> Just as academics must cite any AI-generated machine outputs they rely upon in their research and writing, they can also cite Wikipedia if they use it in their work. Doing so can highlight Wikipedia’s value to other academics as a source of knowledge and provide greater transparency in one’s research processes. Despite longstanding skepticism of Wikipedia among some scholars, citations to Wikipedia in academic journals appear to be increasing – even in high-impact publications in subject areas like the health sciences.
As someone who's contributed to Wikipedia and seen how the sausage is made: that's stupid. Even Wikipedia itself considers wikis (including itself) to lack sufficient authority to be cited as a source.
Such citations could be easily gamed (if you cite a particular change) or are useless (the content you cite may not be there in the future), and are obvious pathways to "citogenesis."
Academics citing any website should consider also pointing towards (or at least creating) an archived version via something like the Wayback Machine. Wikipedia is not the only website that changes over time, and most don't have a easily accessible revision history.
> Academics citing any website should consider also pointing towards (or at least creating) an archived version via something like the Wayback Machine.
It's probably better for the user to search the original URL themselves on the Wayback Machine. If you cite with a Wayback Machine link when the original link still works, you're just creating needless work for a non-profit. An archive isn't a CDN.
Or at least have the decency to make sure there's an archive of it when you looked at it - so many times I've found sources sited and Wayback as one from two years before the cite, and one year after; completely missing what the cite was about.
The wayback machine doesn't archive every version of every page. If it's important/authoritative enough to be cited in an academic work, it's important enough to be archived with it. Universities should be investing in that kind of infrastructure, and it's shameful that they're not already experts.
The authors usually has a copy of a cited article in their reference systems. at least as pdf.
So yes i dont see why they shouldn't also keep a pdf copy of cited websites with metadata attached
this could then be stored on a university server for future reference.
This is not a honest comparison. Books are mass produced and don’t rely solely on their authors paying hosting bills and willingness to not change stuff to keep existing.
Relying entirely on a single nonprofit (archive.org) to provide a honest snapshot of every cited link, at the time of citation, sounds much more unreasonable.
A lot of national libraries also undertake web archiving within their scope (e.g. under their national TLD) and I've sometimes found that they have items not covered by Wayback, but it's not as easy to request additions to it. The risk of having a single point of failure is certainly real, and it would certainly be nice for a coalition of libraries to maybe fund a second alternative and mandate the use of both, or something like that.
Yes. 100% yes. Obviously and clearly, yes. Universities have huge libraries and archives. It used to be a point of pride how big their libraries and archives were. University libraries bound and collated their periodicals. They converted them to microfiche to save space, but the integrity was paramount.
Yes. Libraries should be able to back-reference every citation that is included in every paper that they publish, and so should the journals. That is paramount to the scientific method. Anything that you have not verified yourself should have a clear citation that you're able to prove.
Isn't citing encyclopedias shunned in academia in the first place? Wikipedia is an encyclopedia and should be treated as such. I understand that access to primary sources can be difficult at times, but in that case, wouldn't an argument based on a citation from an encyclopedia have a shaky foundation?
Recently I did a deep dive on some minor historical event in the 1800s that I won't bother to go into detail here, except to say that it has been claimed by an activist editor who has made it a personal mission to re-frame the event as an example of "westerners" committing sexual violence against helpless "easterners".
While certainly this kind of story is common throughout history, in this case, there's absolutely no documentary evidence of the event, and what little evidence exists points in the other direction. This is not just the weight of evidence -- it's what all current historical experts believe. It's what all major encyclopedias say about the event. Nonetheless, the Wikipedia editor clings to a bad reference (in an extremely biased book) that makes an off-hand assertion. This assertion, in turn, is sourced with only a single citation to a 1960s-era historical novel that a) didn't actually support what the author claims, and b) essentially made up signficant details of the event in question, based on popular movies and rumors of the time. It's garbage all the way down.
Nevertheless, anyone who edits this article to reflect accurate current knowledge is immediately embroiled in a war with the editor, because unfortunately, there's no "trusted source" that says the opposite of the bad citation. And so the lie remains. To fight this battle would require escalating the issue and possibly getting the editor removed. Who has time?
Again, this is a minor historical event that nobody cares about, and you still cannot trust it as a source. I have seen enough things like this across Wikipedia that I no longer trust it for anything that might intersect with modern political opinions.
More generally, if there are two incompatible versions of an article to be had and editors can't write a neutral article (could have various reasons) initially the largest group "wins" which may be overruled by so called established editors which at times works out even worse. If the topic is actively propagandized or insulting to one or more people the thing may drag out for years.
Yes, exactly. I think it should be obvious [1] to anyone that Wikipedia is unreliable for extremely contentious subjects or modern politics. But if you point to those as examples of editorial bias, you get mired in of-the-moment political bickering. The reason I raise this example is to show that even in a boring area that should be unrelated to modern politics, you still see the rot.
[1] "should be" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in this sentence. Unfortunately, too many people have had their higher reasoning centers liquified by partisanship, and cannot acknowledge inconvenient facts even when they're blatant.
Are other encyclopedias or sources of information less or more likely to fall prey to this kind of bias?
Maybe in Wikipedia it's just more open, so you notice it more?
I've also noticed bias, especially in anything political (or that admits different political or ideological interpretations, such as history). However, I think you have one thing backwards: the more obscure and niche a topic is, the more likely you'll find it biased, since it has fewer editors looking at it.
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Edit: reply to breezybottom, as I'm rate-limited:
> Encyclopedias in general are not primary sources, and should never be cited.
Note this is not what I'm arguing. I mentioned Wikipedia as a source of information, which it is, not as a primary source to be cited.
Every source has bias, but wikipedia has the additional problem that anyone with a torch to burn, regardless of experience or knowledge, can become a dictator for the content on a topic.
Say what you will about encyclopedias, but they generally farm their writing work out to subject-matter experts, and at least try to be neutral in their editing.
> I think you have one thing backwards: the more obscure and niche a topic is, the more likely you'll find it biased, since it has fewer editors looking at it.
Maybe, but the point remains: this bias has fully permeated wikipedia.
> Are other encyclopedias or sources of information less or more likely to fall prey to this kind of bias?
I think it's less likely, because other encyclopedias are written by paid professionals (or at least some cohesive group whose reliability you can evaluate).
> Maybe in Wikipedia it's just more open, so you notice it more?
I think it's more likely on Wikipedia, because no one there is getting paid, so you have to ask yourself, what's their motivation for doing so much work? Sure you have the altruistic gnomes, just laboring to do a good, fair job for its own sake. But you also have people with an axe to grind, propagandists, and other obsessives, and they contribute to basically propagandize their POV. The dumbest ones get banned, but the smarter ones learn to twist the rules and use things like slow long-term persistence to get their way.
