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Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks

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Re: Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks

#231
post #12

There has been this trend recently of calling Wikipedia the last good thing on the internet. And i agree its great, i spend an inordinate amount of my time on Wikimedia related things. But i think there is a danger here with all these articles putting Wikipedia too much on a pedestal. It isn't perfect. It isn't perfectly neutral or perfectly reliable. It has flaws. The true best part of Wikipedia is that its a work i…

[flagged]

Re: Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks

#232
post #12

There has been this trend recently of calling Wikipedia the last good thing on the internet. And i agree its great, i spend an inordinate amount of my time on Wikimedia related things. But i think there is a danger here with all these articles putting Wikipedia too much on a pedestal. It isn't perfect. It isn't perfectly neutral or perfectly reliable. It has flaws. The true best part of Wikipedia is that its a work i…

I used to edit for wikipedia. I saw a "problem" where a specific troll factory was pushing a particular narrative which is factually contrary to international law. I held out for as long as I could but it was emotionally draining

    > factually contrary to international law
Can you provide us with more specifics? I am curious to hear more.

Re: Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks

#234
post #12

There has been this trend recently of calling Wikipedia the last good thing on the internet. And i agree its great, i spend an inordinate amount of my time on Wikimedia related things. But i think there is a danger here with all these articles putting Wikipedia too much on a pedestal. It isn't perfect. It isn't perfectly neutral or perfectly reliable. It has flaws. The true best part of Wikipedia is that its a work i…

"It isn't perfect." Articles about some chemical process are fine, indeed often excellent. Everything where facts get filtered and presented, is bad. Read about real world events - especially where different groups or countries were involved - in three different languages on Wikipedia, and you'd think three different universes exist.

It isn't so much as bad, as inevitable. And as you say, Wikipedia has the built-in antidote with the other language versions and the Talk pages.

Re: Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks

#235
post #233

Wikipedia is fabulous. I wish educators would stop telling people that it’s not reliable, and start using it to teach media literacy - which, for wiki purposes, is essentially to read the talk page to see what viewpoints have been included and excluded and why.

Aren't they exactly teaching students media literacy by warning them Wikipedia is not reliable ?

Re: Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks

#237
post #233

Wikipedia is fabulous. I wish educators would stop telling people that it’s not reliable, and start using it to teach media literacy - which, for wiki purposes, is essentially to read the talk page to see what viewpoints have been included and excluded and why.

Aren't they exactly teaching students media literacy by warning them Wikipedia is not reliable ?

No, because media literacy is not about sorting the world into “reliable” and “unreliable”, it’s about understanding a text in its full context.

Re: Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks

#238
post #233

Wikipedia is fabulous. I wish educators would stop telling people that it’s not reliable, and start using it to teach media literacy - which, for wiki purposes, is essentially to read the talk page to see what viewpoints have been included and excluded and why.

My daughter's teacher told her class that Wikipedia is unreliable because it's just made up by volunteers. So I asked her where they should find information and she said other sites on the internet that can't just be edited by anyone.

Blew my mind.

Re: Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks

#240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

It's handy to have a neutral place I can look up books or passages of the Christian Bible so that I have a reference point when talking to people about it

Isn't the issue with this is that you would first have to know which bible to use ?
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