The self-appointed smug attitude of the regular “Wikipedians” on that site is laughably awful. I’m blown away at how often perfectly good info can be reverted by one guy, who obviously spends all his time on only certain pages he thinks he holds all the knowledge about, simply because he didn’t think of the other guy’s edit first.

They also hold a bias against anyone “unregistered”, who just edits from an IP and not some Xbox gamertag-like “user name”, like an elitist douche at a night club or something.

Likewise, I’ve seen total nonsense and wrong info survive on the site, by the bias of a Wikipedian, or sly troll skills of someone who simply worded things or faked citation well enough to impress the idiots there.

Wikipedians are an example of genuine human pettiness. They literally think they *own* knowledge.

You could offer good sources and they’ll still try and fight you on it, then in the end, bust out some trivial rule book to peg you with once things have escalated (like you’ve reverted 3 times, it’s no good, etc); nonsense policies that don’t protect anything but their own pride.

Guys who really have no other way to contribute to life, let alone the internet, appoint themselves as monitors of a website called Wikipedia. It’s painfully clear.

I wish Wikipedia would be proven fallible and invalidated once and for all because it’s completely overrated and ridiculous. Stop using it! You want info, there’s plenty of press sites and first-party places to get it.

This website, despite not being updated since mid-2006, does a good job demonstrating various issues Wikipedia faces: http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/wikiwoo.htm

One big issue which discourages people with an actual, sustained interest in a subject (actually acquiring many books, articles, etc. if they themselves aren’t actual academics) from editing to make articles fundamentally better is that your edits could be reverted by someone who knows very little about the subject and who is reliant on Google for answers and sources.

The problem comes when that person insists he or she is totally right about a subject.

Now in the best of cases you’d need to endure some days (or weeks) of bureaucracy. If all is well and the stars align then you use all the sources at your disposal to demonstrate the correctness of your edits. If, however, the bowels of hell break loose then said googlemeister proceeds to move the heavens and the earth; he or she calls up friends, delays the reintroduction of your edits into the article, and introduces you into needless e-politics lasting for months. You might probably win so long as you keep your cool and continue beating opposing arguments to death with credible (preferably academic) sources not gleaned from a Google search, but by then you will have probably regretted involving yourself in Wikipedia anyway.

Then some other googlemeister comes along and reverts your edits weeks or months later. It looks as if the battle is to begin anew.

Then you stop.

And these aren’t even “big” articles, like Hitler or Stalin or the USA or China or something. Pretty much any article could have a googlemeister appear and edit in lameness or revert information you know to be verifiable.

Two quotes from the aforementioned link sum things up quite nicely in this regard:

“I do sometimes contribute to Wikipedia, but my first rule in such matters is never tackle a subject in Wikipedia that I can do better on my own web site. After all, why should I knock myself out writing a brilliantly crafted article that some flat-earther will butcher two hours later? No, I limit my participation to tweaking topics like shipwrecks and Egyptology, things I have a passing, limited interest in, but not subjects I’m willing to sign my name to.”

On a particularly controversial article: “Obviously, the article will never, ever be allowed to rest in peace. Whatever you write, no matter how accurate or fluent, will be changed by the end of the week. The best solution would be to get a couple of knowledgeable historians (or at least history majors) to write it from scratch, and then lock it against further edits. Unfortunately that’s what a real encyclopedia would do, and it would admit the failure of the whole Wikipedia concept.”

Regarding “plot summaries” the person responsible typed in a description of the movie that was prosetry and completely incorrect.

Also, looking up a few factoids, I noticed that the references that were pointed to were other sources that **USE WIKIPEDIA AS THE SOURCE**. This makes absolutely no sense, and is detailed in this comic:

The citation method is ridiculous, and this “collective truth” bickerfest is even worse. All it takes is one editor with self-proclaimed authority or obsession with a page and that page will never change from what their vision is.

And the “free business model” is driving out any other reputable, singularly edited source from being sustainable.

Wikipedia should really evolve into being a source for officiated wikis, where various areas of knowledge are moderated by knowledgable experts.

While I understand the value of demonetizing and decentralizing the knowledge base, I’d prefer it to be monetized and centralized over allowing tin crown wearing zealot editors to monopolize the content via relentless obsession.

i too only use wikipedia for information on tv shows or movies.

one thing i dont like is that with a LOT of tv shows or movies, they allow editors to type in the entire plot. that’s acceptable to them. it seems like a huge spoiler for me and i think it may detract from some people seeing the movies or television shows

That’s why I’m personally more tolerant of the “idiot bloggers” than “idiot Wikipedia contributors” and “editors”. If a blogger writes that the American Civil War started in 1868, so what? No one’s turning to blogs, anyway, for their information. It’s a different story if Wikipedia writes that.

BTW, the argument that *anything* can be corrected in Wikipedia is one of the weakest defenses I have ever heard, because it doesn’t take into account the fact that by the time the error is corrected, hundreds if not thousands of web sites will have passed on that error without giving a second thought about looking back at the corrected Wiki entry. So yes, Wiki’s “entries” get corrected, but not the countless sites that sourced it.

Nowhere was this more evident than when I came across the “any idiot blogger” you were talking about. An “idiot blogger” wrote an entry stating that the 1964 NYC World’s Fair ended in 1970– which defies common sense since it’s the… wait, for it… *1964* World’s Fair and not the 1970 World’s Fair.

Dozens of commenters had to correct her about the error, because guess what– she had gotten the error from Wikipedia, used it in her post, and never thought to check back the original entry for an update. So were it not for those commenters, her error–straight from Wikipedia itself– would still be there. Because after all, who’s going to recheck an encyclopedia for “errors”? It’s supposed to be right the first time, no?

So much for that lame “it’ll be corrected eventually” defense!