> a single citation to a 1960s-era historical novel
People get annoyed when I say "The Jungle" by Upton Sinclair is a novel, as is "The Grapes of Wrath" by Steinbeck, and are not appropriate as a historical reference (outside of being a literary cite).
This was less bad than that (a rigorously researched novel), but yes, the same basic idea. The fundamental problem with that kind of narrative non-fiction is that you don’t know what you’re citing - is it the fiction part, or the non-fiction part? Both?
The fact that a “legitimate” academic text cited this novel as a sole reference is an indictment of the entire book.
Both The Jungle and Grapes of Wrath were pretty rigorously researched, but were not really 'historical' novels at the time of writing (both described roughly contemporary places and events), so the research was closer to field work or journalism.
Are you sure about that? My dad grew up in the Depression. He sat next to Okies in school in Long Beach. He also had a doctorate in history.
So I asked him about TGoW. He said it was an exaggeration, as was most of Steinbeck's work.
As for TJ, Sinclair could have done it as an actual history book, i.e. putting down the results of his rigorous research. But he didn't, and so he could make up whatever he needed. The entire book was a pitch for socialism.
Just say which article this is about. You're leaving out a lead someone else could use to kick out that editor, or fix his mistakes down the line when he's gone.
Your point is terribly weak unless you cite the article in question. The hallmark of an edit war is two editors who are each absolutely convinced that they are editing in good faith while the other has an ideological axe to grind.
I’m not in an edit war. I’m reporting what other people have done.
When I saw the edit “war” (in reality it was the same editor and multiple different people making the same edit over years), I did research into the sources being cited because I was interested.
Based on what I found in the primary literature, I would have made the edit, but I gave up when I saw the situation.
I was able to edit this to fix it, but the geography of New Zealand page had a reference to Southland having a "tundra like climate." Invercargill, which is in Southland, actually has a temperate oceanic climate and a record low of -9C or 15F.
I find wikipedia is really vulnerable to Gell-Mann Amnesia where any article about a topic on which you are very familiar has blatantly incorrect information, but then you open a different one and read it as though it were true. Of course this is true of other sources, famously newspapers, but I think wikipedia is more vulnerable, especially on topics that are very emotionally salient to its power editors.
I didn't really have to fight to edit it, but it had been in the article for many years, despite being blatantly false (tundras have mean temperatures below 0 C for 6+ months out of the year, while coastal Southland has a mean temperature of 5 C in July, the coldest month). My best guess is some kid thought that Southland was cold and knew that tundras were cold, and added a sentence to the article comparing Southland to a tundra.
Whenever I catch something like this, I wonder how many things like this are in there that I don't notice. And this one isn't even really touching anything that is controversial.
I think the Southland reference is to upland areas. Invercargill itself is temperate (but often cold) and has a lot of trees, as does Stewart Island to the south. I've camped in both places.
Exactly. They also game the “no primary sources” rule to write pure fiction in modern political articles because a “trusted source” (aka a journalistic rag they agree with) purposefully didn’t include that information, and in fact may have blatantly falsified events.
If you look up something on Wikipedia and include it in your work without citing it, it's an even worse pathway to citogenesis, since someone trying to check whether you can be used as a source for Wikipedia won't know that that's where you got it from in the first place.
Of course for most things you should have no need to refer to Wikipedia at all, and hence also no need to cite it.
Wikipedia doesn't consider itself to be a reliable source, for obvious reasons: that's directly circular.
But Wikipedia must always be cited if you use it, otherwise people reading your work (including Wikipedia authors and other scholars) cannot trace the provenance of the ideas you discuss.
Isn't this directly against WP:NOR, specifically WP:TERTIARY? Every fact must be supported by reliable first-party source, and the idea's provenance is that source.
In the research, there are often long paths that lead to the ideas: lunch room conversation -> paper 1 -> web search on term seen -> paper 2 -> web search on another term seen -> wikipedia page -> another wikipedia page -> original source (paper 3) -> paper 3's citation list -> paper 4 -> fact for your own paper
We always cite only the very last item in the chain, paper 4. I'd might cite other papers I've seen, but only if they are relevant. I was taught that the tertiary sources, like encyclopedias, are never to be cited, unless they have original facts which cannot be traced to other sources.
In my opinion, if you used Wikipedia, you should cite it. If you instead got your idea from "lunch room conversation", or a private email, or whatever, you can also cite that. It's a really huge problem that people pull ideas from Wikipedia, attribute them to something like "paper 4", but then it turns out that what Wikipedia said and what papers 3 and 4 said were not the same, and what Wikipedia said was actually based on some other paper 5 that turns out to be a bunch of bullshit, or a Wikipedia author made it up and wrongly attributed it to paper 3, or a Wikipedia author didn't understand paper 3 and made a total hash of it. Etc.
This of course also happens plenty when Wikipedia isn't involved, but for whatever reason people seem to have the mistaken idea that citing Wikipedia is inherently bad. There's no rule against citing Wikipedia, or tertiary sources in general, from professional work.
When a later person (e.g. a scholar or Wikipedia author) is trying to understand your work, it's incredibly helpful to know where some claim or idea came from. Otherwise they have to jump through extra hoops to trace the actual attributions and figure out where mistakes came from.
Wikipedia's original research policy is not relevant to what works you should cite in academic papers. A Wikipedia article is not supposed to contain the original research of its authors, because it's the wrong venue for such work, and because when such material is added it typically turns out to be nonsense or spam, but rejecting it on the grounds that it is unsourced is much easier.
Yes I was always taught in school that one shouldn’t cite encyclopedias. Encyclopedias, including Wikipedia, are tertiary sources. When writing papers in school and college, secondary sources were what we were supposed to cite.
People who say you should be allowed and encouraged to cite Wikipedia in academic contexts have clearly not spent enough time on Wikipedia. I love Wikipedia and I think it's one of humanity's greatest achievements- however, it has a lot of flaws and really shouldn't ever be used as a substitute for real in depth research. There are major trends and biases in the types of articles that are high quality and those that are low quality. For example, obscure Marvel comic book characters often have much longer and more detailed Wikipedia pages than ones for most pre-modern historical figures.
Academics require primary source evidence - e.g., experimental or documentary. Wikipedia is a tertiary source; by policy it forbids primary sources and requires secondary sources.
I have direct experience to contradict this on several points. I was the lead product manager for answers.com for several years.
The visitors to answers.com fell into two very distinct groups: consumers and contributors (we called them the community). It was difficult to convert consumers into contributors: most of the easy questions on answers were already answered, so one of my experiments was to present an answered question as unanswered to the consumer, asking them to answer e.g. "what kind of hat was abraham lincoln famous for wearing." Anyone who answered was encouraged to register, and our community team would reach out to encourage them back. Uptake was low.
Likewise, the community did not often consume the content on answers -- they were very used to/comfortable with going out on the internet to find information, since it's what they did to answer questions on the site.
