Wikipedia - truth or fiction?

After using our trusted fountain of information Wikipedia for some time, I thought it hilarious that The Register had written an article entitled "Wikipedia founder admits to serious quality problems" and with the slogan "Yes it's garbage, but it's delivered so much faster!".

Apparently our trusted source is having quality issues and has until now denied of their existence to the masses.

So how much do you rely on Wikipedia?

Absolutely not at all.

It's not refereed by anyone qualified to do so. Anything read there is merely opinion of the last person to edit it. Sometimes you find something useful, sometimes you don't. Is it reliable? Emphatically no. Useful? Sometimes.

It's a source of information. It's not necessarily anymore reliable than anything else out there on the web, but it's a good start.

And if, for example, I want to find out when "A Wrinkle in Time" was written, it's going to be found on Wiki much quicker and easier than via Google. And is likely to be correct.

zero, nada, none...

It's flippin' sweet!

Its an excellent, reference for information really quickly. It's not indepth enough for me consider it the ultimate resource. I still love it though.

Gah!

benpanter and I had a discussion re: Wiki and Higgs Boson particles. I am far to drunk to discuss it now so here's a picture of a monkey cowboy:

[img]http://web.bentley.edu/students/e/efthimi_atha/images/monkey%20riding%20dog.jpg[/img]

Well, this article is pretty accurate.

If you need to rely on the accuracy of something in Wikipedia, check through the history of the article (tab near the top). You'll see every change made, and by whom. You can also check the discussion page for any article. Experts on a subject often write there and give their credentials.

woof.

they write their credentials or some that they made up? There is no way of checking these short of independently finding the person and contacting them to see if they really wrote it.

I'll stick to the traditional published texts, thanks...

So Ben, would you or wouldn't you trust a Wiki math article that this guy had contributed to? Never minding the extremely dogdy looking photo of him.

This is not quite true or simple as you asserted.
As BadDoggie said, the best criteria is the "age" of the article, and in that sense its more reliable then your "conventional" information sources, which are also edited by people, which also always have their own agenda thrown in, but are not "edited" as wikipedia is.
It is a known fact that "history is written by the victors", but with wikipedia this is less so, since its open to everyone to read - and more importantly - to shape.
So the overall "forces" shaping an article in the wikipedia - over time - are more likely to have a more true to the fact content, then other "conventional" sources.
By the way, this rule (that everyone can read and review it) is also what makes open source software better then propriety software.
Its enough to look at some articles that deal with very controversial content (over a long time) to see that the information there is quite reliable (not less reliable than other sources for sure), for example the Israeli Palestinian conflict - if it was really so that the last opinion is what you find, you would not have the information you can find there now.
So to all of you who wrote "zero, nada, none..." - I beg to differ, and I made my point why.
From wikipedia:

Showem, 'Trust' is a difficult concept to describe in this case. I think that it splits into several questions:

Would I use it as a quick reference to jog my memory? Yes.

Would I use something I found in such a page to lead me to more traditional forms of knowledge? Probably.

Would I cite his definition of anything via wikiwhatever in a paper I intended to publish? No.

I am totally shit-faced. But I just got one of the most respected creative directors in the world to create the Wedding invitations for Winegirl and I!

Wikipedia is cool. But not totally accurate. I do not care. Entertainment is the key

I made my point by answering the question asked and not infering anything else by my answer. Thank you for making my point as to why I do not rely on knee jerk non-peer reviewed opinions when I need to find real answers. If I ever submitted a scientific article and referenced Wiki as a source of fact, that article would be instantly rejected. It is what it is, an unverified source of info that I don't happen to rely upon ever, period!

It's late, and I want to work tomorrow morning. If I get round to it I'll answer what you mention tomorrow. But for the meantime:

Is that an ethical statement or a factual one?

Commercial software is usually streets ahead of open source. I say that as someone who works with both sorts of software on a daily basis, majority *nix. You can have the linux v windows debate, but that is not the limit of software. Take MySQL against MS SQL. For serving little webpages they both work fine. For searching a terabyte database MS wins every single time - by orders of magnitude. Take OpenOffice and OfficeXP, or whatever it's called now. OpenOffice is an improvement over StarOffice, but it's still got nowhere near the functionality or reliability of OfficeXP. GIMP and Photoshop... the list goes on.
Why? Money. When you pay for software you pay for the programmers' time. Although the opensource approach is to be applauded, and provides many useful things, at the end of the day if you want the best that is availible you usually have to pay for it. Simple as that. You pay (or don't pay!) your money and you take your choice.

