Wikipedia fallacies

[Pinkbullet3]

I've never found any fallacies, but I do know that my school's IP is blocked for editing on Wiki due to too much vandalism over the past, lol (surprisng, right? -.- )

 

romy y u so hot

[1230abcz]

So basically you randomly created a post with no means of backing your views up and just stated that Wikipedia has a few poorly controlled and written articles. It would be better if you had a few examples of articles so you could prove a point.

 

Ot:

 

I know that a lot of Wikipedia articles are not entirely accurate. Most college professors and high school English teachers won't accept Wikipedia as a valid source for any research paper.

 

 

You obviously don't know... Unless you're super unlucky, you wont ever find a Wikipedia article that has been incorrectly edited for more than a couple minutes. I've tried adding false information with sources cited (credible sources, like my AP Biology textbook), and they ALWAYS get changed back to normal. Only idiot professors don't accept sources from Wikipedia because they think it's a horrible conglomeration of false information edited by little 14-year-olds with no lives. [/rant]

 

Try changing a Wikipedia article (even something entirely random as a 3 paragraph article about a random asteroid orbiting Jupiter) with an appropriate source cited, and it'll get changed no doubt within an hour. If you change something popular (let's say something about a city or science related), your false edit will get changed in a matter of minutes. Wikipedia is perfectly credible, as long as you haven't been fed lies from teachers stating otherwise.

[ilya]

 

This is how they catch the tricky rebells who try to change the articles by the way.

[Vansing]

A friend of mine made up a country and put it on wikipedia, it was there for over a day before it was taken down.

 

It was called Hindia. Everyone who moved there got a cannabis plantation and a cow.

[obfuscator]

In general I find wikipedia to be pretty good - I'd never use it as a reference for anything but I usually start my research with a wikipedia article, it generally gives a good background, plus many references they use are great sources.

[Danqazmlp]

Indeed, Wikipedia a great source if I want somewhere to start when looking at a topic. It is like a text book, has the general information you need, but if you want to write something Academic, you will need to dig deeper.

 

Also, a few years ago, somebody from my course at uni edited something about the course and the teaching staff on wiki, but I forget what and where it actually was.

[revanlives]

I was researching sadism and masochism for a psychology paper, when I decided to click BDSM (Bondage Discipline Sadomasochism). When I opened the page, all that was written on it was:

 

BDSM IS KINKY! BDSM IS KINKY! BDSM IS KINKY! BDSM IS KINKY! BDSM IS KINKY! BDSM IS KINKY! BDSM IS KINKY! BDSM IS KINKY! BDSM IS KINKY! BDSM IS KINKY! BDSM IS KINKY! BDSM IS KINKY! BDSM IS KINKY! BDSM IS KINKY!

 

literally dozens of lines.

[Furah]

My friend found this a week or two ago:

 

Wheelchair basketball? Now that's hardcore.

I'm more interested in that there underwater football.

[hihihi727]

So basically you randomly created a post with no means of backing your views up and just stated that Wikipedia has a few poorly controlled and written articles. It would be better if you had a few examples of articles so you could prove a point.

 

Ot:

 

I know that a lot of Wikipedia articles are not entirely accurate. Most college professors and high school English teachers won't accept Wikipedia as a valid source for any research paper.

 

 

You obviously don't know... Unless you're super unlucky, you wont ever find a Wikipedia article that has been incorrectly edited for more than a couple minutes. I've tried adding false information with sources cited (credible sources, like my AP Biology textbook), and they ALWAYS get changed back to normal. Only idiot professors don't accept sources from Wikipedia because they think it's a horrible conglomeration of false information edited by little 14-year-olds with no lives. [/rant]

 

Try changing a Wikipedia article (even something entirely random as a 3 paragraph article about a random asteroid orbiting Jupiter) with an appropriate source cited, and it'll get changed no doubt within an hour. If you change something popular (let's say something about a city or science related), your false edit will get changed in a matter of minutes. Wikipedia is perfectly credible, as long as you haven't been fed lies from teachers stating otherwise.

 

Wikipedia is quite credible as far as information on the internet goes, but that doesn't mean that professors who don't accept it as a credible source are idiots. A study showed that the average scientific Wikipedia article has an average of 3 scientific errors which isn't much, but it shouldn't be used as a primary source of research. Contrary to your belief, teachers don't think that its full of false information edited by little 14-year olds with no lives. Instead, its common knowledge that many articles contain errors (albeit small ones). BTW, the "sources" that Wikipedia cites aren't always credible, actually they are often random websites that most people have never heard of. But i admit it is annoying if you quote wikipedia and people go "lol anyone can edit wikipedia thats not true"

[stonewall337]

Hmm, I know Wikipedia isn't 100% trustable but I always thought they had ninjas that jumped up on any wrong information relatively quickly.