The point here is that the people contributing to wikipedia are a small subset, and possibly significantly disjoint, from the people the article is concerned won't go to wikipedia anymore because AI is now answering their questions.
And since wikipedia has no advertising, those people's absence won't be directly felt -- possible exception: I don't know the demographics of wikipedia's periodic fundraisers. Clearly if half their funding is coming from casual visitors, then that's an issue.
There is a lot of momentum and good will behind wikipedia. I don't want to deter anyone from doing more/something to support it, but I also think reports of its imminent demise are premature.
As someone who is old enough to remember the start of Wikipedia. Academia originally had issue with wikipedia due to the lack of academic oversight and therefore didn't allow it in citation for academic work. Now they have to defend it?
Actually the most significant reason to not cite Wikipedia is the churn -- citations are supposed to give readers enough information to actually find the specific information that is being cited, and that should be possible even decades after a paper is published. Citations to academic journals are generally preferred because journal articles can, in principle, always be found because of the archives maintained by university libraries. Citations to Wikipedia articles would need to include the specific revision being cited and there is no guarantee that any revision of any article on Wikipedia will actually be available 50 years from now.
Editors are still not allowed to have credentials. The absurd argument is that credentials can never be validated.
I don't know how scientific journals manage to exist but technically it could be as simple as a link to the user page on the university professors profile page.
Wikipedians have all kinds of credentials, which they are allowed to publicize if they want. Many Wikipedians have their full names and links to their personal websites, scholarly work, etc. on their user page.
There are also plenty of pseudonymous Wikipedians with credentials that they keep secret or vague. As long as they don't edit pages where they have an undisclosed conflict of interest, that's also fine.
Credentials can lend someone credibility in discussions. They just don't grant special editing privileges.
Linking to something from the wiki is considered irrelevant as it doesn't prove anything.
If an editor is an expert in a field and you can verify it it would be most useful to the encyclopedia to treat them as such. This is not actually a special privilege but how people normally do things.
I can gather citations and glue them into an article but someone with actual expertise knows which parts are important, what isn't and what is missing.
Wikimedia is of course free to have an encyclopedia project to entertain children with to much time on their hands but they will continue to lose good editors. You can't have both.
If you disarm the man before throwing him into the alligator pit he won't survive but it will be great for the alligators.
I’m old enough to remember when Wikipedia was not allowed to be cited in high school papers because it wasn’t a sufficiently authoritative source. How the turn tables…
That time was also when people could just add useful information to articles without some self-declared gatekeeper/“curator” removing everything they cannot grasp or simply deem uninteresting again.
This is true. I think the problem has changed but it still there. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think it’s a reliable academic source. I just think it’s ironic that an academic is saying it’s a moral duty to protect it.
That is a less useful observation than you might think; Wikipedia is fundamentally an ideological project. Obviously there is a bias.
The question is whether it is a bias to honest citation of sources that are expected to be factual. As long as they maintain that culture they are doing the best they can.
The currently accepted 'knowledge' framework has been vigorously defended in WP since its beginning. When the label 'pseudoscience' appears in the first few paragraphs, you can usually depend on content highly critical of any threats to the orthodox (if they're even allowed mention).
Academics are more likely to defend the current paradigm. Traditionally, anomalies often go unmentioned in published papers.
All evidence for the existence of meteors was denied for centuries after Newton declared that outer space is empty - until the late 18th century, when ignoring the evidence became too burdensome.
The funny to me is that without context there’s no way to know which ideological bias you mean. Just looking at the parts of Wikipedia I routinely use I don’t see much of a bias beyond one that favors more verbose articles.
I’ve routinely heard “Wikipedia is becoming ideological,” and it’s usually action flip as to whether they thinks it’s too far to the left or right.
If you find an article is too long to read comfortably, please consider adding {{too long|date=October 2026}} (or whatever the date at the time is) to the top so that people can figure out what to do with it.
I don’t have any problem with the trend, it’s just notable to me. I think any encyclopedia with essentially unlimited space would eventually trend in the same direction.
What's the ideological bias you identify in Wikipedia? If you name it, we can discuss whether we agree with you or not.
Edit: wow, downvoted for asking this. Really, it's very simple: one should be able to make it explicit what bias they mean. If they don't, maybe they fear to show their own biases and be called out? Downvoting is the coward's way out.
Edit 2: I'm rate-limited, but I find this answer very puzzling:
> Rather, it's a recognition that it's not worth it to engage when the odds of the question being honest are slim.
That goes directly against HN guidelines. Assume the best version of a comment, not the worst. My question should be fairly straightforward to answer.
Rather, it's a recognition that it's not worth it to engage when the odds of the question being honest are slim. If you are curious about bias on Wikipedia, the information is readily available. There's even a Wikipedia article.
Indeed, broadening what academic scores mean (past a citation number) and letting them be recongnized by contributing to open knowledge like wikipedia (vs closed private journals) is the counterbalance we need.
> The fulfilment of ethical obligations to support knowledge communities, however, requires support from institutions of higher education. Currently, most academics are evaluated on their scholarly and research achievements, teaching performance, and service duties to their departments. Public service, like contributing to Wikipedia, goes largely unrecognised, if it is even counted at all. If academics are to fulfil their responsibilities to protect knowledge and knowledge communities, institutions must recognise efforts like contributing to Wikipedia and provide resources and support. Doing so may also help to address the public’s eroding trust in higher education itself, as a greater commitment to serving the public would reassert the role of universities as stewards of knowledge that exist to serve humanity – a role shared by Wikipedia.
What academics need to defend is wikipedia in latent space. Not walls of text that reflect the opinions of a few who have the time to edit that the rich and famous can optimize.
What on earth did we do before WP? I'm old enough to remember the olden days before WP existed and the practice of reading the news.
I also remember the whispers and chatter outside of and around the 'papers. Those whispers etc would reinforce a later article.
What is happening now with news ie top down dissemination of world events is not new but what is different today is the immediacy of commentary by the hoi poloi - you and me and who knows what from across the world ... and bots.
I think we have to get to grips with the fact that an event happening within one corner of the world measuring an inch squared can rock up on the agenda of anyone, anywhere across the entire world.
I miss making monthly trips to the local university library as a child. I would have some infatuation, often related to electronics or programming, and would get a big book on it and just dive in for a few weeks. There were magazines on microfilm. It felt like a privilege to get that information. You had to wait to get to it and would only possess it for a while. The ideas would simmer for long stretches without any ability to instantly cross-check your information or get clarifications or feedback on work. Trite, I know, but I feel joy just thinking about that whole experience.
Defense of open knowledge will appear when they attack the monopoly of Elsevier and other publishers through innovative systems for peer-evaluated papers, not by trying to resuscitate the body of the spook-filled Wikipedia.
