Talk:Reliability of Wikipedia/Archive 6

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Archive 6

Dedicated article on political editing

At the moment we do not have a dedicated article on political editing on Wikipedia, despite this being a recurring theme. I suggest starting one with this text, which contains all of the relevant examples from Conflict-of-interest editing on Wikipedia along with some new content. Suitable names would be "Political editing on Wikipedia" or "Political manipulation on Wikipedia" (cf. Ideological bias on Wikipedia, Vandalism on Wikipedia, Conflict-of-interest editing on Wikipedia). François Robere (talk) 10:20, 20 October 2022 (UTC)

What exactly do you think can be covered in such an article - please be specific - that cannot be covered here? And we both know the relevant history; Icewhiz and his sock puppets and friends [1] tried to use this article as a vehicle for their harassment campaign. This smacks of an attempt to renew these efforts by creating POVFORKs as vehicles for contentious material. Volunteer Marek 19:43, 20 October 2022 (UTC)

I don't have the impression that this talkpage is very well watched. The discussion might be better at the talkpage of Political editing on Wikipedia. To that end, I've reverted Volunteer Marek's latest redirect of that article to this. Marek, I hope you will discuss the new article there as it currently exists, and detail any concrete objections you have, including how the material is "contentious". Please don't go down the rabbithole of it being a 'vehicle for a harassment campaign', at least not without concretely describing how it could serve that purpose. Mention of Icewiz is not a magic wand to make it so. Bishonen | tålk 07:49, 21 October 2022 (UTC).

Thats fine. I redirected the article for the same reason you did - it looked like a POV fork. As to my suspicions, given the history of the article this is being spun off of and the mess that we had last time, I don’t think they’re unfounded. Regardless, they’re on record now. Volunteer Marek 14:14, 21 October 2022 (UTC)

Questionable deletion of "Criteria for evaluating reliability"?

@Randy Kryn: Thanks for appropriately italicizing Britannica and Brockhaus. What can you tell me about the removal of the following from the section on "Criteria for evaluating reliability":

The first four of these have been the subjects of various studies of the project, while the presence of bias is strongly disputed, and the prevalence and quality of citations can be tested within Wikipedia. In addition, the scientific research in the area of computational mechanism for trust and reputation in virtual societies was oriented to increase the reliability and performance of electronic communities such as Wikipedia with more quantitative methods and temporal factors.

This section begin by listing 10 criteria for evaluating reliability of something like Wikipedia. The first half of the deleted paragraph cited a reference commenting on the first four of the 10 criteria. The rest cited a reference discussing "scientific research ... oriented to increase the reliability and performance of electronic communities such as Wikipedia". That sentence could be rewritten to more clearly connect it to a particular subset of these 10 criteria, and the sentence retained could, I think, more clearly identify what is meant by intrinsic and extrinsic metrics.

However, the deletion seems to me to be inappropriate and makes it harder to understand the paragraph that was not delete.  ???

Thanks, DavidMCEddy (talk) 14:53, 16 November 2022 (UTC)

Hello DavidMCEddy, I just added italics, you may want to check the history again to see who deleted that material. Maybe a couple strike-outs in your above comment? Thanks. Randy Kryn (talk)

DavidMCEddy. I deleted those passages. I gave my rationale in the edit summary. The first sentence is simply not supported at all by the WSJ source. The WSJ article is about declining numbers of editors in 2009. The second sentence just isn't about evaluating the reliability of the encyclopedia (or any of the 10 criteria listed above). The cited study is about editor behaviour and ways of determining whether that behaviour will lead to that editor being perceived as trustworthy. It's not related to reliability of the encyclopedia. Hope this helps! Larataguera (talk) 15:44, 16 November 2022 (UTC)

I tried to reword the retained sentence in case that helps? Although I'm not sure it was really necessary. All ten of the listed criteria are really intrinsic. So feel free to revert that last change if it doesn't make it better. Incidently, where did these ten criteria come from anyway? Only one of them is cited. (Not that I have a problem with them. I just like it when things are cited.) Larataguera (talk) 15:54, 16 November 2022 (UTC)

Thanks for the reply. I don't know the source of the ten listed criteria. Should they be marked {{citation needed}}? DavidMCEddy (talk) 16:51, 16 November 2022 (UTC)

Hello DavidMCEddy. Could you consider striking out much of your first comment to me above, thanks. If it were a less viewed page I wouldn't mention it but this is one of the major Wikipedia-community pages so I don't want to take the rap as a text deletist. Thanks. Randy Kryn (talk) 18:18, 16 November 2022 (UTC)

@Randy Kryn: Thanks. I revised it to ask, "What can you tell me about the removal of" material. You then responded that you didn't remove that material. User:Larataguera then acknowledged having removed that material and explained why. I also deleted all but one use of the word "you", because (as you noted) those uses were inappropriate. (I might have used strikeouts, but I don't know how to do that off the top of my head, and it didn't seem worth researching. I hope you agree.)