There's a parallel here to Wikipedia. But time for me to sleep...

lighten up eurovol, I quoted your words to to make a point, didn't mean you specifically, but the general "tone"... OK?
sheesh..
Oh and:

This is true for most information sources, put aside maybe scientific articles, and even these fall in to that category from time to time.
All I said was, on most issues, you can count on wikipedia to be just as (if not more) reliable then other info sources.

Well as a someone who also works with both software daily (I have the feeling most TT'ers do), as a programmer, I disagree.
You can't compare tools in an absolute manner, you have to take in mind, to which work they are made for.
Its well known, that the big majority of web servers, also those who serve A LOT, are apache and not MS.
Mozilla and IE...
Yes, Mozilla has bugs, but they are being fixed MUCH faster, and the overall quality of Mozilla gets better much faster then IE's.
We can throw examples at each other all day long...
This opinion, on your side as well as on mine, can't be really factual, since no one knows the actual FULL facts, so its more philosophical.
When you pay for software, you get a work done, out of - well, its a job for someone.
OSS, is made out of pure interest, and passion of people who ENJOY programming and or the ideology.
Now, I would say, if you have a programmer who does something because his paid for it, and someone who does it because he loves to do it - the later will do a better job of it as a rule IMHO.
Of curse, if the OSS programmer is not that talented, he will produce a lesser code then the MS paid one.
(All though, most OSS programmers are being paid for programming at their work, and then do OSS in their free time)
But how many will review the MS code?
maybe several tens of thousands (and that is very optimistic)
How many will review the OSS code?
Hundreds of thousands, and all the time.
So logically, where is the better chance to find - and then fix bugs?
And that is the same logic that works in the wikipedia.

OK. I could write a page or two on this, but it's been done before, so I'll refer you to an article which covers most of what I feel is important about wikipedia. It also points out the crucial differences between writing the linux kernel and the creation of wiki.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/10/27/wi...nnica_and_linux


Nope. Unless you are talking about popular science, an article that is published in a journal is most definitly peer reviewed. I agree that you have to rely on the choice of the scientist(s) that do the peer reviewing. But at the very least you have a paper written by an expert reviewed by an expert. In the case of a wikipedia page you have a page written by joe bloggs reviewed by a million joe bloggs...

At the end of the day it appears our philosophies are different. I would take a wikipedia page as an easily accessed basis for further research which may or may not verify it, you give the impression that you would just trust it as fact. As a scientist, I deal a lot in hunches and intuition - but any such 'feelings' can only direct you towards an auditable trail of fact. If you don't find that evidence then you drop the argument. A scientific paper or traditional encyclopedia article propogates that trail of fact, a wikipedia article doesn't (unless you're talking about one of the ones which are properlly referenced and not to further dubious quality websites).

FWIW, I'm in complete agreement with Ben.

I don't understand why everyone is using the standard of whether they would use wikipedia for a reference in a published paper. Who would use any encyclopedia reference for a published paper? For published papers you should use the original source, and n some extreme examples a review (which are not usually peer-reviewed, but rather invited) to allow the readers a reference point to review something that may not be pertinent to the paper. But to even suggest that you would use any other encylclopedia for a reference???Is bizarre...What are the purposes for an encyclopedia reference??? I would bet that most of what you come up with, wikipedia fulfils!

Encyclopedias arent traditionally pure fact based anyway. Anyone notice how old encylopedias are so much better than ones developed in the last 50 years or so? The older editions of britannica, and arthur mees childrens encyclopedias for example were much better written, albeit clearly from a specific cultural point of view, and with a lot more passion, enthusiasm and even a bit of the authors subjective feelings about the topic are not only merely present, but deliberatly so. The end result is that the reader feels he shares the authors interest in the topic, shares his passion, and is helped to really keep the material in the readers mind, and inspired to go and learn further.