I'm not sure if I'm confused or terrorized by the article.
Concerns on Wikipedia dying because of a lack of editors, and that being due to AI? Wikipedia's community often makes it very clear they don't want editors, and there's a whole lot of people who have actually tried to contribute who will tell you of the unjustifiable miserable time they had when wanting to do a good deed, that has been a considerable problem for I don't even know how many years now, why would I care about AI redirecting traffic possibly reducing the influx of editors when there's a far larger, more evident, long-standing problem?
Promoting quoting Wikipedia as a source is madness. It begs circular logic. Citogenesis is already a considerable problem, can we not kick it into overdrive? Please? Wikipedia being at risk is one thing, but asking for a cancer to be spread upon academia, I'm sorry but we are not at a point in which reputation can be squandered like that.
>Doing so may also help to address the public’s eroding trust in higher education itself, as a greater commitment to serving the public would reassert the role of universities as stewards of knowledge that exist to serve humanity – a role shared by Wikipedia.
And there's even acknowledgement! But that somehow makes it worse because one of the main reasons academia has lost reputation is the same one that often gets called out on Wikipedia: political bias and agenda pushing.
It's like there's a fire in a building and a huge stack of papers on another, in which a guy is playing with matches, and the argument is that we should move the fire from the former to the latter. I honestly think that if this sort of advice was listened to, the consequences would be terrible.
Open knowledge systems like Wikipedia are not really defensible. Letting anybody edit any page is a great way to get AI and human slop everywhere. It makes it extremely easy to insert knowledge with dubious quality and sources.
We need "open access" knowledge systems with known authors who are sponsored by non-profit and educational organizations and its their duty to defend their reputation.
Humanity needs more openly accessible curated and factually checked information and "open to modify" systems are bad at in all.
>Letting anybody edit any page is a great way to get AI and human slop everywhere.
but that's not how Wikipedia works. articles about noteworthy or controversial things have activist commissars and/or paid shills watching every edit, and unless your edit aligns with the narrative they wish to present, it will be undone with essentially "because fuck you" as the reason.
its value is still considerable, of course -- there are far more neutral things than controversial ones, and most of the articles about those are fine. everything even remotely political, however, is thoroughly subverted.
I used to edit Wikipedia as a hobby with the goal of getting as many incorrect facts in it as possible, and seeing how long they lasted before being corrected. These were really minor things that hardly anyone would care about so they would often fly under the radar. I think my longest lived fake fact was around five years. Was quite pleased with that. Eventually I got bored and moved on but it was a great game while it lasted.
Something like Wikipedia is a wonderful idea in theory, but it's tough to defend when their policies allow factually incorrect content to remain just because it appears on a third-party source that the editors consider reliable. Most media sources contain a pretty high percentage of fake news and when this slop makes its way into Wikipedia that makes the problem even worse. Can we find a better solution?
Philosiphers have been trying to work on how to define what is "True" since forever without much to show for it.
Wikipedia tries to kick the bucket by going with what "reliable" secondary sources say. Thus the goal is not to say the capital T Truth, but to essentially sumnarize academic knowledge.
To steal a saying - its the worst method except for every other known method.
If anyone has a better idea how to determine what is true and what isn't - i'd certainly be very interested.
I think the Gell Mann effect applies on Wikipedia just as much as in the papers. I’ve often come across articles in an area where I’m an expert and they have issues. I used to try and have them changed, but many years ago I just got exhausted by fanatics who seem to have just gotten really attached to their (incorrect) prose.
Sorry but scientific method has been the default for "Truth" for many academic subjects. It is reliable and idempotent. If all of the human information and most of the knowledge workers are removed from the Earth tomorrow, many will arrive in the same conclusion in most of the natural sciences and maths. The language and representation will be different but prime numbers will still be prime numbers and the matter will still be made of one neutral and two "interactive" elements.
Social sciences like politics, history and economy are harder to replicate with the scientific method, however repeated observations, statiscial information as well as qualitative analysis with evidence-based research can still provide replicable analysis.
> If anyone has a better idea how to determine what is true and what isn't - i'd certainly be very interested
This kind of excuse is often cited to shut down any discussion, especially in history, politics and economics. I find it deeply anti-intellectual and dogmatic. As long as evidence and counter-evidence is followed, it should be possible to discuss alternative interpretations and solutions.
While I agree with your sentiment, I must add to this that to say that something is unequivocally true that holds in all conditions everywhere is difficult to ascertain in general. So we have to deal with that two (or more) things can be true at the same time (sometimes). This may be less the case for things such as prime numbers but more the case when the underlying principle is void of simple cause and effect (in the linear sense).
The scientific method can be used to falsify hypotheses. It cannot prove that something is true. Fields that use the scientific method typically rely on social consensus for determining the truth. Empirically speaking, the social consensus seems to converge to a reasonable approximation of the truth with a high probability, but the process can take decades.
> This kind of excuse is often cited to shut down any discussion, especially in history, politics and economics. I find it deeply anti-intellectual and dogmatic. As long as evidence and counter-evidence is followed, it should be possible to discuss alternative interpretations and solutions.
How do you propose to discuss "alternative interpretations and solutions" if you believe that doing so is "anti-intellectual and dogmatic".
I'm honestly confused how you could respond this way to my comment. It sounds like you are criticizing yourself (?)
I understand that "truth" and "facts" are squishy philosophical concepts at the edges, but I'm talking about something much more basic. There are Wikipedia pages which are flat out wrong (by any common definition of the term) and yet the editors won't allow any corrections because the primary sources are also wrong.
One thing that might help a bit would be to tag or color code specific statements with a confidence factor. So a statement sourced only from a single trash site like the NY Times or Fox News would be red, whereas another statement sourced from multiple independent scholarly journals would be green. Or something like that.
> There are Wikipedia pages which are flat out wrong (by any common definition of the term) and yet the editors won't allow any corrections because the primary sources are also wrong.
Primary sources aren't really considered reliable on wikipedia (with some exceptions), so if such a situation is happening (and you have a source for whatever version you think is correct, since just trust me bro doesn't go far on wikipedia) and you can't resolve it on the talk page, probably time to escalate the situation.
> There are Wikipedia pages which are flat out wrong (by any common definition of the term) and yet the editors won't allow any corrections because the primary sources are also wrong.
Not saying that doesn't happen, but do you have an example of such a page?
Literature reviews summarise the state of knowledge in a given field, and given Wikipedia articles are about the knowledge on a subject rather than the contents of a specific paper, I don't see why it would be unusual to rely on them. Is there anything specific that you find doesn't make sense to you? It's fairly common in, e.g. medical research for individual studies to be not relied upon and meta-analyses are certainly generally considered stronger evidence on any topic.
> it's tough to defend when their policies allow factually incorrect content to remain just because it appears on a third-party source that the editors consider reliable.
