"Scotland is not a real country; you are an Englishman with a dress". - Keen eyed Scotsman finds Scots Wikipedia is faked by an American Teenager

[spartaman64]

11 hours ago, mr moose said:

Does this mean for 7 years no one from scotland has read it?

 

 

7 hours ago, Athan Immortal said:

I'm Scottish, I've certainly never felt the need to look up the wikipedia page for somewhere I have full knowledge of.

 

That said, I feel like I haven't been protecting my homeland now.

well it says scots language which i assume is scottish gaelic and very few people even in scotland speak gaelic. 

edit apparently according to the census there are 57,375 people who can speak scottish gaelic in scotland 1.1% of the population

[3 Lions]

33 minutes ago, spartaman64 said:

well it says scots language which i assume is scottish gaelic

Scots is a separate language.

Edited August 27, 2020 by 3 Lions

[Bombastinator]

1 hour ago, MarkelFe said:

So as a Spaniard I can edit the English Wikipedia? Doesn't seem fair

I might actually want to read that

[Qub3d]

13 hours ago, gabrielcarvfer said:

Wikipedia isn't trustworthy. That is it. Always look for the primary source, not a page edited by random people, nor news/aggregator sites.

As a moderately-involved editor on the English WP and Wikimedia, I heartily concur. Just like no-one would accept a report that cited only Encyclopaedia Britannica or a reference book. WP is a great starting point and useful for introductions to topics, but there is a reason all the sources are linked at the bottom. Check them. Make sure that they are actually accessible(!) and in the proper context.

 

And if they aren't, feel free to correct them. But never assume.

[Qub3d]

2 minutes ago, gabrielcarvfer said:

"Feel free to correct" must be a joke. As if editors didn't prevent correction and presented factoids as facts by citing fake news...

Not at all. Wikipedia is not at all perfect, but it isn't broken beyond repair and in my opinion worth trying to fix. I think that while there are certainly people who too quickly revert edits, often there are good reasons. Its just that most people don't want to deal with explaining or debating edits in talk pages or using Wiki processes.

[Bombastinator]

57 minutes ago, Qub3d said:

As a moderately-involved editor on the English WP and Wikimedia, I heartily concur. Just like no-one would accept a report that cited only Encyclopaedia Britannica or a reference book. WP is a great starting point and useful for introductions to topics, but there is a reason all the sources are linked at the bottom. Check them. Make sure that they are actually accessible(!) and in the proper context.

 

And if they aren't, feel free to correct them. But never assume.

Back when I was in college there was this book called “the chalice and the blade” that made all these wacky claims.  I was excited enough about them I decided to check sources.  It was heavily annotated.  I recall it was something about the catholic church and abortion that would have been amazing if true.  Utterly crushing to the anti-abortion movement,  and I wanted to make sure of it. The sources were wildly rare and hard to get. My college had a library that was under utilized by the students but had real library science specialists Manning it so I put it to them.  They took nearly a year to turn up the source material.  It was complete crap.  The whole thing was pizzagate.

[Mark Kaine]

Someone should definitely save those pages before they are "corrected"  lol 

 

 

1 hour ago, Qub3d said:

As a moderately-involved editor on the English WP and Wikimedia, I heartily concur. Just like no-one would accept a report that cited only Encyclopaedia Britannica or a reference book. WP is a great starting point and useful for introductions to topics, but there is a reason all the sources are linked at the bottom. Check them. Make sure that they are actually accessible(!) and in the proper context.

 

And if they aren't, feel free to correct them. But never assume.

I agree it's a good starting point or even for a quick reference, but there's always this feeling that the info maybe isn't accurate or just based on the hidden agendas of the writer(s).

 

But yes, I agree,  it's useful - it's just not reliable for obvious reasons and it's easy to forget that. 

 

 

 

[Kisai]

3 hours ago, Dean0919 said:

I remember in the past we had encyclopedia books if we wanted reliable source. Later, when Internet became a thing and I discovered Wikipedia, I thought it was a good replacement for those old encyclopedia books. Apparently I was wrong. So on what source can we rely on the Internet? Do we have any website that has same purpose what those old encyclopedia books had when we needed to find information about this and that?

 

I think it would be nice if Wikipedia has more strict rules for editing or writing the content to avoid fake information.

Wikipedia is never a replacement for a proper encyclopedia. 

https://www.cnet.com/news/study-wikipedia-as-accurate-as-britannica/ (from 2005)

Quote

In the end, the journal found just eight serious errors, such as general misunderstandings of vital concepts, in the articles. Of those, four came from each site. They did, however, discover a series of factual errors, omissions or misleading statements. All told, Wikipedia had 162 such problems, while Britannica had 123.

That averages out to 2.92 mistakes per article for Britannica and 3.86 for Wikipedia.

Wikipedia's main problem is that anyone can edit it, so there's nothing stopping bad or false information from sliding in, or certian articles from being "trimmed" down due to loss of their sources citied to being completely emptied by algorithms and then deleted. Likewise, there's a lot of information that was purposely lost because the subject material was considered "not notable."

[JZStudios]

15 hours ago, lexusgamer05 said:

I think it would be a good idea for Wikipedia to make it so that if you want to edit a country's wikipedia page, you need to actually be in that country, and block VPN IP's

It still wouldn't stop people in their own country being asshats.

 

14 hours ago, Kisai said:

Anyone who has passed 8th grade knows not to trust Wikipedia for the same reason you don't trust opinion articles. Primary sources first. Wikipedia at best is a third or fourth-hand source.

But I read it on the internet, it has to be true!

[JZStudios]

52 minutes ago, Caroline said:

Look at these articles

Pheesics

https://sco.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pheesics

Cuikin

https://sco.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuikin

Releegion

https://sco.wikipedia.org/wiki/Releegion

I'm going to send those to my buddy. He'll have an aneurysm.