Now we seem to have a series of intellectual witchhunts that have stripped the very soul from the art of encyclopedia writing. "cultural bias" ooo evil, rip it out. "point of view" ooo nasty, burn burn. "author expressing an opinion" ahh propaganda!!

The result being of course, an encyclopedia stripped down to an inane list of facts and figures, that turns people off the very act of learning itself. The encyclopedias I had bought for me as a kid just didnt get read, as I preferred the arthur mees encyclopedia that my parents grew up with, it actually felt like it was written by a human being not a machine.

Sure, with science etc, there isnt actually much scope for the author to go beyond a dry bland stream of facts and figures, theres very little scope for the author to give his personal input. But more interesting articles, about say literature, history, art, culture, religion, economics, philosophy I question if its even possible to write an article totally devoid of cultural viewpoint, bias, and personal feelings, and I dont think it would make sense to if we could.

Wikipedia is somewhat inbetween. I think its found a fairly good compromise between pleasing the anti-bias witchhunters, and being enjoyable to read, but I really wish they werent so anal about their hatred of articles with a point of view being expressed.

I don't trust it much, it's not bad for getting basic information or keywords, but if I'm looking for facts, I go elsewhere

Read my reply to showem and the three cases... that's where it stemmed from. I was trying to illustrate the difference between something being useful and something being reliable. Of course you wouldn't cite an encyclopedia article in a scientific paper, but the majority of people reading this have probably never published such a thing, so I was trying to make it a bit more accessible.

Can't be arsed writing more, it's Friday and there's beer on the distant horizon. Wikifiddlers go forth and multiply... each to their own.

Anti-bias witchhunters? Kza, the point of an encyclopedia is to be a reference for factual information about a topic, not to be novel-style reading to be gone through cover-to-cover. At any rate, I guess you used two totally different encyclopedias and are using that to generalize about all encyclopedias, because there was no real difference in the "entertainment value" between the encyclopedias my parents used (a full volume set on our bookshelf at home) and the ones I used as references at the library when I was a kid.

Edit: @ben - Can you please make sure that my hubby gets taken out and tanked up tonight now that he's finally become a Herr Doktor?

To begin, the comparisons between the open-source methodology in software development and the open philosophy of Wikipedia are spurious.

Software development is a goal-oriented and fairly objective process. Either your code compiles or it does not. Either it is faster than the last revision or it is not. Either it fulfills the specification or it does not. It is in nearly no way comparable to the Wikipedia phenomena. The only real exception to this is the fact that in both cases, people who want to contribute may do so and they are not usually compensated for this.

However, in the case of open-source software no just anyone off the street can commit code. A reputation must be built, and there is a gatekeeper who controls commits to the codebase. This does not exist in Wikipedia, and it is the reason that Open-Source software can have such demonstrably high quality. The fact is that today most open-source software is written for pay. IBM, HP, OSDL and more employ people to write open-source.

This argument is not, fundamentally a useful one. Encyclopedias are, in fact, unreliable sources of information. They are too broad, with too little editorial review and too little control. Most of them rely not on experts, but on low-paid interns to compile and fact-check. The Encyclopedia Britannica is also an imperfect source of information.

Does any encyclopedia aim at being a definitive source? No. They aim at broad sweeps for the general masses. If you are a professional researcher, you should be shot for relying on encyclopeidae of any kind. If you are a layman, who happens to be interested in the Battle of Pharsallas, then god bless you for being interested. It doesn't really matter if Pompey fled on the second or third day of the battle.

So, Wikipedia is a good source of general information that contains flaws. FACT
All encyclopediae contain flaws. FACT
Serious or reliable information should always be double-checked with reputable experts and multiple sources. FACT

There is no interesting argument or point in the register article. FACT

of course I wouldn't quote wiki as a reference in a scientific paper but for general knowledge and info I trust it to a large extent

I played a game last year whenever I saw a forum referring to a Wiki article I'd change the article, sometimes dramatically so anyone linking over to it would see something completely different to what they expected from the referral. In most chases the changes were only there an hour or so before so well-minded editor changed them back, in some cases they remained for a few days, and in one case (that I know about) no subsequent change was made...

I use Wiki for information, but always seek to cross-reference to check facts, especially if they are important to me...

YL6

were you very bored last year YL6

I'm very bored most years...

Apparently it's not so bad, after all


so there you go