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How can we fix Wikipedia? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 4 years ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I LOVE Wikipedia, I think it's one of the best websites of the internet.

But the fact is that Wikipedia has many flaws:

Editing became very hard on Wikipedia based on the amount of rules to respect
Wikipedia is biased, many cultures and minorities are not well represented among editors and pages.
Wikipedia is a dependence, I can't imagine Wikipedia disappear, I think it already changed the way people see knowledge, not as something fixed anymore, but as something dynamic that changes and evolve.
Wikipedia 'sources admission' are also very... Weird. Because you can be a professional in a special field, it doesn't mean your contribution will be accepted, just because your source is not coming from a 'reliable source', even if YOU are this reliable source.

There are other problems as well, but I think those are the most important ones.

What do you think about it? If you could change anything or everything to Wikipedia, what would you do?

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 years ago (3 children)

great question!

i use wikipedia all the time. i think the biggest issue, by far, is bias. it is a huge hurdle. even if the articles cited only scientific journals, there would still be lots of ingrained bias (who conducted the study? what were their methods? who paid for it? how reliable is the journal? have the results been reproduced? why was this study cited instead of a different one? etc)

perhaps a way to address bias would to be seeking out multiple sources that contradict each other. then when the article is written, if these opposing sources have the same information, that is presented with all sources cited. if the sources contradict each other, the information is presented individually. ex.: "[source] reported [information] [citation]. However, [different source] reported [different information] [citation]"

a second way, along the lines of what you have suggested, would be getting more people involved (translators included!) i don't know what the best answer is but i do know that it can absolutely be improved!

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 years ago (2 children)

That must be the best solution - change the format so articles naturally have different sections with different perspectives on the same issue.

Instead of "mark this article as biased so it can be fixed" the true online encyclopaedia of knowledge will have "this article is biased - as a section with an opposing, complementary perspective"

This is brilliant. Somebody make this.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 years ago (1 children)

This is exactly why climate change denying became popular and acceptable, because the media thought they had to represent counter arguments for everything, no matter how big the consensus among scientists was. Adding different viewpoints just for the sake of it will not fix biases but introduce other ones.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 years ago

That bias is called “undue weight”. Wikipedia has a policy to avoid it.