I feel this is the kind of discussion that would really benefit from a number of concrete examples.
> Sealioning (also sea-lioning and sea lioning) is a type of trolling or harassment that consists of pursuing people with relentless requests for evidence, often tangential or previously addressed, while maintaining a pretense of civility and sincerity
You really believe that applies here?
Its hard to say its relentless when not a single piece of evidence has been given so far.
Its hard to say its tangential when it speaks to the original poster's thesis.
I don't know it applies; but given the many times Wikipedias problems (esp politically biased gatekeepers) have been pointed out, followed by innocent-sounding requests for examples, followed by long back and forth time and energy sapping arguments with dismissals and refutations rather than thanks and acknowledgement of the problems, my instinctive reaction is suspicion towards people implying this is their first time hearing Wikipedia is extremely flawed wrt source material and editorial power.
This entire thread is filled with people saying Wikipedia is doomed due to whatever minor problem personally bothers them, in this case apparently coverage of recent events quoting news organizations.
Nobody is actually showing us why the problem they choose to highlight is significant enough to torpedo Wikipedia altogether (or even that is a more important problem than all the others mentioned).
Also, nobody here is starting a long argument to waste people’s time. They’re simply saying “your one paragraph proclamation is completely unconvincing”.
> I feel like that is the kind of response that is an example that could be used for "sealioning" on Wikipedia.
Not at all. Mainly because this is asking for the first line of examples, not repeatedly bogging down the conversation with constant requests for additional evidence.
Also it matters because in this kind of vague remarks that Wikipedia is unreliable, or that articles are wrong, almost always the people claiming this fail to provide specific examples, instead relying on some general feeling of frustration and shared belief that it must be true. But if they provided a specific example of a factually incorrect article, maybe other people would disagree. Or if they provided an example of ideological bias, maybe it would turn out the complainer is in the minority in believing that was biased. And if it turned out that this were controversial topics that most encyclopedic articles struggle with in some form, maybe it isn't a problem with Wikipedia. So examples matter!
Academics have a duty to make quality knowledge open. The difference between what is outside and inside the walled garden is astounding. They most of the truly valuable knowledge to themselves, and leave the public to feed on scraps, augmented by mountains of junk food, drowning in an ocean of sh-t (misinformation).
Wikipedia is existentially threatened by AI, which does the same thing but better.
> most users of AI products do not click the links to Wikipedia, choosing instead to accept machine-generated outputs without further verification. If this practice continues, readership on Wikipedia will continue to decline.
This is the same mechanism by which Wikipedia drained readers from news outlets and academic papers that it cites for information.
I play the tiniest violin in the world for Wikipedia editors that now suffer from the same thing they did to the news media.
What are "collective facts?" How do you distinguish "collective facts" from "alternative facts?"
It is hard to imagine a worse attempt at establishing a collection of commonly accepted truths than Wikipedia. Scientific journals are overwhelmingly better at weeding out falsehoods and hoaxes, despite the history of successful efforts to dupe reviewers. University libraries are also better at collecting knowledge, and in fact the entire industry of journal publishing began at university libraries. That knowledge is not locked away from the masses, it is just less convenient to access than Wikipedia.
Even Wikipedia has had to accept that a certain amount of oversight and review is necessary. There are some topics that attract bad actors, paid shills, state-sponsored propagandists, etc., and Wikipedia had to introduce "protected pages" to deal with such things. Add a structured review process and more rigorous citation requirements and those "protected pages" would be a lightweight version of academic publishing.
Fair to assume that the library of Alexandria contained books written by the most erudite scholars and philosophers of their day, not Joe and Jane and their cohort of terminally online gatekeepers.
Why is that fair to assume? "Books" were extremely rare then. Some random librarian had to include those books, and likely leaned towards taking all written works due to scarcity.
Likely some other librarian disagreed with some inclusions and certainly many readers disagreed with the content. They must have had a system for all of this. It was far less open than Wikipedia.
IIRC, they seized all scrolls from all ships in the port, in many languages. They likely had many "errors" according to other librarians and many readers.
> can anyone argue that Wikipedia is not our best attempt at collective facts?
Maybe at free collective facts. If you want to pay: JSTOR and Google Scholar, for example; textbooks; or any of the endless scholarly encylopedias, guides, and review papers, especially on specific topics. And if you don't want to pay: shadow libraries, or the reference room of an academic library.
I am not deeply familiar with the process of peer review, but is it open? As far as I know, it is confidential on purpose, correct? Doing all of this with an open moderation trail is what makes Wikipedia truly ambitious, isn't it?
I have spoken with a few Reddit mods, and Chad, creator of automod and reddit's 12th hire about this topic. Everyone agreed that truly open moderation would be the biggest shit show ever. Yet, that is ambition of Wikipedia.
Can you imagine what Dang and Tom would have to deal with if all of their moderation was open? I might have some disagreements with HN moderation, but open moderation is not something I would wish upon them.
Yes, the reviewers' comments and the authors' rebuttals are generally confidential, and there are good reasons for doing it that way. One significant reason is to allow the reviewers to make their comments freely, without worrying about how those comments might be perceived by the public or how the authors' reputations might be impacted; likewise with the authors' rebuttals. Another reason is to avoid tainting the review process in situations where a paper is rejected from one journal and re-submitted to another -- the second set of reviewers should not know that it was previously rejected, nor should they know why it was previously rejected.
On the other hand, the peer review process is "open" in the sense that there is no explicit credential required to be a reviewer, only expertise in the field (typically determined by publishing papers -- in principle someone with no formal education could publish enough papers to start getting invitations to be a reviewer). It is also "open" in the sense that anyone can submit a paper for review as long as it adheres to formatting (page layout, font size, etc.) and length requirements.
Downvote away, but: Academics have a duty to explain their years of inaction while their students have wilted and faltered as a direct result of academics not understanding how to to be effective in the real world in which their students are expected to be productive members. Those that cant, teach, and teach ridiculous fallacies they personally subscribe to. These people are too weak to stand up to their own bosses and boards. Are those the meek and weak we want teaching? Instead of real critical thinking they instilled a twisted sick worldview about social issues that have no connection to creating market value and being a good, supportive human that lifts all boats. They focus on things no businessperson would even consider engaging while missing the forest for the trees. Wikipedia is the last concern of this rapidly imploding rightthink crumbling empire, on its last legs from those whose families bore the ultimate cost to get their kid a degree that is increasingly worthless.
I propose our leadership cut funding and fine any program in the US where a professor is not actively working in their field at a minimum part-time. These people are so out of touch it is literally sickening when you think of all the negative downstream effects. Citizens should demand better of their tax dollars - academia in its form today is a cancer that is holding back your youth from greatness and robbing our nation of the qualities that made it great, kneecapping our young talent for independent thought before they even figure out who they are.
