I'm curious since it seems to be the most quoted and only thing close to research that Veeky Forums uses. Has there ever been times it was wrong? Do pages increase or decrease in value depending on how specific the topic is?
Is Wikipedia Reliable?
Ayden Foster
Thomas Cox
You can check the sources to verify reliability. It's up to you to judge.
Noah Stewart
The formal articles that are reviewed, yes.
But DYOR
Alexander Walker
Many years ago when I was in High School, I was making note cards for an exam and I remember Aaron Burr's middle name being Isuckcocks.
Other than that any validity issues are usually measured by the sources. Some pages are better than others.
Joseph Gomez
It depends on the pages you read.
Gavin Lewis
Check the sources for individual articles. Two articles spring to mind as being particularly ridiculous off the top of my head.
One is an article about persecution of cats in the middle ages. This is not something that actually happened. The only book given as a source is "Classical Cats: The Rise and Fall of the Sacred Cat", by a man called Donald Engels. Engels claims, among other things, that:
>People stopped cleaning their houses because brooms became associated with witchcraft, leading to the Black Death
>Roving gangs of Monks wandered medieval Europe slaughtering women indiscriminately. Their estimated kill count was over two hundred million
>Cats were members of the Catholic Church until they were excommunicated during the Black Death
>People stopped cleaning their houses because brooms became associated with witchcraft
>Celtic Pagans joined forces with the Christians to eliminate cats
>The Catholic Church declared a crusade against all cats but had this wiped from their archives in the 19th century
>All women who owned cats actually were witches
>The Knights Templar were a sect of cat-worshipping pagans
>The Catholic Church engineered the development of feudalism to get rid of cats
It's ridiculous, but any time myself or anyone in my university's history department tries deleting the article it gets put back and we get a telling off, and we're informed that it has to stay up because "the information is in a book, while your refutations are only articles". Which is ridiculous.
The other article is the Battle of the Catalaunian Plains. A large portion of the article is dedicated to the thesis that it didn't actually happen. It's not a serious scholarly argument, it's based on the demented ravings of a Korean medical student. I think the article has actually been cleaned up since then, but at one point things like the context of the battle, and the condition of the forces present had all been deleted to make room for the idea that it didn't happen.
Jack Cruz
Is not the patent absurdity of these claims enough? Do people lack an internal logicometer?
Daniel Brown
Like what pages?
Isaac James
I wouldn't be surpised by some actions that actually do happen. Sometimes it's hard to believe, sometimes it's just as ridiculous as it sounds
Joshua Sullivan
How old are you dear boy?
Lucas Richardson
It's absolutely fine for overviews.
It's also good for finding further sources.
But be wary on controversial topic pages as they're a battleground. However you can always check the Discussion page for each page to see the debate first hand.
Oliver Myers
>denying the Catocaust
Go back to /pol/ you pondlife
Adrian Walker
>it seems to be the most quoted and only thing close to research that Veeky Forums uses.
Which is why Veeky Forums is so historically retarded.
William Ortiz
Noah Sanchez
>Engels claims, among other things, that:
>>People stopped cleaning their houses because brooms became associated with witchcraft, leading to the Black Death
>>Roving gangs of Monks wandered medieval Europe slaughtering women indiscriminately. Their estimated kill count was over two hundred million
>>Cats were members of the Catholic Church until they were excommunicated during the Black Death
>>People stopped cleaning their houses because brooms became associated with witchcraft
>>Celtic Pagans joined forces with the Christians to eliminate cats
>>The Catholic Church declared a crusade against all cats but had this wiped from their archives in the 19th century
>>All women who owned cats actually were witches
>>The Knights Templar were a sect of cat-worshipping pagans
>>The Catholic Church engineered the development of feudalism to get rid of cats
You've got to be kitten me.
Luke Walker
95% of the content is, it's surely not less reliable than other big encyclopedias around
Isaiah Myers
t h i c c
Dominic Sanders
I think Wikipedia is reliable *precisely* because it's free.
Think about. You have millions of articles on virtually all fields of knowledge being written, maintained and updated over a period of a couple of decades by... some interent autists?
