How to use Wikipedia properly: the best and worst of Wikipedia
Posted: Sat Jul 08, 2023 8:36 am
Many young people see Wikipedia as an extension of Google, which in turn they see as essentially just using the internet. For people who never saw actual encyclopaedias, let alone actual individual reference books, they have no idea just how bad Wikipedia is. I remember in high school, just 35 years ago, that we weren't supposed to use encyclopaedias for research even, because encyclopaedias were amalgamations of individual reference books. We were taught that biased reference books were much better than supposedly unbiased pieces that lacked knowledge. Encyclopaedias, even the amazing World Book Encyclopaedia and its greatest competitor, Encyclopaedia Britannica, were bad because they were amalgamations, and you were better to go to your source.
The greatest problem with Wikipedia is summed up in one policy: Neutral Point of View, or NPOV. If they would just abandon that policy, and replace it with accuracy at all costs, they would be a whole lot better.
Another policy that is almost as bad as NPOV is the No Original Research (NOR) policy, which claims that original sources, which we were always taught were the best sources, are terrible.
This is why Wikipedia is bad, because they exclude the best parts of research and replace it with the worst. The end result of this is that, as a guarantee, they are going to be terrible.
The result of this is that Wikipedia is terrible about anything that matters. The more important a topic is, the worse Wikipedia is. Yay! Wikipedia succeeds in being neutral, or at least pretends to be neutral, though a lot of that is because there are so many editors that it is nearly impossible to work out who wrote what. It's not like each sentence has an attribution to it in terms of its author. Only experts on the topic can tell how accurately an article is written, and experts are banned from writing about any topics that they are expert at.
But Wikipedia does get some things right = articles that don't matter. So entertainment articles are usually pretty good. Anything about anything on TV, in movies, music, books, and computer games are generally pretty good, or at least so long as there is nothing controversial in them. Articles about Spongebob Squarepants, for example, can be exceptionally useful. Sadly, Wikipedia doesn't like that their unimportant articles are their best.
Quite possibly the single worst type of articles are about politics.
The article about former US President George W Bush is often quoted as being the most inaccurate article in the whole of Wikipedia, and this is not because it is barely edited - it doubles as the most edited article on Wikipedia, with some 500,000 total edits. People just can't get it right. And there is a reason for this too - because while he was president George W Bush told some of the biggest lies, including false claims that Saddam Hussein was harbouring weapons of mass destruction, or that Afghanistan had anything to do with 9/11, or that Afghanistan were harbouring Al Qaeda. The worst part is that many of Bush's lies were compounded from his father George H Bush's lies, that included the false claim that Iraq had invaded Kuwait, or that Kuwait was a democracy, or that Iraq wasn't, and so on and so forth, all of which we were told we had to accept as true because we were traitors if we didn't.
Related to the lies in the George W Bush articles are lies about 9/11, the two US invasions of Iraq, the Iraqi annexation of Kuwait, and the US invasion of Afghanistan. Anything that touches George W Bush is lied about on Wikipedia.
Next-worst is the article about Donald Trump. Love him or hate him, the Wikipedia article has nothing to do with what actually happened. The difference between this and the Bush article is that it actually existed in a reasonably-accurate fashion until he became president, and they kept at least some of his pre-presidential article in place. It was almost like he could be spoken about fairly accurately while he was not a politician, but as soon as he became a politician they were committed to the lie. I kept checking every time that a new piece of information came out related to him, whether it was about the Durham Report or the revelations about Hunter Biden, but Wikipedia either completely ignored them, or, if they did mention them, it was only to pretend that they didn't matter.
It's not like other politicians are spoken about honestly. Joe Biden's page is horrific too, as is Hillary Clinton's. Indeed, every major American politician has an inaccurate article about them.
In terms of accuracy, the least important they are determines how accurate their articles are, and you could plot a chart to work it out. Minor politicians who don't really matter might be lucky enough to get wholly-accurate articles written about them - at least until someone decides that they need to be written about in a certain way. Then it stops just being biased (which is okay) and becomes absolute lies.
Here in Australia, the least-accurate article on Wikipedia is not about an individual politician, but a political decision = the creation of the Goods and Services Tax, or GST. Wikipedia claims that it was popular, but it was actually widely hated. Nobody in Australia has ever claimed it to be popular, but Wikipedia go on about it as if it is fact. It's like they have no concept of what is really going on.
Related inaccurate articles are about the Port Arthur massacre, which led to widespread gun control, and the Children Overboard scandal, which led to some immigration law reforms. Wikipedia refers to the latter as the MV Tampa incident, as if to try to bury it by not referring to it by its normal name.
Internationally, the worst article is about the Lockerbie Bombing, which Wikipedia refers to as Pan Am Flight 103, which, like with the Children Overboard scandal, is not how most people refer to it.
They love to refer to topics by completely the wrong names, so as to bury them.
