Wikipedia seems to appeal primarily to teenagers and lazy college students, who don't know enough about researching, or are lazy, and like to use Wikipedia because it saves them time.

What should we advise people as to how to use Wikipedia properly? Simply never use it? Or is there some way that we can advise them as to why not to use it, and what precautions they should use as to why not to use it?

Any ideas?

There was a time when you could advise people to use Wikipedia the same way that any e-literate person would sensibly use a search engine. Namely, be aware that most of the ostensible information that you get on first pass is probable junk, but that sources that give you their own sources will allow you to follow trails of references back to sources that you can evaluate for reliability on common sense grounds.

However, changes in attribution policy at Wikepedia are making this strategy less and less available for Wikipedia articles. Without it, a sensible inquirer has no choice but to treat Wikipedia articles as first pass dead-end junk.

Jonny

Changes? I see more references, not less.

Quality not quantity. It's not difficult to find junk references to support a POV position.

Exactly. Again, think about the search engine model -- my own skills in surf'n'search have somewhat degenerated since I fell down the rabid-hole to Wikiland, but I still know researchers who are absolute whizzes at winnowing through the chaff of your average Google harvest to arrive at solid sources and resources on any given subject. It's not an automatic process -- it requires discretion and intelligence. Wikipedia could have been a catalyst for that process of inquiry -- and of course it still works that way in topic areas that have yet to be blighted by the monoclonal belief system that is steadily creeping outward from the policy meltdown being engineered by the cabal core -- but more and more one finds that Wikipedia is acting as a block in the way of inquiry. All the razzle-dazzle of its new Cite-Borg systems are just so much distraction and inhibition if they do not lead back to primary sources and pointers to real data.

Jonny

There's a lot about Wikipedia that's extremely valuable, and pretty darn good.

You should definitely expect to be misled on any matter involving politics or religion (or maybe any subject about which it used to be said "you should avoid it in polite discussion), or about a person with any sort of controversial aura.

But on other things, your chance of getting good information is very good. I can remember seeing some excellent but hard-to-find-elsewhere articles on old telephones, television shows of any kind, ham radio equipment, Navy ships, U.S. political geography (states, counties, towns, etc.), plants and animals, former professional athletes, etc.

No matter where you go, however, you need to be aware that vandals could have struck. I remember one or maybe two cases where some idiot had put somebody else's picture in place of that of a non-famous former pro athlete.

There is an advertisement on at the moment that advertises Telstra Wireless Broadband. A guy is driving his car and his 10-year-old son asks "Dad, why did they build the great wall of China?" The Dad replies "Rabbits, it was to keep the rabbits out, that's why they built it". The ad then goes to a scene with the boy being introduced to his class, to do his oral report about China, and the closing caption reads "If you want the real information, get Telstra Wireless Broadband".

That is basically what Wikipedia is like. Wikipedia can be right sometimes, depending on who you ask and what their knowledge of the topic is like. But it has the same reliability as asking your Dad something. Sometimes he'll say the right thing, or something close to it, but other times he'll tell you that the Great Wall of China was made to keep the rabbits out.

Maybe we should have an advert like that to encourage people not to use Wikipedia?

I recall some instances where Chip Berlet has taken to eliminating weblinks to articles when he quotes himself, replacing them with footnotes to print versions, so that no one can pursue the matter further.

During my time in Wikipedia, I was never concerned with fringe areas, and the one or two encounters that I had with Wikipedia articles on politics or religion were enough to tell me how utterly useless such articles would always be.

When it came to editing, aside from a compulsion to fix grammar and spelling errors on the articles that I happened to surf past, I mostly stuck to subjects where I knew what I was talking about -- largely in logic, mathematics, philosophy, and psychology. "Knowing what I'm talking about" means a subject that I studied for somewhere between 20 and 40 years, and all I ever did in these areas was the standard sorts of things that anybody familiar with the subjects would do to improve the quality of the expositions -- correcting factual errors, clearing up popular misconceptions, filling up gaps in the coverage, supplying references, upgrading the quality of the sources, and so on.

All of this should have been perfectly straightforward quality improvement. But it's not. At some point you run into a wall of arrogant anti-intellectual ignoramuses who are fixated at a particular stage of knowledge and who stubbornly refuse to grow beyond it. Not only that, but they refuse to allow others the opportunity to learn. They are more interested in controlling the information at any cost than they are in facilitating learning, and people like that simply cannot be trusted with any fraction of the "sum of human knowledge".

Jonny

To give the simplest answer that I know to the original question, we should advise people to read the fine print -- the Labyrinth Of Absolute Disclaimers (LOAD) that is linked at the bottom of every Wikipedia page. And when they have grasped the implications of that LOAD, they should turn off their computers and go to a library, or just go for a walk in the woods.

You come too ...

Jonny

sometimes tihs board is crzy. treat wp like you treat any othre source - trust but verify. youd never use britannica or ms encartca as teh only sorce for teh same reasin youd never use wp: serius reserch isnt done with a single sorce. wp is great for initial info, but inmost cases thats it - just like other encycs.

Yet another Serving Suggestion for Web-Eyed Readers in general, though it applies with poignant singularity to Hapless Wikipedestrians, is to copy the following notice on a Day-Glo Stickit-Note and stick it at the top of their computer consoles:



Jonny

Wow! — I'd totally forgotten how much clearer I used to write …

I really gotta get outa this خߡ† soon …

Jonny

Hey can I use that disclaimer?

One direct way would be to tell people that Wikipedia is very useful for misinforming the world. I.e say:

Go to an article, and change the text in order to twist the fact in a particular direction. Go to a conclusive statement (eg a scientific review conclusion) and add another line of made-up caveat to push the fact in another direction. Go and join a group of self-interested editors (e.g. Chiropractors, political pushers, or other cranks) and help them distort the facts on Wikipedia. If you get caught distorting, then go to another article and continue. You will find that its really easy to do.

Wikipedia in writing does not support distortion. In practice it generally supports the distortion of facts. That is its main actual function. Distorting is easy and generally supported by the community, whereas maintaining straight facts is incredibly hard work (because of the distorters in the community and administration).

Wikipedia is a tool for distortion.

Yup, I would have to say that is definitely one big piece of the puzzle.

Jonny

WP isn't very good as a source of scholarly material for use in academia.

But it's an excellent compendium of popular culture. If you want to look up some obscure detail about an episode of The Simpsons or M*A*S*H or Star Trek, it's unparalleled.

I never knew you used to write like that.

Encyclopedias in general, as a rule, aren't.

What encyclopedias are actually useful is as source of material for use in high school, or for those who want to have a general idea about some subject, without actually messing with the details of specialised knowledge (if you want to know how a jet engine functions, get an encyclopedia; if you want to know what metal alloys are optimal for use in an jet engine, get a handbook on the building of jet engines).

Wikipedia is not useful for highschool or the person who looks for a general knowledge, too.

Luís Henrique