There's no vested interests involved with it. It's literally just hobbyists who write articles because they like the topic. When you're doing something for free, it's usually because you're passionate about it.
Henry Ward
I am editor with 12 years of experience on Wikipedia.
I have personally falsified several articles by faking sources(the information attributed to the source is not in the source).
There are several behind the scens groups in Wikipedia that are manipulating articles.
This includes people paid by various governments and organizations.
Also fringe editors have more staying power as they are obsessed about the subject, therefore certain fringe points of view are more represented.
Xavier Ortiz
For a long time there were retarded admins in the English WIkipedia who would not acknowledge on the RSFSR page that Russia still was Soviet up to the 1993 Constitutional Crisis.
Nolan Nguyen
I was part of a group a few years ago who wanted to leverage funding for Scottish Gaelic as opposed to Scots, the language of the Scottish Lowlands
We set up the Scots version of Wikipedia and typed up all the articles in English with phonetic Scottish pronunciation, as opposed to actual Scots vocabulary, showed it to the Arts & Culture guys, said "look, this is basically just English, give us the grant instead" and we ended up getting it. I've seen people all over the Internet use the Scots Wikipedia as proof that Scots isn't a real language. Myself and a few colleagues are basically single handedly responsible for destroying the credibility of the language in the information age, probably dooming it to extinction
I feel a bit bad about it now, mostly because we used the £30,000 we got to produce a few kids books in Gaelic that sold like 100 copies total, and I've actually taken in a bit of an interest in Scots since then
Woops lol
Jason Perry
History's already pretty fucking absurd on its own.
>some screaming Bavarian, a rat-faced journalist, an obese boyfucker, a 'we wuz atlanteans' military LARPer, and a burnt-out former war hero manage to become the democratically elected heads of a government they tried to violently overthrow ten years prior
>the most influential religious head in Europe once put his former boss's corpse on trial
>20-30,000 civilians eaten >strategic Tang victory
>multiple cases of fruit companies staging coups in foreign nations
>two Italian city-states went to war over a bucket
>a fringe messianic cult becomes the largest religion on the planet because an emperor saw a trippy comet
Mason Nelson
Now you need to change all the Scots Gaelic pages to Irish and use it as proof it's not a language in order to save Scots. It's only fair.
John Wood
Wikipedia articles are all over the place in terms of quality. You can't make a blanket statement. FA and Good Articles are typically very high quality. On the other end, you have pages that have no citations and might be made up.
WP is only as good as its citations. If there's none, don't trust it. Question everything. Question every source.
Always try to improve WP as well. Add little {{citation needed}} tags, ask questions on the talk page. Don't feel bad about making edits. Make an account. Get familliar with the rules. The more people editing, the better it will be.
Joseph Flores
Two wrongs don't make a right user
Levi Wright
It should be pretty good for solid facts on historical topics.
If you're looking at it for anything else, run and never look back. Wikipedia editors always have an agenda and they will always try to push it *cough*Ryulong*cough*
Hunter King
>maintained and updated over a period of a couple of decades by... some interent autists
And an infinity of paid shills from literally everybody's PR department, get real.
>When you're doing something for free, it's usually because you're passionate about it.
But being passionate about something doesn't imply any level of rationality or even competence, so it's a pretty moot point.
Leo Turner
The way to go about this woudl be to make a post on the History group first, or another page, and critique the credentials of these two people first. Getting into wars with editors on pages isn't the way to go, but rather Wikiprojects.
Make the case there, and then it will be ruled that they're not reliable sources.
James Bailey
-30,000 civilians eaten >strategic Tang victory
Ryder Kelly
It's as reliable as the sources it provides.
If you get a page full of [Citation needed] then it's as reliable as hearsay.
Also be wary of articles about Turks and Egyptians as those faggots will edit them for nationalism and it will take months for any of the staff to notice. Once saw a battle table for one of the old Ottoman-Syrian conflicts where the Syrian casualties were listed, "Over thousands"
Kayden Cruz
>It's literally just hobbyists who write articles because they like the topic. When you're doing something for free, it's usually because you're passionate about it.