I hope you find this appropriate. Thanks for your support of our great project to increase the accessibility of the "sum of all human knowledge." DavidMCEddy (talk) 10:40, 17 November 2022 (UTC)

References

Wikipedia’s Intentional Distortion of the History of the Holocaust?

I was about to publish the following text, but then I realised that a preliminary discussion is necessary. The attempt to influence the content of our articles is obvious, and the article even mentions fellow users by name, so this is a rather sensitive issue and perhaps an UNDUE edit. I leave it to you:

In 2023, Jan Grabowski and Shira Klein published an article in the Journal of Holocaust Research in which they claim to have discovered a "systematic, intentional distortion of Holocaust history" on the English-language Wikipedia. Analysing 25 Wikipedia articles and almost 300 back pages (including talk pages, noticeboards and arbitration cases) Grabowski and Klein believe they have shown how a small group of editors managed to impose a fringe narrative on Polish-Jewish relations, informed by Polish nationalist propaganda and far removed from evidence-driven historical research. In addition to the article on the Warsaw concentration camp, the authors claim that the activities of the editors' group had an effect on several articles, such as History of the Jews in Poland, Rescue of Jews by Poles during the Holocaust and Jew with a coin. Nationalist editing on these and other articles allegedly included content ranging "from minor errors to subtle manipulations and outright lies", examples of which the authors offer.

Gitz (talk) (contribs) 23:19, 9 February 2023 (UTC)

See the discussion at RSN. Doug Weller talk 08:54, 10 February 2023 (UTC)

@Doug Weller: What's "RSN"? DavidMCEddy (talk) 13:28, 11 February 2023 (UTC)

"Reliable sources noticeboard", here's the pertinent discussion: [2] Gitz (talk) (contribs) 13:36, 11 February 2023 (UTC)

References

Should the To-do list be removed as it is well over 4 years old?

I think it's pointless to have such an old list that clearly hasn't been resolved. Doug Weller talk 13:41, 11 February 2023 (UTC)

+1 seems out of date. Levivich (talk) 03:54, 12 February 2023 (UTC)

Rule Ambiguity, Institutional Clashes, and Population Loss: How Wikipedia Became the Last Good Place on the Internet

Rule Ambiguity, Institutional Clashes, and Population Loss: How Wikipedia Became the Last Good Place on the Internet

Some recent scholarship, maybe good for something. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 13:46, 30 May 2023 (UTC)

Edit request

Wikipedia's reliability was frequently criticized in the 2000s but has been improved; it has been generally praised in the late 2010s and early 2020s.

Can someone please add the bold word in? Wikipedia's reliability is not a person that can improve things. 2600:6C44:117F:95BE:11B9:8CBE:8C78:E450 (talk) 14:35, 12 May 2023 (UTC)

To improve means "to become better" when used intransitively. Paradoctor (talk) 18:22, 4 July 2023 (UTC)

Claiming 'Wikipedia is without bias due to widespread usage via users'

While users can contribute to Wikipedia, these suggestions, edits and discussions are all curated by a group of primarily anonymous individuals who are ranked as having a more valued viewpoint than any of the individual users, being given the ability to decide what is true or false along with what is shown to the general userbase. This would naturally mean that Wikipedia is susceptible to biases, most notably political and social biases along with communication biases through how information is relayed.

The article should acknowledge that Wikipedia by definition of its structure of having moderation is susceptible to a level of widespread and unchecked bias. 2A00:23C7:807:C601:AC20:FDFE:6D0B:4A3D (talk) 23:03, 17 July 2023 (UTC)

Quote from the lead: "Its editing model facilitates multiple systemic biases: namely, selection bias, inclusion bias, participation bias, and group-think bias."

We good? Paradoctor (talk) 23:18, 17 July 2023 (UTC)

No he is referring specifically to power users of the website who have a higher tier of privileges than a common editor, and have the ability to control the content of many articles when the padlock features in the top right-hand corner. Why is there no mention of this within this article? The biases of that extremely small group of users obviously affects the articles that they control through the locked article feature. 182.239.135.70 (talk) 21:39, 10 September 2023 (UTC)

Do you mean extended confirmed users? Thats not an extremely small group, its basically anyone with an account who has edited for a month or two. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 15:41, 11 September 2023 (UTC)

Citing Wikipedia articles from outside of Wikipedia

There is a long-standing rule that Wikipedia articles may not be cited by other Wikipedia articles, nor should Wikipedia ever be cited from academic papers. At the same time, there are papers analyzing the reliability of Wikipedia, the operation of Wikipedia rules (e.g. NPOV) which are intended to help maintain content quality, and the speed with which vandalism is typically reverted.