2 of my friends were bored so they went on and changed 'William the Conquerer' to 'William the Pooper'. Everywhere they saw London they added a 'g' after each 'n', as well. It was changed back within a few minutes.

Get some new friends. People who would commit vandalism for their own amusement are arses.

[Romy]

I just looked up "Wikipedia" on Wikipedia, and here's what I found:

 

Attacks on the encyclopedia

 

The open nature of the editing model has been central to most criticism of Wikipedia. For example, a reader of an article cannot be certain that it has not been vandalized with the insertion of false information or the removal of essential information. Former Encyclopaedia Britannica editor-in-chief Robert McHenry once described this by saying:[54]

 

The user who visits Wikipedia to learn about some subject, to confirm some matter of fact, is rather in the position of a visitor to a public restroom. It may be obviously dirty, so that he knows to exercise great care, or it may seem fairly clean, so that he may be lulled into a false sense of security. What he certainly does not know is who has used the facilities before him. Wikipedia [is a] faith-based encyclopedia.[55]

practice, vandalism is fairly easy to remove from wikis, and the median time to detect and fix vandalisms is typically very low, usually a few minutes,[14][15] but in one particularly well-publicized incident, false information was introduced into the biography of American political figure John Seigenthaler and remained undetected for four months.[56] John Seigenthaler, the founding editorial director of USA Today and founder of the Freedom Forum First Amendment Center at Vanderbilt University, called Jimmy Wales and asked if Wales had any way of knowing who contributed the misinformation. Wales replied that he did not.[57] This incident led to policy changes on the site, specifically targeted at tightening up the verifiability of all biographical articles of living people.

 

Wikipedia's open structure inherently makes it an easy target for Internet trolls, spamming, and those with an agenda to push.[47][58] The addition of political spin to articles by organizations including members of the U.S. House of Representatives and special interest groups[13] has been noted,[59] and organizations such as Microsoft have offered financial incentives to work on certain articles.[60] These issues have been parodied, notably by Stephen Colbert in The Colbert Report.[61]

 

For example, in August 2007, the website WikiScanner began to trace the sources of changes made to Wikipedia by anonymous editors without Wikipedia accounts. The program revealed that many such edits were made by corporations or government agencies changing the content of articles related to them, their personnel or their work.[62]

 

In practice, the Wikipedia is defended from attack by multiple systems and techniques. These include users checking pages and edits, computer programs ('bots') that are carefully designed to try to detect attacks and fix them automatically (or semi-automatically), blocks on the creation of links to particular websites, blocks on edits from particular accounts, IP addresses or address ranges.

 

For heavily attacked pages, particular articles can be semi-protected so that only well established accounts can edit them,[63] or for particularly contentious cases, locked so that only administrators are able to make changes.[64]

 

 

Quality

 

Critics argue[who?] that non-expert editing undermines quality. Because contributors usually rewrite small portions of an entry rather than making full-length revisions, high- and low-quality content may be intermingled within an entry. Historian Roy Rosenzweig noted: "Overall, writing is the Achilles' heel of Wikipedia. Committees rarely write well, and Wikipedia entries often have a choppy quality that results from the stringing together of sentences or paragraphs written by different people."

 

 

Lastly, and most importantly-

Reliability

Main article: Reliability of Wikipedia

 

As a consequence of the open structure, Wikipedia "makes no guarantee of validity" of its content, since no one is ultimately responsible for any claims appearing in it.[81] Concerns have been raised regarding the lack of accountability that results from users' anonymity,[82] the insertion of spurious information[83], vandalism, and similar problems.

