection (NIH is despicable in this regard). Everyone has an agenda. The advantage of Wikipedia is that it can synthesize multiple sources, rather than being confined to whatever is approved by an institution or the state. There's a reason Wiki is blocked in backwards shitholes like Iran and China.

4. Political conflicts, if they are to be presented at all, should be presented in the manner Wikipedia presents them. What do you mean by false position of neutrality? Would you prefer Wikipedia to be biased towards the political beliefs you personally subscribe to?

This.
The internet is literally gives access to the collective mind of humanity.

5. This is true of information in the digital age in general. Wikipedia is not meant to replace or supplant detailed, careful research into a subject. The function of any encyclopedia is to 'give information on many subjects or on many aspects of one subject'. By making so much information available to such a wide range of people (and in so many different languages) Wikipedia has become in many ways a microcosm of the entire digital age, for better or for worse. Yes, it does cater to those who are indolent and just want to satisfy fleeting curiosity, and yes it has spread a deal of disinformation. But when you consider how factually unreliable and wrought with personal designs most all human productions are, Wikipedia can hardly be called an outlier.

Schopenhauer once estimated that only 10% of recorded history had been accurately recorded.

Translation;

>Wahh no one is taking my holocaust denial """""sources""""" seriously and they keep deleting my edits wahhh.

>implying holocaust affirmation sources are credible

Wikipedia is high school level knowledge at best, obviously not something scientific, but like schools, it's still nice to have around, most people need it before advancing to college level.

So what's the alternative?
I see people sperging out out Veeky Forums whenever you link to Wikipedia for some basic fact that they should have knows since elementary.
But they act smug and never provide any source for what they claim.
What should people use?

Agree 100%. Wikipedia was invaluable during my physics studies and also helps me to grasp basic ideas of concepts outside of my field of study.

I feel like the critiques that many people have against it are nothing more than some kind of educational bourgiousie trying to hold onto their intellectual monopoly.

If you take up the Nietzsche example you can quite easily click your way to linked articles that explain his philosophical positions and impact more in depth.

They don't know either. They would prefer people stay ignorant.

Wrong. It is great even for university tier sciences.

>What should people use?

Books.

>History isn't correct unless I SAY SO

>jumps to /pol/ and holocaust denial even though the original post and literally nothing to do with it
This is the same paranoia that made this board so shit the first month of it's existence. You're probably a butthurt wikifag too.

Is completely right, wikifags will push their political agenda even on articles that have little to nothing to do with politics. I`m glad i left that shithole long ago. It's full of """""""""intellectuals""""""""", faggots who think they're gonna be the "next great wiki admin" and admins who think they're ultra """""""""""intellectuals""""""""""" and god's gift to the world. God damn, there are so many retarded groups of people on that site that if i tried to include all of them in this post it'd be above the character limit.

Thanks for taking the time to read that long post. I just wanted to add a little bit of personal blog since this is the Veeky Forums board.

OUR main problem I think lies in point (2.), which is that our increased access to information has caused us to overestimate our knowledge.

I started realizing this a few years ago when I was in my early 20s. I was never a big reader growing up, but I enjoyed thinking about politics, history etc. I could name drop all day in conversations with peers, but I began to realize I really knew nothing.

I made an effort to start reading and have been fairly successful in building it up as a habit. Looking at Norman Finkelstein's work on the Israel-Palestine conflict was extremely influential. He wrote a critique of "From Time Immemorial" by Joan Peters, a book which looks and sounds like thorough scholarship (lots of footnotes and sources, extended quotes etc.) but he showed by meticulously going through all the footnotes (must have taken him hundreds of hours) that she made a ton of deliberate and fraudulent maneuvers. She connected phrases separated by dozens of pages to create new quotes, she compiled information in overly complex ways that misled the reader, she abused brackets in her quotes, all kinds of dirty tricks.

It made me realize that all the source citations we learned in college actually matter, and it made me keenly aware of what scholarship actually is. Since reading and studying his work, I have not written a single bogus paper, I've made it a general rule to read 50-100 pages for every page I write, and I always read footnotes.

I refuse to read information without knowing the author, and I make sure I learn about a writer before I read their work. I stopped using a smart phone and got out of the habit of Googling.

I don't mean to sing my own praises, I'm just saying you can put in effort and become a better thinker/learner than you are now. It pays off.

Also the information in that post is largely gleaned from this essay by a Buddhism scholar. It can be read here:

acmuller.net/wikipedia.html

I vandalized a Wikipedia article 9 months ago and it hasn't been removed. Even the 1 person who edited the article since then didn't notice it.

Maybe when it turns 1 year old i`ll reveal my epeec ween on /b/ or some shit

Why would you vandalize an article on Wikipedia?

because im a top tier memer

i smile when i think of all the high school essays that got shit hilariously wrong because of my vandalism

I don't that many people care enough about your high school so obviously no one is going to notice it.

>using it for anything else

As shitpost-y as this board sometimes is, I'm really glad this place exists. One of the few boards where people will construct fairly thoughtout arguments to different sides of a given topic, and this thread is no exception.

Namaste, Veeky Forums!

Poo in Loo detected
[spoiler]Namaskar[/spoiler]

Just under the white male. So pretty low.

>read an article
>almost every sentence has [citation needed]

too often people just make shit up to fit their own agendas

There's a lot of low-quality books out there, too.

At least you know who wrote it.