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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.
[–]rwbj0 points
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It depends there. I think statistics from Wikipedia are generally okay because Wiki is almost never the source for the statistics. So for instance here's a list of OECD countries by job security on Wiki, but the information there is simply a slightly better presented version of data straight from the OECD. Of course it's now several years outdated which is a routine problem with Wiki, but the numbers themselves are genuine.
I have seen some made up statistics. For instance in one page somebody quoted a research paper by name instead of link when posting a statistic related to rape in India. It turns out that paper was available online. A quick ctrl+f turned up the number in the paper and it, unsurprisingly, had nothing to do with what the Wiki edit said it did. In fact the paper was quoting US rape statistics and the Wiki editor said it was quoting Indian statistics and using it as an example of how India compares favorable to some developed nations. Hahaha, the number itself is still up on Wikipedia here. That 54% is from a US law enforcement agency referencing US unreported rapes, not Indian. The author in paper stated that and then explicitly stated they expected unreported rapes in India to be substantially higher. But yeah, the editor who put that in had nothing but edits in a variety of Indian related controversies trying to sugar coat everything and who else is going to be anal enough to actually double check a stat? Obviously not the sort of people that like to waste their time editing Wikipedia.
In any case I think those times when editors simply make up numbers or lie about their source are pretty rare and there's usually some huge red flags - numbers that make little sense, are isolated (as opposed to being part of a series of data), a no-name source, and offline sources are all pretty big tells. But most stats on Wikipedia are not like that. So long as they're clearly just ripping the data directly from elsewhere, it's pretty solid.
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[–] 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.
[–] rwbj ago (edited ago)
It depends there. I think statistics from Wikipedia are generally okay because Wiki is almost never the source for the statistics. So for instance here's a list of OECD countries by job security on Wiki, but the information there is simply a slightly better presented version of data straight from the OECD. Of course it's now several years outdated which is a routine problem with Wiki, but the numbers themselves are genuine.
I have seen some made up statistics. For instance in one page somebody quoted a research paper by name instead of link when posting a statistic related to rape in India. It turns out that paper was available online. A quick ctrl+f turned up the number in the paper and it, unsurprisingly, had nothing to do with what the Wiki edit said it did. In fact the paper was quoting US rape statistics and the Wiki editor said it was quoting Indian statistics and using it as an example of how India compares favorable to some developed nations. Hahaha, the number itself is still up on Wikipedia here. That 54% is from a US law enforcement agency referencing US unreported rapes, not Indian. The author in paper stated that and then explicitly stated they expected unreported rapes in India to be substantially higher. But yeah, the editor who put that in had nothing but edits in a variety of Indian related controversies trying to sugar coat everything and who else is going to be anal enough to actually double check a stat? Obviously not the sort of people that like to waste their time editing Wikipedia.
In any case I think those times when editors simply make up numbers or lie about their source are pretty rare and there's usually some huge red flags - numbers that make little sense, are isolated (as opposed to being part of a series of data), a no-name source, and offline sources are all pretty big tells. But most stats on Wikipedia are not like that. So long as they're clearly just ripping the data directly from elsewhere, it's pretty solid.