They're academics. The job is to say things that are true inosfar as a community of experts driven by rigorous argument believes.
Whether or not that has any effect on the real world is not their concern. The academy is proud of their record of interest in things that have no applications whatsoever in the real world and ideas that turn out to be extremely harmful if applied. The people pretending that academia is some sort of vocational system were wrong and are to blame for the academics doing exactly what they were expected to do.
Although yes to the idea that taxpayers shouldn't have to fund running everyone through university. The academics are often opposed to the taxpayers, it isn't fair to make the taxpayers fund them.
As someone who's contributed to Wikipedia and seen how the sausage is made: that's stupid. Even Wikipedia itself considers wikis (including itself) to lack sufficient authority to be cited as a source.
Such citations could be easily gamed (if you cite a particular change) or are useless (the content you cite may not be there in the future), and are obvious pathways to "citogenesis."
It's probably better for the user to search the original URL themselves on the Wayback Machine. If you cite with a Wayback Machine link when the original link still works, you're just creating needless work for a non-profit. An archive isn't a CDN.
> or at least creating
I agree on creating.
Do you also expect universities to have an archived version of every article and book their professors cite?
this could then be stored on a university server for future reference.
Relying entirely on a single nonprofit (archive.org) to provide a honest snapshot of every cited link, at the time of citation, sounds much more unreasonable.
Yes. Libraries should be able to back-reference every citation that is included in every paper that they publish, and so should the journals. That is paramount to the scientific method. Anything that you have not verified yourself should have a clear citation that you're able to prove.
While certainly this kind of story is common throughout history, in this case, there's absolutely no documentary evidence of the event, and what little evidence exists points in the other direction. This is not just the weight of evidence -- it's what all current historical experts believe. It's what all major encyclopedias say about the event. Nonetheless, the Wikipedia editor clings to a bad reference (in an extremely biased book) that makes an off-hand assertion. This assertion, in turn, is sourced with only a single citation to a 1960s-era historical novel that a) didn't actually support what the author claims, and b) essentially made up signficant details of the event in question, based on popular movies and rumors of the time. It's garbage all the way down.
Nevertheless, anyone who edits this article to reflect accurate current knowledge is immediately embroiled in a war with the editor, because unfortunately, there's no "trusted source" that says the opposite of the bad citation. And so the lie remains. To fight this battle would require escalating the issue and possibly getting the editor removed. Who has time?
Again, this is a minor historical event that nobody cares about, and you still cannot trust it as a source. I have seen enough things like this across Wikipedia that I no longer trust it for anything that might intersect with modern political opinions.
[1] "should be" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in this sentence. Unfortunately, too many people have had their higher reasoning centers liquified by partisanship, and cannot acknowledge inconvenient facts even when they're blatant.
Maybe in Wikipedia it's just more open, so you notice it more?
I've also noticed bias, especially in anything political (or that admits different political or ideological interpretations, such as history). However, I think you have one thing backwards: the more obscure and niche a topic is, the more likely you'll find it biased, since it has fewer editors looking at it.
---
Edit: reply to breezybottom, as I'm rate-limited:
> Encyclopedias in general are not primary sources, and should never be cited.
Note this is not what I'm arguing. I mentioned Wikipedia as a source of information, which it is, not as a primary source to be cited.
Every source has bias, but wikipedia has the additional problem that anyone with a torch to burn, regardless of experience or knowledge, can become a dictator for the content on a topic.
Say what you will about encyclopedias, but they generally farm their writing work out to subject-matter experts, and at least try to be neutral in their editing.
> I think you have one thing backwards: the more obscure and niche a topic is, the more likely you'll find it biased, since it has fewer editors looking at it.
Maybe, but the point remains: this bias has fully permeated wikipedia.
I think it's less likely, because other encyclopedias are written by paid professionals (or at least some cohesive group whose reliability you can evaluate).
> Maybe in Wikipedia it's just more open, so you notice it more?
I think it's more likely on Wikipedia, because no one there is getting paid, so you have to ask yourself, what's their motivation for doing so much work? Sure you have the altruistic gnomes, just laboring to do a good, fair job for its own sake. But you also have people with an axe to grind, propagandists, and other obsessives, and they contribute to basically propagandize their POV. The dumbest ones get banned, but the smarter ones learn to twist the rules and use things like slow long-term persistence to get their way.
People get annoyed when I say "The Jungle" by Upton Sinclair is a novel, as is "The Grapes of Wrath" by Steinbeck, and are not appropriate as a historical reference (outside of being a literary cite).
The fact that a “legitimate” academic text cited this novel as a sole reference is an indictment of the entire book.
So I asked him about TGoW. He said it was an exaggeration, as was most of Steinbeck's work.
As for TJ, Sinclair could have done it as an actual history book, i.e. putting down the results of his rigorous research. But he didn't, and so he could make up whatever he needed. The entire book was a pitch for socialism.
When I saw the edit “war” (in reality it was the same editor and multiple different people making the same edit over years), I did research into the sources being cited because I was interested.
Based on what I found in the primary literature, I would have made the edit, but I gave up when I saw the situation.
I find wikipedia is really vulnerable to Gell-Mann Amnesia where any article about a topic on which you are very familiar has blatantly incorrect information, but then you open a different one and read it as though it were true. Of course this is true of other sources, famously newspapers, but I think wikipedia is more vulnerable, especially on topics that are very emotionally salient to its power editors.
I can totally see how this kind of question would intersect with climate activism though.
Whenever I catch something like this, I wonder how many things like this are in there that I don't notice. And this one isn't even really touching anything that is controversial.
Of course for most things you should have no need to refer to Wikipedia at all, and hence also no need to cite it.
But Wikipedia must always be cited if you use it, otherwise people reading your work (including Wikipedia authors and other scholars) cannot trace the provenance of the ideas you discuss.
In the research, there are often long paths that lead to the ideas: lunch room conversation -> paper 1 -> web search on term seen -> paper 2 -> web search on another term seen -> wikipedia page -> another wikipedia page -> original source (paper 3) -> paper 3's citation list -> paper 4 -> fact for your own paper
We always cite only the very last item in the chain, paper 4. I'd might cite other papers I've seen, but only if they are relevant. I was taught that the tertiary sources, like encyclopedias, are never to be cited, unless they have original facts which cannot be traced to other sources.
This of course also happens plenty when Wikipedia isn't involved, but for whatever reason people seem to have the mistaken idea that citing Wikipedia is inherently bad. There's no rule against citing Wikipedia, or tertiary sources in general, from professional work.
When a later person (e.g. a scholar or Wikipedia author) is trying to understand your work, it's incredibly helpful to know where some claim or idea came from. Otherwise they have to jump through extra hoops to trace the actual attributions and figure out where mistakes came from.
