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Comment by berntb | Hacker News Reader

Cool. And sad.

But re old accounts: I've recently seen a few cases where old accounts with high karma dismissed Wikipedia -- without any references of their own. That is a "quality smell", if anything is.

(One particularly shameless fellow just copied the primary link Wikipedia used -- and lied about the content. :-( )

EDIT: I wrote without any references of their own -- i.e. dismissed with hand waving. Wikipedia won't always be correct, but it has references and is whetted by quite a lot of people.

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My dad likes to dismiss Wikipedia, and he used to be an admin. They may just know how the sausage is made.

His rule of thumb is "If it isn't a major article there's probably errors". His favorite example is that of an article about an ancient persian poet, which says that there's only 2 of his poems known, and only 1 remains. Next to that line, there's a picture of the other poem.

Eh, who knows.

You can see Wikipedia as a mixture of different "subpedias". I find articles on technical and mathematical topics to generally be extremely accurate, content rich, and surprisingly bias free (so not very, but still). Protocols, theorems, proofs, even very advanced topics (way over my head, so perhaps I can't tell...). You could do much worse than take everything Wikipedia says about mathematics at face value.*

On the other hand, everything about currently living people, or worse, companies, you can essentially dismiss out of hand.

* Please don't. I'm just making a point.

"I find articles on technical and mathematical topics to generally be extremely accurate, content rich, and surprisingly bias free (so not very, but still)."

Same here. I usually just link the Wikipedia article because it's either totally accurate or accurate enough for what I'm trying to accomplish. I added a bunch of stuff to it as a result from my domain. I do spot marketing BS on occasion in there but the baseline makes it really stand out. Most people doing IT work are going to say, "Wait, that looks like a fan or advertiser wrote it" then dismiss that specific point.

> His rule of thumb is "If it isn't a major article there's probably errors"

...and if it is a major article, there are definitely errors, some likely introduced on purpose[1] (since major articles are the juiciest targets)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Ravpapa/Tilt

I didn't argue that Wikipedia always was correct (no source is that, I'd guess), just that it smelled really bad to dismiss it with just hand waving. It do have sources and have been whetted (for reasonably popular subjects.)

Wasn't trying to imply you meant that. It's more that I could see where someone like that could come from, dismissing the Wikipedia article out of habit, especially if they've been involved with the project. Not backing it up with additional sources is of course bad form, but finding and linking extra sources is additional work.

Minor nitpick, vetting is someone checking something and approving it, whereas whetting is grinding away metal to sharpen a blade.

OK, you more or less agree with my argument. Enough about that, then.

I am curious about something else.

Do you have non anecdotal information about Wikipedia's general dependability?

How is the dependability for large subjects? For subjects like a poet where less than a hundred people even recognize the name?

(The last I saw on this was years ago, when Wikipedia edged out the Encyclopædia Britannica. It would be strange to be less dependable now?!)

It seems I was trolled, but in a funny way.

I discuss how you can see bad behaviour from even old accounts at HN, dismissing serious references with just hand waving.

This got a well written answer about how non serious my example reference was, arguing with a family anecdote.

When I ask for better sources (I don't know the writer or his/her family from Adam/Eve) -- then I get no answer. :-)

I always find it strange when people do that. I mean, it's a wiki - if there's an obvious, glaring error - just fix it? Then that particular article will be more correct?

Wikipedia is absolutely useless as a dead book - the level of (professional) work that goes into vetting "real" encyclopedia articles is much higher - and the errors that slip through much more permanent.

The great thing about Wikipedia is the potential steady improvement. When people complain about its accuracy it often just sounds like whining.

Granted, there are a few articles that are "contested", and I understand why people don't have the time or energy to fix all of Wikipedia.

No, your fix will often be reverted by those one or two authors who consider the article "theirs".

If you fix it a second time, including a clear explanation in the commit message, you'll be accused of vandalism.

Do you know if anyone's done quantitative research on that? Should be pretty straightforward to sample some articles and see if that pattern is common? (I'm not trying to passive - aggressively suggest you're wrong, I'm honestly curious)

[ed: I should add that I've started to form a habit of looking at the revision history and talk pages of wp articles - in addition to references. And I really do think the added transparency is a very real added value over dead tree encyclopedia. ]

I referenced this earlier, but got no answer. It is from 2005. I haven't seen anything after that.

"Wikipedia is about as good a source of accurate information as Britannica, the venerable standard-bearer of facts about the world around us, according to a study published this week in the journal Nature."

https://www.cnet.com/news/study-wikipedia-as-accurate-as-bri...

(Please Google a better source for that paper. :-) )

I am willing to believe that "sensitive" information about living (and relative unknown) people along with companies/political parties is being more gamed in Wikipedia today, than ten years ago.

I'd just see some good references for that...

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