Which makes is very prone to biases of the writers though. Who's more likely to write an in depth article on the life of Stalin, a die hard tankie or someone who has more centred views?
And it's very easy to cherry pick your sources
Jordan Davis
It's not as bad as middle and high school teachers make it out to be, but it's not nearly as good as you would hope either.
And it does vary based on the topic and page. Some pages are highly reliable, other pages are edit wars between people who have a vested interest in those topics and are complete bullshit. Checking sources only helps so much in those cases, because sources will be cherrypicked.
Lincoln Myers
Wikipedia really isn't reliable when it comes to anything slightly controversial, so history and politics are a no-no.
Exhibit A: Fidel Castro is not listed as a dictator, and any attempt to change it back, even with proper citations, gets reverted almost immediately (on top of being a protected article).
Jace Sanchez
Someone who really hates Stalin.
Jonathan Gomez
>Fidel Castro
>Critics view him as a dictator whose administration oversaw human-rights abuses
It's right there.
If you're talking about the dictators page the list is only for people that use dictator as an official title.
Evan Wilson
Yeah, and that's about it. The point is that in the pages of other dictators Wikipedia will immediately say they were dictators in the first sentence, and not just say that "according to some critics".
Do you understand the difference?
Alexander Carter
>the only people writing about stalin on wikipedia are die hard tankies or die hard trotskyists
makes sense
Aaron Nelson
Parker Cox
Cameron Thomas
kinda minor
Jason Price
Most dictators that are listed as dictator are from when dictator did not originally have negative connotations.
For Gaddafi for a modern example,
>He was internationally condemned as a dictator whose authoritarian administration violated human rights and financed global terrorism.
Which is at the bottom of the intro, the last sentence in the 4th paragraph.
Christopher Young
Wikipedia is of course unreliable. You might be able to trust the sources it cites, but you should always keep in mind that even those are usually chosen with a bias.
Cooper Bell
Everything has a bias. It's human nature. There is no such thing as an objective history.
Instead of pursing history through the lens of false objectivity, you should view history subjectively while being conscious of its subjectivity.
Grayson Nelson
Best part about wikipedia other than the edit wars are all the hoaxes that exist/existed on it. Some have even persisted for more than a decade. Hell, the obscure historical article you're reading might be a complete fabrication.
Daniel Murphy
The thing is if no other article links to it, and only people who search for it can find it, not many people are going to see it, say that's bullshit and try to get it deleted.
Mason Peterson
Yes, but that's just the symptom of something bigger.
Yes. Now tell me what Gaddafi and Castro have in common. See what I'm getting at?
Brayden Green
Another problem with Wikipedia that hasn't been mentioned is link rot. Basically the older the article, the higher the probability that the sources it cites no longer exist. Especially a problem if articles cite internet sources, which tons of articles do exclusively. Obviously this isn't much of a problem if the article is on something popular and well known, but the more niche the subject the worse it gets. There's already some articles that don't even have a single extant source and if the source wasn't archived with the wayback machine then the article is essentially unverifiable.
Bentley Gray
There are no doubt good articles on Wikipedia but most articles about WW2 or tanks or Africans aka shit that we talk about on Veeky Forums are not reliable for obvious reasons.
Joseph Sanchez
>Yes. Now tell me what Gaddafi and Castro have in common. See what I'm getting at?
Not really. It doesn't say Gaddafi was a dictator. It says he was internationally condemned as a dictator. That's basically the same thing as critics called Castro a dictator. Both are worded to say that people called them dictators, but avoiding saying they were dictators.
William Harris
What's the most autistic edit war on wikipedia?
Jordan Brown
This. Wikipedia is can be heavily biased, especially in the cases where there may be legitimate attempts at historical revisionism by actual scholars.
Anthony Rogers
Exactly. Now go to any other non-leftist dictator page and see the difference.
Landon Rodriguez
Wikipedia is basically Veeky Forums except archived permanently and used by people as reference.