My historic house has a Wikipedia page, I've tried updating it with information I know is accurate (I mean, I live here), but it was always removed. Must have a primary source that's not "individual research" like, you know, counting the bedrooms or fireplaces.

Which is what lead to me getting our city's newspaper to interview me, print several facts and stories, and now that published article is a primary source.

During this process I realized that Wikipedia is pretty goddamn serious.

The point isn't that Wikipedia is wrong, the point is that your research papers should cite primary sources published by the field instead of a generic encyclopedia. Even if the pages on encyclopedia are maintained by respected authors, it's not immediately obvious, and the information is likely surface level and not worth citing.

Censorship sucks, giving credit rules.

In university my entire dorm floor was in on insisting to my ex that it wasn't "Big Bird", but instead "Big Bert" (as opposed to regular sized bert)

It came up for the 100th time at a party, and I was like "go ahead, look it up" and was able to get in an edit JUST before the page load. "Big Bird (Or "Big Burt" for Canadian rebroadcast)"

It lasted for maybe 20 seconds, but it was all we needed.

Anybody who thinks Wikipedia is bad should have grown up on encyclopedias. Looking back at my childhood set, they are hilariously riddled with errors.

Wikipedia is unreliable for politically controversial topics, I've seen multiple articles on the Gaza genocide with specific claims citing fucking Times of Israel with no other supporting evidence whatsoever, Times of Israel has been caught lying more than once and shouldn't be used as a source at all. Each article is only as good as the sources cited and they're not all equally well sourced, it is entirely possible to insert false info into articles especially if you've got a well funded organization behind the effort, and even if it is eventually caught and corrected it will already have served as useful propaganda for anyone reading the article in the interim.

Honestly I think it comes from a misunderstanding regarding secondary sources vs primary ones. Wikipedia, as well as encyclopedias and textbooks, are secondary sources. It's not good practice to cite secondary sources without primary ones, but a lot of people (namely, teachers) don't grasp why which leads these sources to get classified as bad.

That, plus Wikipedia is accessible without the usual gatekeeping and money behind what textbooks and encyclopedias have, which adds to the sources "credibility." Money means marketing, including constant email campaigns targeting people like me trying to validate whatever textbook they're peddling. (And in case you wonder if they're evil, they sometimes offer kickbacks to adopt their expensive textbooks for my university classes).

Fedi users already get that, though, as that's a common problem FOSS usually has. Point is, wiki lives in a weird place because no, you shouldn't cite it just like you shouldn't cite textbooks, but yes, it's perfectly valid so long as you check those sources. And, speaking from experience, some students really don't understand as I see citations for so much worse.

I once posted a Wikipedia article to r/TodayILearned, and my post went really popular. Someone a few hours later then edited the Wikipedia page to contradict my Reddit post title, reported my post to the subreddit mods, and my post got taken down.

Eh. It really depends on the topic. I am a Wikipedia addict and I would never tell anyone that Wikipedia should be used for anything beyond surface level familiarity. Ideally you start with Wikipedia then move on to better quality sources. The problem with Wikipedia isn't necessarily inaccuracy, but lack of information and bias. I'm not talking about right wing conspiracies saying Wikipedia is too liberal, but rather I am talking about things in history where a specific view is presented and alternate views are not. This is especially common in situations where modern scholars are questioning historically mainstream views. I suspect this is because the editors simply aren't aware of these developments and are accessing more available older sources, but it can bring in bias. This can also happen in science and engineering as well. Plus there is the classic Wikipedia problem where some random B list Marvel superhero or star wars extended universe side character has an extremely high quality Wikipedia page and a relatively important historical to figure has a very basic overview. Wikipedia is incredible and one of the greatest achievements of Humanity, but it's got some flaws and I don't think that it's wrong to tell students not to rely on Wikipedia. It's kind of like all the same issues with ChatGPT but way less severe and way more subtle.

There's a lot of misinformation on Wikipedia too, of many different kinds. Some smaller pages exists purely for someone's PR. I've seen blatantly false (but "verifiable") stuff too but the most common thing is to have pages that are just creative with the truth.

Also sometimes I'll notice an article make multiple different claims that all point to the same source and then check the source and realize it is not a valid source for all of those claims, just some.

And also there's stuff that gets flagged as verified based on extrapolation of data from a combination of sources. For example: one source says "John Doe facing 1 billion dollars fines if found guilty" and another source says "John Doe was found guilty", then the article says "John Doe fined 1 billion dollars after being found guilty" as verified, then you go search the web and find no mention of any fines actually being issued following the verdict.

I haven't done it in a while, but I would make little edits to Republican political figures. If they "ended" or "stopped" a business. I change it to "aborted" the business.

Some they would fix, but not all of them.

idk I've seen a lot of total bs on wikipedia