this post was submitted on 26 Oct 2023
1075 points (90.8% liked)
Showerthoughts
29678 readers
1302 users here now
A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. A showerthought should offer a unique perspective on an ordinary part of life.
Rules
- All posts must be showerthoughts
- The entire showerthought must be in the title
- Avoid politics (NEW RULE as of 5 Nov 2024, trying it out)
- Posts must be original/unique
- Adhere to Lemmy's Code of Conduct-----
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Except not really.
Lol, everything is sourced.
No. There are plenty of articles with the "needs citations" tag.
But even of the ones that are? A LOT of people never actually read the sources and you have plenty of wild claims that are not at all supported by their citation. Plenty of "celebrities" have even talked about how it was a huge hassle to get something changed because the lie was cited... with something unrelated.
"a huge hassle"
Step 1. Remove the unfounded claim
Step 2. Go to the talk page explaining why you removed it
Step 3. If someone puts it back, edit war them, tag needs citation, call them out in the talk page, get the article locked by an admin, etc etc etc. These things happen all the time, and 95% of the time it gets corrected as long as someone gives a damn
Can you show some examples of this?
Nice.
Lol this guy is getting ready to edit some articles.
A lot of the political entries are written with a bent towards being sympathetic with leftists.
The Kyle Rittenhouse article spends a lot of time on how Rittenhouse ‘appeared in conservative media’ or ‘appeared with conservative personalities’ which is a pretty weird thing to say, if you don’t already understand the political undertones of the Kenosha riot.
When you click the article for the Kenosha riot, it’s titled ‘civil unrest in Kenosha’ and focusses a lot on what a reader would perceive as positive aims of the riot. Protesting racism and police brutality, and doesn’t focus at all on the crime, danger, guns, vandalism, arson, etc
That article mentions BLM and when you read that article it makes sure to state that BLM protests were ‘largely peaceful’ and totally misses the amount of deaths and destruction that had happened at them.
The BLM article, if written like the Rittenhouse article, should focus a fair amount in the organizations ties to Marxism, the overthrowing of capitalism and colonialism, but doesn’t.
Wikipedia articles are written and edited and maintained to push a narrative.
If you agree with the narrative, you probably like that it does this. If you disagree, you probably don’t bother reading Wikipedia very much.
The issue with sources, is that a lot of ‘sources’ for stuff like this are already heavily curated to paint a picture the editors want to put on front street.
And anything that would combat that narrative is just outright banned from the site.
A lot of citations with politically charged topics are just opinions anyway. There is no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ answer or sources on the war between Palestine and isreal, for example. But if Wikipedia editors want to push propaganda for either side over the other, all they have to do is only cite pro-Palestinian or pro-Israeli sources.
This is easily exploitable by editors for whatever narrative they choose to push.
Wikipedia is not an exhaustive gathering of all relevant information, it is a carefully curated propaganda machine for the editors.
Good point. I forgot to mention that Wikipedia editors, for all their flaws, are really good at shutting down hateful right wing bullshit.
So you’d categorize it as hateful right wing bullshit if someone mentions that there as violence or criminal activity at BLM protests?
Why would that be hateful? Or right wing? Or anything other than just a description of what happened?
Exactly
You can have violence at a largely peaceful protest, as long as it is ... largely peaceful.
Which they were, the majority ended peacefully and only a handful were violent.
So what Wikipedia did was state the facts. You can disagree with those facts, but you would be wrong.
Well it’s the old fact that reality has a left-wing bias, as someone once put it.
That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.
Whoever said that should step out of their bubble and have a look around once in awhile
Have you ever looked at the sources? Some pages have some insane blog spam "sources" linked.
That's a circular argument. If you can't trust the sources how can you trust the wikipedia article which cites those sources.
You can trust the sources, because unreliable sources can't be used on Wikipedia: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Perennial_sources
In any discipline some part has to be trusted for the next to follow. It is not circular, it is axiomatic. You can do a Descartes to find a "guarantee of truth", but there won't be one. Hence your critique could literally be applied to anything. Check sources and be happy they are freely provided (and donate to Wikipedia).
That's my point, by mistrusting every other website, OP is violating axioms upon which Wikipedia is built, yet still claiming it's trustworthy
Ah, I now see better what you meant. That is in part a fun little contradiction, but much of Wikipedia's sources are books and articles that come in printed form. These are easier than other websites to verify as sources due to their tangible nature.
But it takes more effort to confirm a tangible source than one on the internet?
Not really. Just sail the high seas with Library Genesis or Sci-Hub. The nature of being published is being non-editable, a digital copy is an okay compromise.
EDIT: There is an issue of trust in piracy, though hardly in practice, but Open Access should help with this.
Oh, you're taking me literally. Sorry I didn't catch that.
You can check the sources... if the source doesn't check out... Guess what, Wikipedia has given you all the information you need.
Lawl, 1) 25% of Wikipedia in English is unsourced
https://venturebeat.com/ai/how-wikimedia-is-using-machine-learning-to-spot-missing-citations/#:~:text=With%20crowdsourced%20content%2C%20citations%20are,articles%20lack%20a%20single%20citation.
lAwL 2) 77% of Wikipedia is written by 1% of its editors
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliability_of_Wikipedia#:~:text=If%20the%20original%20information%20in,an%20apparent%20credibility%20to%20falsehood
RaWfL 3) once a source is credited once, it isn't rechecked and can be used as a source on Wikipedia countless times
LmFAo 4) literally anyone saying something does not make it credible or true.
It could even be someone purposefully poisoning the well
Kinda like how the government hires people to put terrible music over all the UFO footage so we perceive it as crazy people stuff.
Not at all. I'm responding to OP, and while my comment is informative and sourced so that other people can understand it too, I do not care at all that my in-kind response turns some people off.
Lol.... kinda reminds of something.... Wikipedia?
As scrambled as your brain is, anything could.
my comment is informative and sourced so that other people can understand it too, I do not care at all that my in-kind response turns some people off.And you've learned how to copy and paste! Big day for you.
You're one obnoxious fuck.
Source?
This comment section
Haha, it was fun.
Yeah just like you copy and pasted your ethos from Wikipedia.
If you're this wrong about a two-syllable word, you shouldn't worry about cracking the code.
Thanks, trusting wikipedia because it has a "source"(, as if a source meant the truth 🙄,) is super weird, and i'll also add that a lot of sources are inaccessible anyway, such as those pointing to books. Wikipedia will hopefully(, in part because it's always a mistake to pretend knowing "the one truth",) be replaced one day, it's long overdue.
The inaccessibility of many wiki sources is a very good point, thanks.
I think Wikipedia serves its purpose as a broad strokes indicator of things that are likely significant in some way, but its limitations are as important as its content.
Rolfcopter. This guy doesn't know how to use Wikipedia.
You probably learned how to use Wikipedia from Wikipedia, that's how you got so wrong.
Not bad actually https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_and_fact-checking