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Seeing something like this, does anyone else worry about Wikipedia like I do?
I'm not just talking about the special agendas that everyone knows are present. Wikipedia is dangerous because it can be changed so fast. Anyone not doing serious research trusts Wikipedia. The facts and content available in an article can change in a split second, with no one checking to see what it said before the change. This is a serious problem because Wikipedia may one day be a definitive source of human knowledge such that anything not mentioned there might as well not exist. I worry this could lead to powerful entities rewriting history in a much more effective way than before, 1984-style changing the story mid-sentence, or article in this case. With books, you have to destroy all the old copies to erase what they said. With Wikipedia, you just have to erase some computer memory. Wikipedia is a potential Library of Alexandria just waiting to be torched.
Many, if not the majority, of university classes ban Wikipedia as a source even at the undergraduate level. It's hardly like only people doing serious research don't know its full of poo. It's in no way definitive, it's simply winning by default as the alternatives at the moment are biased by design, whereas Wikipedia is biased only because it turns out the sort of population willing to spend hours a day working in a 0 barrier to entry popularity contest driven project - without pay... well whodathunk you end up with petulant social media warriors as your primary 'employees' ?
Well put. I laugh anytime someone tries to use them as a reliable source. It's an interesting project but you might as well read the tabloids for all the good it does. At a high level for non-controversial stuff it's handy to get a bit of info or something; but if you're going to cite statistics and the like, you better use a more reliable source.
Considering what they did to #GamerGate with it, yeah.
You get on the wrong side and you'll be known as a monster, even if no one can name a single event that's been interrupted by a bomb threat that your group is supposedly well known for sending.
And, I mean, who cares if 3 of your own events have received verifiable bomb threats. See, the wrong media outlet reported on that so there's no reliable sources for us to add that to the article.
Yeah, you might not be able to use it in a university, but it's great for isolating a group of undesirables from the public.
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[–] tar-x 0 points 11 points 11 points (+11|-0) ago
Seeing something like this, does anyone else worry about Wikipedia like I do?
I'm not just talking about the special agendas that everyone knows are present. Wikipedia is dangerous because it can be changed so fast. Anyone not doing serious research trusts Wikipedia. The facts and content available in an article can change in a split second, with no one checking to see what it said before the change. This is a serious problem because Wikipedia may one day be a definitive source of human knowledge such that anything not mentioned there might as well not exist. I worry this could lead to powerful entities rewriting history in a much more effective way than before, 1984-style changing the story mid-sentence, or article in this case. With books, you have to destroy all the old copies to erase what they said. With Wikipedia, you just have to erase some computer memory. Wikipedia is a potential Library of Alexandria just waiting to be torched.
[–] rwbj 0 points 5 points 5 points (+5|-0) ago
Many, if not the majority, of university classes ban Wikipedia as a source even at the undergraduate level. It's hardly like only people doing serious research don't know its full of poo. It's in no way definitive, it's simply winning by default as the alternatives at the moment are biased by design, whereas Wikipedia is biased only because it turns out the sort of population willing to spend hours a day working in a 0 barrier to entry popularity contest driven project - without pay... well whodathunk you end up with petulant social media warriors as your primary 'employees' ?
[–] 1moar ago
Well put. I laugh anytime someone tries to use them as a reliable source. It's an interesting project but you might as well read the tabloids for all the good it does. At a high level for non-controversial stuff it's handy to get a bit of info or something; but if you're going to cite statistics and the like, you better use a more reliable source.
[–] derram ago
Considering what they did to #GamerGate with it, yeah.
You get on the wrong side and you'll be known as a monster, even if no one can name a single event that's been interrupted by a bomb threat that your group is supposedly well known for sending.
And, I mean, who cares if 3 of your own events have received verifiable bomb threats. See, the wrong media outlet reported on that so there's no reliable sources for us to add that to the article.
Yeah, you might not be able to use it in a university, but it's great for isolating a group of undesirables from the public.