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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] 2 points 3 years ago

The main issue is that it needs to be verifiable. If you do original research and write on the basis of your own knowledge, there's no (easy) way for anyone else to verify that what you wrote is true. The trust is on that one person who claims to have experience with what they wrote. @[email protected] mentioned the second main issue which is bias. If you're writing about a topic that is close to you that has multiple viewpoints, what you're writing is most likely going to be biased toward that view. Wikipedia can't just have "the truth" about a topic that people disagree about through consensus. It's job is to only list the different viewpoint and to tell how prevalent those viewpoints are.

If the topic is notable, you're likely to find a good source that talks about that topic, if you can't find a source for that (regardless of how true you think that fact is), then too bad.