Wolfire Games Forums

Uberbeard wrote:... I think the thing to consider is, as time goes on Wikipedia has a genuine chance of becoming more and more accurate in the important established articles, and is specifically useful for current information.

Only if what the general population thinks is fact is actually a fact ...

Renegade_Turner wrote:You're just upset that no one agrees with you, and you're avoiding the point by skirting around it and only addressing your own post rather than anyone else's. Nice try. Now you look foolish.

What was his comment?

Assaultman67 wrote:Only if what the general population thinks is fact is actually a fact ...

You can't reference 'the general population's opinion', and wikipedia might be editable by anyone but it still requires academic back up.

When it comes to things that aren't fully accepted as fact, wikipedophiles tend to do a good job of providing varied and current information on different theories, and make sure to put a little tag in the article suggesting that nothing written is decided.

I retain my point that the only issues wikipedia has are reader based, and these same ones apply to any encyclopedia, they're all designed to give a overview of a subject, not as a full research tool.

When people discredit wikipedia, it makes me a sad beard. People just seem so feverish to argue a single point in the debate they lose perspective. There are plenty of negatives with wikipedia, but it always seems to fall back on the community based editing.

Uberbeard wrote:You can't reference 'the general population's opinion', and wikipedia might be editable by anyone but it still requires academic back up.

What Wikipedia most often gets wrong is something that's a general opinion, but not important enough to be studied. Take something like a Marid, a type of Djinn. Wikipedia article states that it's a water/sea based djinn or jann, and that the information is contested. However, no one has fixed it in years. I know it has been years, because that article was where I learned not to trust Wikipedia on popular opinion. Back then, there wasn't even the "contested" tag; the only people who knew marid was just another name for a desert spirit had written to the talk page and not edited the actual page, because they couldn't back it up. The people who "knew" the "popular opinion" wrote what they "knew", the people who knew better would have to proove the popular opinion wrong, and if someone went and removed their additions no one might notice because the page tells them what they expected it to tell.

I get the same issue with Britannica, though, which merely states it's a Jinn associated with Ifrit.

Wikipedia articles have a wider range for error, it's true, but nowhere on the page for Marid does it have a reference, which is the point you're contesting. I understand it can be considered a problem that articles are not researched before they are written but it'd be a non-issue if the people who used Wikipedia a lot just learned the right way to do it.

I hope that page is one that gets sorted soon, because that's what I mean when I said wikipedia has a chance of becoming more accurate as time goes on. The big errors we're seeing now are often on obscurer subjects, but even those can be flagged down and chased for answers with perspective.