A few years ago I noticed that a certain contentious article only cited studies that supported one position, failing to note that it's controversial, or point to papers that support the opposite conclusion.
Comments
Log in with your Bluesky account to leave a comment
It was (and remains) protected, so I could not edit it. Pointing the error out in the Talk page, with sources, didn't work either. No matter how many times I tried, nothing truly changed. Once, I got them to add a citation in another section, while leaving the slanted paragraphs in place.
I think about this a lot. This is one subject I happened to know a lot about, so I caught the error, but how often am I mislead without my knowledge? Even reading every source can't save you if material that contradicts the desired narrative doesn't even make it into the article.
Yeah exactly, you need other subject matter experts who can catch this kind of stuff because they already know what is missing, and from what I've heard of Wikipedia there's a lot of people being territorial over 'their' pages like that and the ideal of collective wisdom totally falls over.
I hear there are some good areas and I'm glad it exists in these times of so much autogenerated nonsense, but it is important to understand where its weaknesses lie.
Comments