[rcmaehl]

15 hours ago, Samfisher said:

??? HAHAHAHAHA

 

15 hours ago, Caroline said:

what does the fact that he's no longer a brony has to do with anything??

I have no clue. Mainstream media latches onto the weirdest specifics

[Nowak]

People are saying "Wikipedia is unreliable" but like, this is incredibly damaging towards the Scots language if it's not fixed since there are linguistics engines that rely on the Scots Wiki. Wikipedia also gets millions of visitors a year. To possibly millions of people, Scots is just a weird English dialect rather than a distinct language with its own grammar and sentence structure. This needs to be fixed.

[wall03]

7 hours ago, Dean0919 said:

what source can we rely on the Internet

brittanica

[wall03]

I see this everywhere now that I look at it

[Tech_Dreamer]

*ELON MUSK WANTS TO KNOW YOUR LOCATION*

[Intrafinesse]

I find Wikipedia useful when I look up something related to Cosmology or Physics.

 

[mr moose]

I don;t think I would ever call a scot an english man in a dress.  That sounds like a death wish to me.

 

For those not familiar with scots,  This is what their liberal arts side looks like:

 

 

[JZStudios]

16 minutes ago, Caroline said:

come on there must be like 5 computers in NK, one's the president's personal and the rest are for top secret government facilities, all of them soviet EVMs with amber screens

In all actual fact, they have more than you'd think, but you need special permissions to use them, they run on... Win98-XP (don't remember which exactly) and limit you to basically the state run news media site and their special email.

There's a pretty good video on YT with a Russian guy that went in and secretly filmed basically everything and smuggled it out.

[Trik'Stari]

I always quote the wikipedia article, as well as the sources it quotes for whatever I am using from that article.

 

Haven't had an issue with it.

17 hours ago, Jet_ski said:

What if you have to update North Korea’s page but inside the country you’re only allowed to say nice things about the government? Just one scenario out of many.

If anyone should not have authority to edit that specific page, or any page, it's the North Korean government lol.

[Kisai]

47 minutes ago, Trik'Stari said:

I always quote the wikipedia article, as well as the sources it quotes for whatever I am using from that article.

Quoting from Wikipedia is about the second laziest thing forum people do. The first is linking to it without any context or anchor tags.

 

Wikipedia, at best, should only be quoted for information that is hard to understand, so what you're really looking to copy is the "plain English" explanation for something rather than dense science papers, or engineering documents that are sometimes written in ways that may as well be another language itself. If the information was easy to understand in the first place, then you should be able to find the source and quote the relevant part yourself.

 

Especially when it involves legal crap, because failing to cite the actual law will burn you very hard.

 

47 minutes ago, Trik'Stari said:

Haven't had an issue with it.

If anyone should not have authority to edit that specific page, or any page, it's the North Korean government lol.

I kinda doubt North Korea edits wikipedia, or Iran, or any other country with locked-down internet kill-switches. Information that enters Wikipedia is either:

a) Stuff that Americans find interesting

or

b) Stuff that American (immigrants) find interesting from their own history and culture.

 

Other countries can of course contribute, but in general, if it's not of interest to American nerds, it's "not notable" and speedy deleted.

[Jet_ski]

1 hour ago, Caroline said:

come on there must be like 5 computers in NK, one's the president's personal and the rest are for top secret government facilities, all of them soviet EVMs with amber screens

Ok replace North Korea with China. Or any other country where things may be problematic if you criticize the government.

[LAwLz]

I think people have way too hard of a black or white thinking when it comes to Wikipedia (or on things in general really).

There is absolutely nothing wrong with using Wikipedia as a source, in the right circumstances. Of course using the first hand sources is better, but that is always the case regardless of where you get info from.

Is it really important that the info is 100% correct? If no, then go ahead and use Wikipedia. Who gives a shit if something is slightly wrong?

If the answer is yes then you shouldn't rely on a single source to begin with, and if other sources also agree with Wikipedia then the information is most likely correct. 

 

Also, people put way too much trust into stuff like books or Encyclopedia Britannica. Here is a Wikipedia article about factual errors in Britannica which have been corrected in Wikipedia (yes I do see the irony here).

Wikipedia isn't written by an all-knowing being that has all facts 100% correct, but neither is Britannica. The benefit of Wikipedia is that it is scrutinized by more people so errors are more likely to get caught and corrected.

This whole thread reminds me of why science is going down the shitter. Someone catches an error, acknowledges it and corrects it? That's apparently evidence that they were bad and should not be used!

It's the same mindset of people who are for example anti-vaxxers because "medicinal science admits to have been wrong sometimes, so therefore we can't trust them!". The entire scientific model is based on being wrong and refining things over time. 

 

 

Also, this thread reminds me of when my high school teachers were going to "prove" to us that Wikipedia was unreliable by editing an article with some incorrect info. The change was reverted within an hour.

 

 

I think Adam Ragusea (and his wife) says it really well in this video (38:50)

 

[LAwLz]

Just now, Dean0919 said:

Okay, now I'm confused. Which website provides more authentic material, Wikipedia or Britannica?

According to some older studies, Britannica is slightly more reliable than Wikipedia. But it's not by much, and like I said above, if you're using it as a source for something that isn't important then who cares? If you are using it for something important then you shouldn't use secondary sources (which both Wikipedia and Britannica are), nor should you rely on a single source.

[ravenshrike]

17 hours ago, Caroline said:

Look at these articles

Pheesics

https://sco.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pheesics

Cuikin

https://sco.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuikin

Releegion

https://sco.wikipedia.org/wiki/Releegion

 

This is one of the funniest things I've ever seen.

[nonamesm3]

In those articles "of" is sometimes "ay" sometimes "o".