I mean, you have an unlimited amount of contributors from academic and hyper-fixated autistic backgrounds, so at some point it has to be accurate from just the massive number of eyes looking over it
The hypothetical issue is that those eyes cannot be on every single update at all times. Pages tend to get fixed quickly, but it’s not perfect. At any point that you go to read an article, there is a chance that the article had been defaced recently with misinformation and one of those benevolent eyes has just not gotten around to fixing it yet. Nowadays, with all the automated systems in place, it is a fairly rare likelihood that something like that would happen, but it’s still possible.
Wikipedians are terrifyingly fast at getting out some updates. If someone dies, their article moves to the past tense often within 10 minutes of their death being known, assuming they were at all prominent.
You should always be a bit skeptical, sometimes really arcane subjects’ articles are written by one of the handful of people who understand them, sometimes they’re very subtly wrong but not prominent enough to get the right attention. If something seems off, Wikipedia has tools like the Talk page, and looking at Edit history, that can allow you to glean information in-platform about what might be happening. Edit wars, vandalism, disagreements among editors, maybe a negotiated agreement about a way to represent something controversial, all can become clearer by looking at those resources. You can also check its sources, to see if they agree with what felt off to you, or if there isn’t a good source on that claim.
It’s not perfect, any system can fail, but at least it has reasonable tools to figure out why it says what it says, and dig further.
I mean if I have to read the slop, I’ll still need to read Wikipedia to verify the accuracy. Just take me to the real info.
I love how Wikipedia has now become the source of accurate information. Such a strange timeline.
I think it was before 2010, I saw an article that said Wikipedia was already more accurate than traditional encyclopedias.
I suppose you don’t need to buy a whole 5 kg of Wikipedia each year to keep up with the latest updates.
It pretty much always was?
It’s a tertiary source, so not appropriate for citing in your essays, but that isn’t a comment on the accuracy.
I mean, you have an unlimited amount of contributors from academic and hyper-fixated autistic backgrounds, so at some point it has to be accurate from just the massive number of eyes looking over it
The hypothetical issue is that those eyes cannot be on every single update at all times. Pages tend to get fixed quickly, but it’s not perfect. At any point that you go to read an article, there is a chance that the article had been defaced recently with misinformation and one of those benevolent eyes has just not gotten around to fixing it yet. Nowadays, with all the automated systems in place, it is a fairly rare likelihood that something like that would happen, but it’s still possible.
Wikipedians are terrifyingly fast at getting out some updates. If someone dies, their article moves to the past tense often within 10 minutes of their death being known, assuming they were at all prominent.
You should always be a bit skeptical, sometimes really arcane subjects’ articles are written by one of the handful of people who understand them, sometimes they’re very subtly wrong but not prominent enough to get the right attention. If something seems off, Wikipedia has tools like the Talk page, and looking at Edit history, that can allow you to glean information in-platform about what might be happening. Edit wars, vandalism, disagreements among editors, maybe a negotiated agreement about a way to represent something controversial, all can become clearer by looking at those resources. You can also check its sources, to see if they agree with what felt off to you, or if there isn’t a good source on that claim.
It’s not perfect, any system can fail, but at least it has reasonable tools to figure out why it says what it says, and dig further.