31–40 of 42 posts
Those who are interested in seeing the hoax article can find a copy of it at this mirror site: http://www.thefullwiki.org/Bicholim_conflict
Guess they missed the whole "deleted" flag.
A problem that prevents people from spotting things like this is that there are tons and tons of sites that just have copies of Wikipedia articles or the site just blindly copies things from Wikipedia. For example... Alicia Keys birthday on Wikipedia is wrong, she was born in 1980, not 1981. If you read the Talk page about this there are several times where discussion of this takes place. But due to a Wiki Admin sitt…
Wikipedia is not about truth, it is about verifiability. That's fine, everyone[1] knows this. Anything that appears in WP should be traceable to multiple reliable printed sources. For the article you mention there should be some way of getting multiple reliable sources of a birthdate. When one person sits on a page there's verious conflict resolution measure to jump through that might help. I hate WP so I'm not going…
...did you not write the footnote or something?
However, increasingly people are using wikipedia as a first and only source of data, and this includes many of those "trusted organizations", which produces a trust loop paradox. And this is because despite all these faults wikipedia still manages to be a solid, accurate source of information most of the time.
We're not going to escape out of this paradox until primary sources become more available on the internet and we start getting articles written which make use of primary sources.
One of the results of Wikipedia, is that I now take every supposedly reliable article with a grain of salt. Any encyclopedia that doesn't provide detailed references that I can review, I presume to be inaccurate until proven otherwise. That, I think, is the greatest contribution that Wikipedia has made - it requires people to cite their sources, before they get any credibility; and even then, there is always some dou…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Wikipedia is certainly a safe source for that. Until you want to know about India-Portugal relations.
And this of course is the tricky bit. There is a parable about a conqueror who captured a city by throwing a handful of diseased grain into the grainary and telling the town this. The town surrendered to his siege rather than anyone eat possibly tainted grain. Of course the message is that you can sometimes destroy the value of a large asset or strength with a small act. The trick is that if anyone ate the grain it w…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
And this of course is the tricky bit. There is a parable about a conqueror who captured a city by throwing a handful of diseased grain into the grainary and telling the town this. The town surrendered to his siege rather than anyone eat possibly tainted grain. Of course the message is that you can sometimes destroy the value of a large asset or strength with a small act. The trick is that if anyone ate the grain it w…
And yet regular journalism is as bad but we don't see constant hand wringing about how the NYT or WSJ is full of BS.
One of the results of Wikipedia, is that I now take every supposedly reliable article with a grain of salt. Any encyclopedia that doesn't provide detailed references that I can review, I presume to be inaccurate until proven otherwise. That, I think, is the greatest contribution that Wikipedia has made - it requires people to cite their sources, before they get any credibility; and even then, there is always some dou…
I hope you apply the same standard to news and magazine articles, and realize the sorry state that journalism is in now. Wikipedia will never e better than the sum of its sources, many of which are awful.
This is a good reminder of the only safe way to use Wikipedia: as a pointer to references, rather than as an actual source of information. And you must check those references yourself, rather than assuming that they say what the article authors claim they say.
Is there really something like a "save way"? Every expressed knowledge can be wrong in the end. You can increase your level of certainty by checking the origin of the information, reputation of source and author, or by measuring against common sense. What degree of certainty is needed for - looking up a subject you are generally interested in? A undergrad paper? A local newspaper journalist? A doctoral thesis? 90% of…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes I believe I suggested adding in both years as a compromise unfortunately the admin would not budge. Going through various commitee groups on Wikpedia to get this compromise did not seem like a good use of my time
Perhaps it would be a good idea for disputes to be recorded with the wikipedia article i.e. in your case their would be a dispute registered in the foot notes over the birth date of Alicia Keys(with a link to the alternative put forward). This would allow others to investigate further if need be, adding any new information to the dispute as and when found.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wikipedia is not about truth, it is about verifiability. That's fine, everyone[1] knows this. Anything that appears in WP should be traceable to multiple reliable printed sources. For the article you mention there should be some way of getting multiple reliable sources of a birthdate. When one person sits on a page there's verious conflict resolution measure to jump through that might help. I hate WP so I'm not going…
"Anything that appears in WP should be traceable to multiple reliable printed sources." However, even "professional" journalists have become so sloppy these days that it's likely that the printed source used Wikipedia as the basis for its information.
This is not a new thing - journalists have been sloppy with facts for a long time.
It is simply more noticeable now, with multiple sources of information.