Wikipedia's original research policy is not relevant to what works you should cite in academic papers. A Wikipedia article is not supposed to contain the original research of its authors, because it's the wrong venue for such work, and because when such material is added it typically turns out to be nonsense or spam, but rejecting it on the grounds that it is unsourced is much easier.
What do you mean by "gamed"?
My favorite version is when topics are stuck decades ago and newer sources are rejected as an attempt to make the topic look real
Those two things are not alike. Nobody can view themselves as sufficient authority to be cited as their own source.
(The late Victor Mair was an exception; he was happy to "support" his own claims by citing wikipedia articles that cited unsourced claims from him.)
Academics require primary source evidence - e.g., experimental or documentary. Wikipedia is a tertiary source; by policy it forbids primary sources and requires secondary sources.
The visitors to answers.com fell into two very distinct groups: consumers and contributors (we called them the community). It was difficult to convert consumers into contributors: most of the easy questions on answers were already answered, so one of my experiments was to present an answered question as unanswered to the consumer, asking them to answer e.g. "what kind of hat was abraham lincoln famous for wearing." Anyone who answered was encouraged to register, and our community team would reach out to encourage them back. Uptake was low.
Likewise, the community did not often consume the content on answers -- they were very used to/comfortable with going out on the internet to find information, since it's what they did to answer questions on the site.
The point here is that the people contributing to wikipedia are a small subset, and possibly significantly disjoint, from the people the article is concerned won't go to wikipedia anymore because AI is now answering their questions.
And since wikipedia has no advertising, those people's absence won't be directly felt -- possible exception: I don't know the demographics of wikipedia's periodic fundraisers. Clearly if half their funding is coming from casual visitors, then that's an issue.
There is a lot of momentum and good will behind wikipedia. I don't want to deter anyone from doing more/something to support it, but I also think reports of its imminent demise are premature.
I don't know how scientific journals manage to exist but technically it could be as simple as a link to the user page on the university professors profile page.
There are also plenty of pseudonymous Wikipedians with credentials that they keep secret or vague. As long as they don't edit pages where they have an undisclosed conflict of interest, that's also fine.
Credentials can lend someone credibility in discussions. They just don't grant special editing privileges.
If an editor is an expert in a field and you can verify it it would be most useful to the encyclopedia to treat them as such. This is not actually a special privilege but how people normally do things.
I can gather citations and glue them into an article but someone with actual expertise knows which parts are important, what isn't and what is missing.
Wikimedia is of course free to have an encyclopedia project to entertain children with to much time on their hands but they will continue to lose good editors. You can't have both.
If you disarm the man before throwing him into the alligator pit he won't survive but it will be great for the alligators.
And then the admins decide what gets deleted and what is allowed to remain.
The question is whether it is a bias to honest citation of sources that are expected to be factual. As long as they maintain that culture they are doing the best they can.
The currently accepted 'knowledge' framework has been vigorously defended in WP since its beginning. When the label 'pseudoscience' appears in the first few paragraphs, you can usually depend on content highly critical of any threats to the orthodox (if they're even allowed mention).
Academics are more likely to defend the current paradigm. Traditionally, anomalies often go unmentioned in published papers.
All evidence for the existence of meteors was denied for centuries after Newton declared that outer space is empty - until the late 18th century, when ignoring the evidence became too burdensome.
I’ve routinely heard “Wikipedia is becoming ideological,” and it’s usually action flip as to whether they thinks it’s too far to the left or right.
Edit: wow, downvoted for asking this. Really, it's very simple: one should be able to make it explicit what bias they mean. If they don't, maybe they fear to show their own biases and be called out? Downvoting is the coward's way out.
Edit 2: I'm rate-limited, but I find this answer very puzzling:
> Rather, it's a recognition that it's not worth it to engage when the odds of the question being honest are slim.
That goes directly against HN guidelines. Assume the best version of a comment, not the worst. My question should be fairly straightforward to answer.
> The fulfilment of ethical obligations to support knowledge communities, however, requires support from institutions of higher education. Currently, most academics are evaluated on their scholarly and research achievements, teaching performance, and service duties to their departments. Public service, like contributing to Wikipedia, goes largely unrecognised, if it is even counted at all. If academics are to fulfil their responsibilities to protect knowledge and knowledge communities, institutions must recognise efforts like contributing to Wikipedia and provide resources and support. Doing so may also help to address the public’s eroding trust in higher education itself, as a greater commitment to serving the public would reassert the role of universities as stewards of knowledge that exist to serve humanity – a role shared by Wikipedia.
[0]: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/like preposition sense 4
It's not like anybody really thinks Webster's Second International (1937) is definitive any more.
That is why we are building latentpedia.org.
I also remember the whispers and chatter outside of and around the 'papers. Those whispers etc would reinforce a later article.
What is happening now with news ie top down dissemination of world events is not new but what is different today is the immediacy of commentary by the hoi poloi - you and me and who knows what from across the world ... and bots.
I think we have to get to grips with the fact that an event happening within one corner of the world measuring an inch squared can rock up on the agenda of anyone, anywhere across the entire world.
Libraries and encyclopedias were my mainstays until Wikipedia came along. Many libraries still have a current affairs section that covers the news.
Yet at the same time their CloudFront WAF decided to block IP coming from Singapore ISP...
So much on defending open.
Concerns on Wikipedia dying because of a lack of editors, and that being due to AI? Wikipedia's community often makes it very clear they don't want editors, and there's a whole lot of people who have actually tried to contribute who will tell you of the unjustifiable miserable time they had when wanting to do a good deed, that has been a considerable problem for I don't even know how many years now, why would I care about AI redirecting traffic possibly reducing the influx of editors when there's a far larger, more evident, long-standing problem?
Promoting quoting Wikipedia as a source is madness. It begs circular logic. Citogenesis is already a considerable problem, can we not kick it into overdrive? Please? Wikipedia being at risk is one thing, but asking for a cancer to be spread upon academia, I'm sorry but we are not at a point in which reputation can be squandered like that.
>Doing so may also help to address the public’s eroding trust in higher education itself, as a greater commitment to serving the public would reassert the role of universities as stewards of knowledge that exist to serve humanity – a role shared by Wikipedia.
And there's even acknowledgement! But that somehow makes it worse because one of the main reasons academia has lost reputation is the same one that often gets called out on Wikipedia: political bias and agenda pushing.
It's like there's a fire in a building and a huge stack of papers on another, in which a guy is playing with matches, and the argument is that we should move the fire from the former to the latter. I honestly think that if this sort of advice was listened to, the consequences would be terrible.
We need "open access" knowledge systems with known authors who are sponsored by non-profit and educational organizations and its their duty to defend their reputation.
