I LOVE Wikipedia, I think it’s one of the best websites of the internet.
But the fact is that Wikipedia has many flaws:
- Editing became very hard on Wikipedia based on the amount of rules to respect
- Wikipedia is biased, many cultures and minorities are not well represented among editors and pages.
- Wikipedia is a dependence, I can’t imagine Wikipedia disappear, I think it already changed the way people see knowledge, not as something fixed anymore, but as something dynamic that changes and evolve.
- Wikipedia ‘sources admission’ are also very… Weird. Because you can be a professional in a special field, it doesn’t mean your contribution will be accepted, just because your source is not coming from a ‘reliable source’, even if YOU are this reliable source.
There are other problems as well, but I think those are the most important ones.
What do you think about it? If you could change anything or everything to Wikipedia, what would you do?
If the article in question is something that needs sources that are scientific. What if you want to update a page about a band (for example) you are actually in, are you then not one of the valid sources? (I think @SnowCode@lemmy.ml is referring to this).
In deed that was one of the thing I got in mind. I don’t think the academic writing rules can be applied to any topic the same way.
Oh that makes sense. In that case I guess Wikipedia could use a way to verify “original source” of information. if they don’t have that already
The main issue is that it needs to be verifiable. If you do original research and write on the basis of your own knowledge, there’s no (easy) way for anyone else to verify that what you wrote is true. The trust is on that one person who claims to have experience with what they wrote. @Niquarl@lemmy.ml mentioned the second main issue which is bias. If you’re writing about a topic that is close to you that has multiple viewpoints, what you’re writing is most likely going to be biased toward that view. Wikipedia can’t just have “the truth” about a topic that people disagree about through consensus. It’s job is to only list the different viewpoint and to tell how prevalent those viewpoints are.
If the topic is notable, you’re likely to find a good source that talks about that topic, if you can’t find a source for that (regardless of how true you think that fact is), then too bad.
I think the idea is to try to get less bias. A lot of French MPs offices edit their MPs page, sometimes not even malicious but sometimes just reorganising critiques or whatever. Wikipedia has had to ban a couple of IP adresses because of this.
In a lot of cases that makes indeed sense, that if i create a personal wikipedia page and declare myself person awesome the awesomenest and emperor of the world that that will not fly. But academic writing rules can’t be fully translated to be talking about people, or groups, or particular things. It really depends on the topic which ruleset you can apply (and i guess Wikipedia is trying to do that).
I suppose you could say that an academic could write a paper about it then use that as their source? Maybe a form of verified accounts could be implemented into wikipedia in a sort of test run.