wikipedia, the truth or disinformation

I see many people on this forum often referring to wikipedia as being their source of information.

Please be advised that anyone can create a wikipedia account and edit information as they please... yes wikipedia tries to control the editorial progress by saying things like :

Inappropriate changes are usually removed quickly, and repeat offenders can be blocked from editing. If you add new material to Wikipedia, please provide references. Facts that are unreferenced are routinely removed from the encyclopedia.

But the references they want, is simple links to other webpages, quotes from books etc. Providing the information and credibility to the edits you make or the subjects you write about.

In general, the most reliable sources are peer-reviewed journals and books published in university presses; university-level textbooks; magazines, journals, and books published by respected publishing houses; and mainstream newspapers

This litteratly means that anyone capeable of making a few websites, getting a story in a paper and so on, with information on a subject could get their edits and writing on that subject, accepted in wikipedia as a fact.

So please do not look at wikipedia as the only true source of information, there are several incident where people have done so and failed. Also people have been harrased in wikipedia.
So be carefull and investigate more before you see "the truth" in wikipedia.

exambles:

Founder admits to serious quality problems
A false wikipedia biography
list of wikipedia problems

Many medias have already covered this problem aswell as schools, where students fail when citing from wikipedia.

More Problems with this can be found on the net and in newspapers all over.

I hope that this will lead to more investigation when trying to find actual facts on the internet, instead of having people citing wikipedia as the absolute truth.


[edit on 3-12-2007 by Bluess]

reply to post by Bluess


Wikipedia can have any level of truth and disinfo as its an open user generated information center.

Granted, companies definitely edit not-so-friendly content to make them look better. In general, there's a lot of missing information.

So I wouldn't necessarily call it disinfo rather than lack of info, which could be worse.

The whole story is never played out on wikipedia as the user typically has an agenda.

Make an edit on the page of the Federal Reserve, citing criticisms.


Bet you anything you'll find your edit erased within 5 minutes.

On Wikipedia it doesn't matter about the truth too much, what matters is what 'notable' sources have to say about it. If those notable sources are telling the truth that is just a bonus. I think in this regard they are kind of right, because in a lot of areas there is no truth (an example exception being something like 2+2=4 (although I bet someone will try and argue that)), only what the notable people say is the truth.

For the most part when Wikipedia is wrong, or does something wrong it is actually our fault, because it's written by the people.

There are some exceptions for this though, that are getting worse as time goes on, like businesses or other entities editing it for their own gain.

There is also another side, and that is the 'cabal', essentially a loosely based group who control the wikipedia in many ways. For example if you or I send in 50 people to win a vote somewhere, then that will be seen as bad, however the cabal do this all the time, through their IRC chatrooms and other tools. The way they would get away with this, is because they are all known admins/editors, we couldn't get away with that, because they will refuse to count the votes because they come from anonymous/new users. The cabal also are masters at wiki-lawyering, basically (ab)using the policies to stop people they disagree with, however if you or I wiki-lawyer, they will not allow that. The cabal get away with a lot of double standards like this.

It's things like this that cause people to label Wikipedia "The largest online role playing game"

All that said, Wikipedia is very useful, and often does have good information, I just make sure it is never my only source.

I have to agree with the above poster. I was part of a project group that was working on improving and creating articles in our specific subject area. An alleged account specialist jumped into our completely unrelated project and start nominating articles for deletion (via the AfD process). He was nominating an upwards of 200 or more a DAY. His group of friends would start voting not notible, ignoring awards given, reviews, interviews, etc. His group literally overwelmed the process. It basically destroyed the project.

Wikipedia = Bad Encyclopedia

I wouldn't rely on anything posted at that site.

reply to post by Bluess


This is how people who deal in mis-information work, they change lines here or lines of source there, If one Site like Wikipedia can allow edits in their Works then their Source or Base infomation becomes suspect? Everyone on the info-highway wants clean, correct, source we can go to like students, layman, Moms And Dads. Thanks