Humanity needs more openly accessible curated and factually checked information and "open to modify" systems are bad at in all.
but that's not how Wikipedia works. articles about noteworthy or controversial things have activist commissars and/or paid shills watching every edit, and unless your edit aligns with the narrative they wish to present, it will be undone with essentially "because fuck you" as the reason.
its value is still considerable, of course -- there are far more neutral things than controversial ones, and most of the articles about those are fine. everything even remotely political, however, is thoroughly subverted.
Wikipedia tries to kick the bucket by going with what "reliable" secondary sources say. Thus the goal is not to say the capital T Truth, but to essentially sumnarize academic knowledge.
To steal a saying - its the worst method except for every other known method.
If anyone has a better idea how to determine what is true and what isn't - i'd certainly be very interested.
Social sciences like politics, history and economy are harder to replicate with the scientific method, however repeated observations, statiscial information as well as qualitative analysis with evidence-based research can still provide replicable analysis.
> If anyone has a better idea how to determine what is true and what isn't - i'd certainly be very interested
This kind of excuse is often cited to shut down any discussion, especially in history, politics and economics. I find it deeply anti-intellectual and dogmatic. As long as evidence and counter-evidence is followed, it should be possible to discuss alternative interpretations and solutions.
How do you propose to discuss "alternative interpretations and solutions" if you believe that doing so is "anti-intellectual and dogmatic".
I'm honestly confused how you could respond this way to my comment. It sounds like you are criticizing yourself (?)
One thing that might help a bit would be to tag or color code specific statements with a confidence factor. So a statement sourced only from a single trash site like the NY Times or Fox News would be red, whereas another statement sourced from multiple independent scholarly journals would be green. Or something like that.
Primary sources aren't really considered reliable on wikipedia (with some exceptions), so if such a situation is happening (and you have a source for whatever version you think is correct, since just trust me bro doesn't go far on wikipedia) and you can't resolve it on the talk page, probably time to escalate the situation.
Not saying that doesn't happen, but do you have an example of such a page?
I feel this is the kind of discussion that would really benefit from a number of concrete examples.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sealioning
You really believe that applies here?
Its hard to say its relentless when not a single piece of evidence has been given so far.
Its hard to say its tangential when it speaks to the original poster's thesis.
Nobody is actually showing us why the problem they choose to highlight is significant enough to torpedo Wikipedia altogether (or even that is a more important problem than all the others mentioned).
Also, nobody here is starting a long argument to waste people’s time. They’re simply saying “your one paragraph proclamation is completely unconvincing”.
Not at all. Mainly because this is asking for the first line of examples, not repeatedly bogging down the conversation with constant requests for additional evidence.
Also it matters because in this kind of vague remarks that Wikipedia is unreliable, or that articles are wrong, almost always the people claiming this fail to provide specific examples, instead relying on some general feeling of frustration and shared belief that it must be true. But if they provided a specific example of a factually incorrect article, maybe other people would disagree. Or if they provided an example of ideological bias, maybe it would turn out the complainer is in the minority in believing that was biased. And if it turned out that this were controversial topics that most encyclopedic articles struggle with in some form, maybe it isn't a problem with Wikipedia. So examples matter!
> most users of AI products do not click the links to Wikipedia, choosing instead to accept machine-generated outputs without further verification. If this practice continues, readership on Wikipedia will continue to decline.
This is the same mechanism by which Wikipedia drained readers from news outlets and academic papers that it cites for information.
I play the tiniest violin in the world for Wikipedia editors that now suffer from the same thing they did to the news media.
Of course agreeing on collective facts is extremely messy.
Show me a better attempt, please.
It is hard to imagine a worse attempt at establishing a collection of commonly accepted truths than Wikipedia. Scientific journals are overwhelmingly better at weeding out falsehoods and hoaxes, despite the history of successful efforts to dupe reviewers. University libraries are also better at collecting knowledge, and in fact the entire industry of journal publishing began at university libraries. That knowledge is not locked away from the masses, it is just less convenient to access than Wikipedia.
Even Wikipedia has had to accept that a certain amount of oversight and review is necessary. There are some topics that attract bad actors, paid shills, state-sponsored propagandists, etc., and Wikipedia had to introduce "protected pages" to deal with such things. Add a structured review process and more rigorous citation requirements and those "protected pages" would be a lightweight version of academic publishing.
Likely some other librarian disagreed with some inclusions and certainly many readers disagreed with the content. They must have had a system for all of this. It was far less open than Wikipedia.
IIRC, they seized all scrolls from all ships in the port, in many languages. They likely had many "errors" according to other librarians and many readers.
Maybe at free collective facts. If you want to pay: JSTOR and Google Scholar, for example; textbooks; or any of the endless scholarly encylopedias, guides, and review papers, especially on specific topics. And if you don't want to pay: shadow libraries, or the reference room of an academic library.
I am not deeply familiar with the process of peer review, but is it open? As far as I know, it is confidential on purpose, correct? Doing all of this with an open moderation trail is what makes Wikipedia truly ambitious, isn't it?
I have spoken with a few Reddit mods, and Chad, creator of automod and reddit's 12th hire about this topic. Everyone agreed that truly open moderation would be the biggest shit show ever. Yet, that is ambition of Wikipedia.
Can you imagine what Dang and Tom would have to deal with if all of their moderation was open? I might have some disagreements with HN moderation, but open moderation is not something I would wish upon them.
Yes, the reviewers' comments and the authors' rebuttals are generally confidential, and there are good reasons for doing it that way. One significant reason is to allow the reviewers to make their comments freely, without worrying about how those comments might be perceived by the public or how the authors' reputations might be impacted; likewise with the authors' rebuttals. Another reason is to avoid tainting the review process in situations where a paper is rejected from one journal and re-submitted to another -- the second set of reviewers should not know that it was previously rejected, nor should they know why it was previously rejected.
On the other hand, the peer review process is "open" in the sense that there is no explicit credential required to be a reviewer, only expertise in the field (typically determined by publishing papers -- in principle someone with no formal education could publish enough papers to start getting invitations to be a reviewer). It is also "open" in the sense that anyone can submit a paper for review as long as it adheres to formatting (page layout, font size, etc.) and length requirements.
I propose our leadership cut funding and fine any program in the US where a professor is not actively working in their field at a minimum part-time. These people are so out of touch it is literally sickening when you think of all the negative downstream effects. Citizens should demand better of their tax dollars - academia in its form today is a cancer that is holding back your youth from greatness and robbing our nation of the qualities that made it great, kneecapping our young talent for independent thought before they even figure out who they are.
Whether or not that has any effect on the real world is not their concern. The academy is proud of their record of interest in things that have no applications whatsoever in the real world and ideas that turn out to be extremely harmful if applied. The people pretending that academia is some sort of vocational system were wrong and are to blame for the academics doing exactly what they were expected to do.
Although yes to the idea that taxpayers shouldn't have to fund running everyone through university. The academics are often opposed to the taxpayers, it isn't fair to make the taxpayers fund them.
If you want job training, get certifications.