this post was submitted on 10 Nov 2024
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Inexplicably unpopular opinion: the priority for Wikipedia is not to delete whole articles, it's to delete unsubstantiated content within articles.
Personally I would be in favor of a bot that, after expiry of a time limit, deletes everything in an article - everything - where no citation has been provided. The resulting encyclopedia would be smaller but more accurate by definition, and almost certainly more useful.
I just cannot understand why it's so widely considered acceptable that articles contain unsourced factoids for years, even decades, on end.
I think there’s an as big problem in that the citation provided often does not back the sentence claim’s, but since people rarely check the sources it gets included.
Yeah, and a bot that did that would just encourage more and more irrelevant citations, reducing overall quality.
This is a big problem in actual research too
As a college student, I have certainly never cited a completely irrelevant source with a similar-enough sounding title at 11:55pm for a paper due at midnight to get my source count up to meet a rubric... I would never. I resent the accusation.
Does every bit of info have a published source?
What sort of requirements does Wikipedia have for published info, I wonder. There's a lot of wrong info published in books and online.
It's an encyclopedia. That makes it a tertiary source. Just as a secondary source (book, journalism, and so on) should cite its primary sources, a tertiary source should cite its secondary sources. Yes, you should be able to source the origin of every assertion of fact.
Fair enough.
Does Wikipedia allow someone to tag themselves as a primary source, or does it have to be published elsewhere first?
Like if someone had specific firsthand knowledge that Elvis preferred a certain brand of Peanut Butter, but that tidbit isn't published anywhere, how would that work?
Sorry for not researching this stuff on my own, I'm just curious, but not curious enough to go figure it out on my own.
Very easy to answer that: no. This falls under the "No original research" rule. The information must be publicly available from a reputable source. If you had insider info about Elvis's peanut butter you would need to write it up and get your article accepted by a recognized publication, basically.
That's really interesting, thanks.