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?

  • roastpotatothief
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    4
    ·
    4 years ago

    That must be the best solution - change the format so articles naturally have different sections with different perspectives on the same issue.

    Instead of “mark this article as biased so it can be fixed” the true online encyclopaedia of knowledge will have “this article is biased - as a section with an opposing, complementary perspective”

    This is brilliant. Somebody make this.

    • tofuwabohu@lemmy.161.social
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      3
      ·
      4 years ago

      This is exactly why climate change denying became popular and acceptable, because the media thought they had to represent counter arguments for everything, no matter how big the consensus among scientists was. Adding different viewpoints just for the sake of it will not fix biases but introduce other ones.

      • Ordoviz
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        4
        ·
        4 years ago

        That bias is called “undue weight”. Wikipedia has a policy to avoid it.