 

Wikipedia has been accused of exhibiting systemic bias and inconsistency;[12] additionally, critics argue that Wikipedia's open nature and a lack of proper sources for much of the information makes it unreliable.[84] Some commentators suggest that Wikipedia is generally reliable, but that the reliability of any given article is not always clear.[11] Editors of traditional reference works such as the Encyclopædia Britannica have questioned the project's utility and status as an encyclopedia.[85] Many university lecturers discourage students from citing any encyclopedia in academic work, preferring primary sources;[86] some specifically prohibit Wikipedia citations.[87] Co-founder Jimmy Wales stresses that encyclopedias of any type are not usually appropriate as primary sources, and should not be relied upon as authoritative.[88]

 

However, an investigation reported in the journal Nature in 2005 suggested that for scientific articles Wikipedia came close to the level of accuracy of Encyclopædia Britannica and had a similar rate of "serious errors."[16] These claims have been disputed by Encyclopædia Britannica.[89][90]

 

Ireland's largest selling newspaper said in February 2010 that rival Britannica offers a "farcically inaccurate version" of the country's history. An opposition Senator said "This screwy version of events is a gross insult and that it is being used to educate our children is even more ridiculous." The Irish Department of Education, who paid €450,000 to give children in school online access to Britannica (Wikipedia is a free resource), issued a statement saying they were "disappointed".[91][92]

 

Andrew Lih, author of the 2009 book The Wikipedia Revolution, notes: "A wiki has all its activities happening in the open for inspection... Trust is built by observing the actions of others in the community and discovering people with like or complementary interests.”[93] Economist Tyler Cowen writes, "If I had to guess whether Wikipedia or the median refereed journal article on economics was more likely to be true, after a not so long think I would opt for Wikipedia." He comments that many traditional sources of non-fiction suffer from systemic biases. Novel results are over-reported in journal articles, and relevant information is omitted from news reports. However, he also cautions that errors are frequently found on Internet sites, and that academics and experts must be vigilant in correcting them.[94]

 

In February 2007, an article in The Harvard Crimson newspaper reported that some of the professors at Harvard University include Wikipedia in their syllabi, but that there is a split in their perception of using Wikipedia.[95] In June 2007, former president of the American Library Association Michael Gorman condemned Wikipedia, along with Google,[96] stating that academics who endorse the use of Wikipedia are "the intellectual equivalent of a dietitian who recommends a steady diet of Big Macs with everything". He also said that "a generation of intellectual sluggards incapable of moving beyond the Internet" was being produced at universities. He complains that the web-based sources are discouraging students from learning from the more rare texts which are either found only on paper or are on subscription-only web sites. In the same article Jenny Fry (a research fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute) commented on academics who cite Wikipedia, saying that: "You cannot say children are intellectually lazy because they are using the Internet when academics are using search engines in their research. The difference is that they have more experience of being critical about what is retrieved and whether it is authoritative. Children need to be told how to use the Internet in a critical and appropriate way."

 

 

 

The funny thing is, that I also looked it up on different languages (such as Hebrew and Spanish) and apparently, the values differ A LOT...

 

 

 

Your thoughts?

 

 

 

EDIT: I think that was my 1000th post :^_^: .

Edited March 2, 2010 by romy

[unkn0wnwarrior]

Hmm, I know Wikipedia isn't 100% trustable but I always thought they had ninjas that jumped up on any wrong information relatively quickly.

2 of my friends were bored so they went on and changed 'William the Conquerer' to 'William the Pooper'. Everywhere they saw London they added a 'g' after each 'n', as well. It was changed back within a few minutes.

Get some new friends. People who would commit vandalism for their own amusement are arses.

Considering this was almost 8 years ago, and that was a one-time deal... I think I'll keep them. Actually, I would anyway.

[mario_sunny]

Willy on Wheels!

[vivimancer]

The wikipedos are pretty fast at reverting vandalism, cases of Willy on Wheels, Zodiac Template Vandal and Grawp do crop up but even with a million open proxy's those guys get bored because they realise sysops usually have nothing better to do and its easier to press "revert" that it is to blank articles. Honestly the best way to post useless junk to wiki is become an administrator using this guide first then create such gems as (NSFW?) /Breast_ironing or /Comco_clamp or /Placentophagy

 

Wiki sysops used to go into aspie fit mode anyone tried to re-write the article on *chan image boards after the "SO I HURD U LIEK..." drama or try and mention that Wikipedia its not the greatest thing since the library of Alexandria.

 

Frankly if you think its cool to create random unfunny pages try Uncyclopedia =)

[Alg]

 

Frankly if you think its cool to create random unfunny pages try Uncyclopedia =)

Which according to one of the wikis was originally created to house funny vandalism from Wikipedia.

[sees_all1]

I prefer Uncyclopedia...

[vivimancer]

 

Which according to one of the wikis was originally created to house funny vandalism from Wikipedia.

 

sauce?