<story><title>Ten years ago Wikipedia was widely considered a doomed experiment</title><url>https://medium.com/@cdixon/it-s-hard-to-believe-today-but-10-years-ago-wikipedia-was-widely-considered-a-doomed-experiment-a7a0dfd27b8b#.9bk1kti56</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>swang</author><text>When the SOPA&amp;#x2F;PIPA protests happened in 2012, I was really surprised to learn that students were upset since all they used as a resource was Wikipedia.&lt;p&gt;I mean for the most part I agree with the quoted articles in that Wikipedia is hard to &amp;quot;verify&amp;quot; other than what you believe sounds true. And sometimes this happens.&lt;p&gt;1) Someone write something on Wikipedia
2) Person changes it
3) Another person reverts, citing source X. Source X is &amp;quot;Celebrity Magazine&amp;quot; which may or may not have actually checked that fact on Wikipedia.
5) Repeat&lt;p&gt;It is a bit scary how much our source of information is just this one site source without decent &amp;quot;fact&amp;quot; checking other than turf war related reasons.&lt;p&gt;Here is one: I am pretty certain that Alicia Keys was born in 1980 and not 1981 as her Wikipedia article says. I have no way to prove this based on Wikipedia standards and if you look on &amp;quot;the Internet&amp;quot; you sometimes see 1980 and sometimes see 1981. The editors who turfed her page at the time sided with the 1981 timeline.&lt;p&gt;And how did they &amp;quot;prove&amp;quot; it was 1981? They showed links to some music related websites with articles about her saying she was born in that year. Completely ignoring alternative sources that said she was born in 1981.&lt;p&gt;I mean there are certain explanations on why this happened:
1) A major publication cited her DOB as 1981, others followed suit.
2) Alicia keys&amp;#x27; handlers want her to be a year younger than she is, so she told her PR people to make sure everyone says she was born a year younger.
3) Someone misheard she was born in 1981, wrote that down on Wikipedia, then everyone else just used Wikipedia as a reference.&lt;p&gt;The problem I&amp;#x27;m trying to get at is, Wikipedia is so popular its hard to figure out if people are just lazy and using it as a source, which perpetuates this cycle of &amp;quot;Fact F on Article A is true because of source S, Source S it turns out, used article A to look up Fact F and reprinted it without really fact checking F.&lt;p&gt;So yeah, popular, but hard to determine how accurate. &amp;#x2F;rant.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mikekchar</author><text>Now try to follow the same thought process for other sources of information.  Ever see a citation in a newspaper?  How do you check the facts on the evening news?  What is the sequence of events leading to something being reported (and believed by the vast majority of people reading it)?&lt;p&gt;1) Reporter discovers something (how???) 2) Reporter submits it 3) Some editor approves&amp;#x2F;rejects it (how&amp;#x2F;why???) 4) A very good looking person presents it to you on TV along with audio and visual designed to make it look plausible.&lt;p&gt;If it turns out to be untrue, is it reported? What if you discover that it is untrue yourself?  How do you correct it?&lt;p&gt;So yeah, even more popular that wikipedia, but hard to determine how accurate.</text></comment>
<story><title>Ten years ago Wikipedia was widely considered a doomed experiment</title><url>https://medium.com/@cdixon/it-s-hard-to-believe-today-but-10-years-ago-wikipedia-was-widely-considered-a-doomed-experiment-a7a0dfd27b8b#.9bk1kti56</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>swang</author><text>When the SOPA&amp;#x2F;PIPA protests happened in 2012, I was really surprised to learn that students were upset since all they used as a resource was Wikipedia.&lt;p&gt;I mean for the most part I agree with the quoted articles in that Wikipedia is hard to &amp;quot;verify&amp;quot; other than what you believe sounds true. And sometimes this happens.&lt;p&gt;1) Someone write something on Wikipedia
2) Person changes it
3) Another person reverts, citing source X. Source X is &amp;quot;Celebrity Magazine&amp;quot; which may or may not have actually checked that fact on Wikipedia.
5) Repeat&lt;p&gt;It is a bit scary how much our source of information is just this one site source without decent &amp;quot;fact&amp;quot; checking other than turf war related reasons.&lt;p&gt;Here is one: I am pretty certain that Alicia Keys was born in 1980 and not 1981 as her Wikipedia article says. I have no way to prove this based on Wikipedia standards and if you look on &amp;quot;the Internet&amp;quot; you sometimes see 1980 and sometimes see 1981. The editors who turfed her page at the time sided with the 1981 timeline.&lt;p&gt;And how did they &amp;quot;prove&amp;quot; it was 1981? They showed links to some music related websites with articles about her saying she was born in that year. Completely ignoring alternative sources that said she was born in 1981.&lt;p&gt;I mean there are certain explanations on why this happened:
1) A major publication cited her DOB as 1981, others followed suit.
2) Alicia keys&amp;#x27; handlers want her to be a year younger than she is, so she told her PR people to make sure everyone says she was born a year younger.
3) Someone misheard she was born in 1981, wrote that down on Wikipedia, then everyone else just used Wikipedia as a reference.&lt;p&gt;The problem I&amp;#x27;m trying to get at is, Wikipedia is so popular its hard to figure out if people are just lazy and using it as a source, which perpetuates this cycle of &amp;quot;Fact F on Article A is true because of source S, Source S it turns out, used article A to look up Fact F and reprinted it without really fact checking F.&lt;p&gt;So yeah, popular, but hard to determine how accurate. &amp;#x2F;rant.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>drinchev</author><text>If you are talking about the &amp;quot;news&amp;quot;-articles, you are right. With the same arguments I could argue that &amp;gt;almost every&amp;lt; historical fact&amp;#x2F;source is somehow modified, according to political&amp;#x2F;moral&amp;#x2F;memory problems.&lt;p&gt;Just to mention the total media collapse these days, where Russia &amp;amp; &amp;quot;The West&amp;quot; have so different facts put out in the wild, that you actually can&amp;#x27;t find what happened, by only reading and selecting a source. What&amp;#x27;s interesting is that both media don&amp;#x27;t provide any evidence of what actually happened, they just spread out opinions by other people, which are in most cases subjective.&lt;p&gt;What Wikipedia did ( and is doing very good ), though is that it gathered multiple knowledge bases under one roof - very general, sometimes, but accurate enough. For example, I&amp;#x27;ve graduated law and could claim that what I can find as articles on that topic is very basic, but true. Also I&amp;#x27;m professionally working as a web-dev and still can claim that most articles I find are precisely moderated and reflect the science-books.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s so funny I always like to &amp;quot;Let&amp;#x27;s check wikipedia&amp;quot; and people usually reply &amp;quot;That&amp;#x27;s not an accurate source of information&amp;quot;, which IMHO is wrong. Wikipedia is still the most accurate (general) knowledge base to me.</text></comment>