The reliability of Wikipedia is commonly reported as approximating that of other sources, and it seems like they are advocating that the use of Wikipedia as a cited source is approximately as valid as a citation to traditional encyclopedias.

Is that the actual intent, or am I reading more into this than is actually there? Fabrickator (talk) 18:02, 23 June 2023 (UTC)

You said that "nor should Wikipedia ever be cited from academic papers" but that is no longer seems to be the case. "Wikipedia’s citation rates in scholarly publications have been consistently increasing", according to research by Taemin Kim Park, 2011. Mateussf (talk) 01:53, 7 July 2023 (UTC)

A brief perusal of articles about this in Wikipedia (using the google search site:wiki.riteme.site wikipedia-should-not-be-cited-in-academic-papers) seems to suggest that it is fairly common for citing Wikipedia to be unacceptable.

However, I am not so blase about this not being totally unacceptable, because there is no requirement either that changes be reviewed, much less that they be reviewed by competent persons. There is no process in place that ensures that every change gets reviewed in some finite time frame, and there's no process in place that for every change, a reviewer will suffer substantial consequences for failure to recognize erroneous content. In a conventionally published encyclopedia, the reputation of the article authors is at stake.

If I want to get on Wikipedia and screw around with an article, I can. The false information I've added might be detected in a couple of minutes or may last for years. When I see the phony information I posted actually being reported in the media as true or being cited in an academic paper, it's hilarious. Fabrickator (talk) 03:43, 7 July 2023 (UTC)

Any academic article using WP as a source would be of low quality. There is a good reason why WP should not be used as a source, that being that the majority of articles are pretty useless. WP could be used to get a general overview of a topic a reader knew nothing about, but that is about all. I am quite astounded at times when I see what is written about topics I know something about. Often articles that initially look good have a poor use of sources, are unbalanced and agenda based. Having said that, encyclopedia britannica is often just as bad and that is usually regarded as more reliable as a source. You cannot overcome the fact that most WP editors don't have a clue and they are checked on by editors who also don't have a clue. WP is a fantastic online encyclopedia with many benefits but lets not forget its inherent limitations. Roger 8 Roger (talk) 16:14, 11 September 2023 (UTC)

Christine Lagarde and Jimbo Wales

Would something about Talk:Christine Lagarde#BLP issue qualify for addition, maybe to the "false biographical information" section? The fact that Jimbo Wales is involved seems to make this incident notable. Renerpho (talk) 06:38, 30 September 2023 (UTC)

For the purposes of inclusion in Wikipedia an incident is considered notable if it has significant coverage in reliable sources. Is there such coverage? A discussion on a talk page on Wikipedia does not qualify. —⁠andrybak (talk) 16:23, 30 September 2023 (UTC)

Relevance of third sentence

I've tagged the third sentence of the lead as it is unclear to me how the sources connect the sentence to the topic of the article:

This editing model is highly concentrated, as 77% of all articles are written by 1% of its editors, a majority of whom have chosen to remain anonymous.

What does "77% of all articles are written by 1% of its editors" have to do with the reliability of Wikipedia? By the way, this statement is prominent in the lead but does not exist at all in the body. Clayoquot (talk | contribs) 01:45, 3 November 2023 (UTC) Clayoquot (talk | contribs) 01:45, 3 November 2023 (UTC)

I suggest that we are supposed to make the inference that a large portion of the content is produced by experienced editors who are committed to adhering to WP:Policy and the presumed quality this provides. It's been at least 5 years since they came up with that number, and the extent to which this measurement (based on number of edits) is meaningful is unclear. This overlooks the fact that Wikipedia content is dynamic, with the implication that articles can be subsequently altered by editors who are less committed to maintaining its quality, notwithstanding all the implied claims that there are hordes of people to correct any erroneous content. Furthermore, to the extent that WP has a reputation of accuracy, that makes it a more attractive target for those who would benefit by maliciously altering the content.

In effect, even without any malicious editors, I feel that there's a "reversion to the mean" because the average edit is done by less competent editors than those who worked on improving the articles earlier on in the history of WP. Oh, well! Fabrickator (talk) 05:09, 3 November 2023 (UTC)

That's a plausible interpretation of the study's finding, but (as I'm sure you know) we can only give interpretations that come from published reliable sources. I haven't seen a reliable source that interprets the study's finding in relation to the reliability of Wikipedia. I'll remove the statement for now. Cheers, Clayoquot (talk | contribs) 23:55, 6 November 2023 (UTC)

References