So if you were researching anything at all, you should never use Wikipedia. It is like an encyclopaedia, an amalgam of ideas, but it is much worse than the likes of World Book or Britannica, not because it is online, but because of NPOV and NOR, and an inability to tell who wrote what.
Even ancient historical facts are lied about on Wikipedia, such as the articles about the Bermuda Triangle and Atlantis, which Wikipedia gets completely wrong in spite of being thousands of years old.
The greatest problem with Wikipedia is summed up in one policy: Neutral Point of View, or NPOV. If they would just abandon that policy, and replace it with accuracy at all costs, they would be a whole lot better.
Another policy that is almost as bad as NPOV is the No Original Research (NOR) policy, which claims that original sources, which we were always taught were the best sources, are terrible.
This is why Wikipedia is bad, because they exclude the best parts of research and replace it with the worst. The end result of this is that, as a guarantee, they are going to be terrible.
The result of this is that Wikipedia is terrible about anything that matters. The more important a topic is, the worse Wikipedia is. Yay! Wikipedia succeeds in being neutral, or at least pretends to be neutral, though a lot of that is because there are so many editors that it is nearly impossible to work out who wrote what. It's not like each sentence has an attribution to it in terms of its author. Only experts on the topic can tell how accurately an article is written, and experts are banned from writing about any topics that they are expert at.
But Wikipedia does get some things right = articles that don't matter. So entertainment articles are usually pretty good. Anything about anything on TV, in movies, music, books, and computer games are generally pretty good, or at least so long as there is nothing controversial in them. Articles about Spongebob Squarepants, for example, can be exceptionally useful. Sadly, Wikipedia doesn't like that their unimportant articles are their best.
Quite possibly the single worst type of articles are about politics.
The article about former US President George W Bush is often quoted as being the most inaccurate article in the whole of Wikipedia, and this is not because it is barely edited - it doubles as the most edited article on Wikipedia, with some 500,000 total edits. People just can't get it right. And there is a reason for this too - because while he was president George W Bush told some of the biggest lies, including false claims that Saddam Hussein was harbouring weapons of mass destruction, or that Afghanistan had anything to do with 9/11, or that Afghanistan were harbouring Al Qaeda. The worst part is that many of Bush's lies were compounded from his father George H Bush's lies, that included the false claim that Iraq had invaded Kuwait, or that Kuwait was a democracy, or that Iraq wasn't, and so on and so forth, all of which we were told we had to accept as true because we were traitors if we didn't.
Related to the lies in the George W Bush articles are lies about 9/11, the two US invasions of Iraq, the Iraqi annexation of Kuwait, and the US invasion of Afghanistan. Anything that touches George W Bush is lied about on Wikipedia.
Next-worst is the article about Donald Trump. Love him or hate him, the Wikipedia article has nothing to do with what actually happened. The difference between this and the Bush article is that it actually existed in a reasonably-accurate fashion until he became president, and they kept at least some of his pre-presidential article in place. It was almost like he could be spoken about fairly accurately while he was not a politician, but as soon as he became a politician they were committed to the lie. I kept checking every time that a new piece of information came out related to him, whether it was about the Durham Report or the revelations about Hunter Biden, but Wikipedia either completely ignored them, or, if they did mention them, it was only to pretend that they didn't matter.
It's not like other politicians are spoken about honestly. Joe Biden's page is horrific too, as is Hillary Clinton's. Indeed, every major American politician has an inaccurate article about them.
In terms of accuracy, the least important they are determines how accurate their articles are, and you could plot a chart to work it out. Minor politicians who don't really matter might be lucky enough to get wholly-accurate articles written about them - at least until someone decides that they need to be written about in a certain way. Then it stops just being biased (which is okay) and becomes absolute lies.
Here in Australia, the least-accurate article on Wikipedia is not about an individual politician, but a political decision = the creation of the Goods and Services Tax, or GST. Wikipedia claims that it was popular, but it was actually widely hated. Nobody in Australia has ever claimed it to be popular, but Wikipedia go on about it as if it is fact. It's like they have no concept of what is really going on.
Related inaccurate articles are about the Port Arthur massacre, which led to widespread gun control, and the Children Overboard scandal, which led to some immigration law reforms. Wikipedia refers to the latter as the MV Tampa incident, as if to try to bury it by not referring to it by its normal name.
Internationally, the worst article is about the Lockerbie Bombing, which Wikipedia refers to as Pan Am Flight 103, which, like with the Children Overboard scandal, is not how most people refer to it.
They love to refer to topics by completely the wrong names, so as to bury them.
So if you were researching anything at all, you should never use Wikipedia. It is like an encyclopaedia, an amalgam of ideas, but it is much worse than the likes of World Book or Britannica, not because it is online, but because of NPOV and NOR, and an inability to tell who wrote what.
Even ancient historical facts are lied about on Wikipedia, such as the articles about the Bermuda Triangle and Atlantis, which Wikipedia gets completely wrong in spite of being thousands of years old.
