you: information on wikipedia shouldn’t be taken at face value… it’s good to not blindly put your trust in whatever you read from it…
also you: I would default to saying trustworthy…
🤔
you: information on wikipedia shouldn’t be taken at face value… it’s good to not blindly put your trust in whatever you read from it…
also you: I would default to saying trustworthy…
🤔
Woah.
So, like, if you knew of a website which shouldn’t be taken at face value and whose claims had to be verified, what word would you use to describe it? would that word be reliable? Trustworthy?
That’s wild.
If you knew a person who shouldn’t be taken at face value and whose claims had to be verified, what word would you use to describe them? Would that word be reliable? Trustworthy?
Wikipedia’s reliability in it’s own words - check out the holocaust misinformation from last year!
US congressional staff editing controversies as documented by and presented in wikipedia
A ten year long hoax running until two years ago
Wikipedia’s own list of its controversies - pay special attention here to the 2023 exposure of an administrator pretending to be a spanish folk singer as a sockpuppet of another administrator who was banned in 2015 for making “promotional edits”.
I want to be clear: i do not feel that wikipedia isn’t reliable. I can clearly observe that wikipedia is unreliable.
Wikipedia is not a library neither is it a reliable source of accurate information.
I promise you, I am not missing any other point you have made. my intent with selectively quoting was to go ahead and knock the legs out from under all the other stuff that rests upon those two statements in order to save us the back and forth of big walls of text.
My skepticism absolutely does not imply that nothing is trustworthy when it has to be verified. It explicitly applies to a website (Wikipedia) which maintains an extensive record of ways in which it has been shown to be systematically untrustworthy.
Within the scope of this discussion, it’s not important what sources of information I would consider trustworthy, we’re only talking about Wikipedia, a source that has a long history of being untrustworthy. We are talking about Wikipedia because it is the subject of the ops post which compares it to the library of Alexandria.