First thing that comes to mind when you think of Wikipedia

Post Reply New Topic

Hours of going into rabbit holes about my special interests and random topics that I will never utilize the information from, ever... That's what comes to mind.

My mother is an author. Someone in the USA is also an author and shares her same name. Wiki has their books mixed up and my mother does not know how to correct this.

Another author who wrote fictional story books found a write up about one of the books she wrote and some of the characters descriptions were wrong, so she logged in and corrected them.
After a while she went back to look and they were changed back, so she changed them again.
Then she looked and they were changed back, and she tried to put them right but her ability to do so was blocked. She complained to wiki who wrote back and said that the person who changed them was an expert and had a masters degree on the subject of her books, and as she did not have any qualifications linked to the book she was said to not be a leading athority on the book that she wrote.
While she was flattered that someone could have a masters degree on the subject of her books, she was the author. She knew what she was thinking when she wrote the books and yet she was being sidelined by wiki who would not allow her from correcting as she did not have a qualification in studying her own books!

I had something kind of similar. In a previous job, as head of R&D and one of the largest stockholders at a certain high tech company that was the first of its kind in the US, I had certain inside knowledge of certain events. Despite that inside knowledge, my corrections on info on Wikipedia related to that company cannot be independently verified by news articles and so they are reversed very quickly. I don't even bother any more.

Out of curiosity, I just went and looked at current web pages about that company. Everything I found had some bad information. But since that information has been published, then it is acceptable on Wikipedia even if it is wrong. The information included such things as contracts that never even existed.

The fact that we weren't allowed to use it as source material at school.

Of course not. It has too many inaccuracies.

Apart from that. If it was available when I was in school using the internet as a source of information would be like using a calculator in a maths exam. It was classed as cheating!

Footnotes and References.  Wikipedia may not get everything exactly correct; but at least they provide the means by which their articles can be validated.

Were you not allowed to use it as source material, or were you not allowed to copy-and-paste articles from it?

Today's students seem to be a little wiser, in that they may paraphrase a few parts of a Wikipedia article and then fill in the rest with their own impressions of the topic, citing about half of the same references and throwing in a few of their own, and their homework is done!

(... except for printing it out, double-spaced, in a 10-point sans-serif font, in black ink, with 3/4-inch margins all around on standard bond paper, and making sure to include appropriate charts and tables while citing the sources of the data therein in the footnotes ... et cetera ...)

The source of most of my eclectic knowledge that makes it nearly impossible for me to relate to the kind of women I find attractive

Both, and changing the text a little wouldn't have worked since we had to list the sources used.

It is truly a Bizarro world wherein people put more faith in a single YouTube video than in all of Wikipedia.

That they usually appear to make a concerted effort to be objective.

That they are actually a decent source for knowledge-----especially if there are many citations from peer-reviewed articles.

It is the citations and references that validate Wikipedia's contents.  The trouble is that critics of Wikipedia never seem to read that far down the page ... if they can read at all.

Wiki is usually one of the 1st sites that comes up when I perform google searches when I'm looking up info about a medical issue &/or treatment. However the amount of info & the ability to understand said info on Wiki can vary quite a lot sometimes. Sometimes Wiki mostly uses complex medical terminology & makes comparisons to rareish medical stuff without explaining in a way that the average layperson can understand. I end up having to click a link inside Wiki that takes me to another Wiki page for a different thing that may or may not have the same issue & I can end up with 7 Wiki pages open & am thoroughly confused & frustrated to the point where I want to smash my computer which I NEVER actually do of corse. Other times Wiki barely has any info about something. They may only list the top symptoms, most common treatments & meds, & the main use of a med & the most dangerous side-effects of a med, instead of mentioning the less common symptoms, more alternative treatments & meds, & mentioning side-effects that are less dangerous or side-effects that are rarer.

The next site that comes up in my google searches after the Wiki one is usually Mayo Clinic which usually barely has any info. 15 years ago a doc suggested I check out Mayo Clinic for a tremor disorder he was treating me for that I had been diagnosed 5 years prior by a different doc. I checked out Mayo Clinic & everything mentioned was all stuff I had already knew cuz I had researched the tremor disorder a bit after the 1st doc had diagnosed me with it. The scientific & medical community should of learned some new stuff about it in the last 5 years but Mayo Clinic did NOT mention anything newer.

The search results that come up after Mayo Clinic are usually scientific studies that have the word Abstract at the top I am NOT looking for a scientific article about one specific aspect related to a disorder or a treatment & one med being used for it.

I want info that is designed for the average person who has that disorder & is wanting to learn about various symptoms & treatments & ways to cope in life with it but most everything is written for the scientific & medical community or written by a layperson who knows practically nothing about it

one of the first thing that came to mind was that we could not use it for research papers and academic work in all my years of education.

website that asks me to donate money to keep it going yet I never have.

SEE third paragraph block on Wikipedia's listing of.............Wikipedia!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia