patrick.net

"This kind of feedback loop—wherein an error that appears on Wikipedia then trickles to sources that Wikipedia considers authoritative, which are in turn used as evidence for the original falsehood—is a documented phenomenon. There’s even a Wikipedia article describing it. Some of the most well-known examples involve Wikipedia entries for famous people, such as when users edited the article on the British actor Sacha Baron Cohen to say he had worked at Goldman Sachs. When a Wikipedia editor tried to remove the apocryphal detail, it took some convincing. Because it had since appeared in several articles on Cohen in the British press, the burden was on Wikipedians to disprove the myth.

“As a long-time Wikipedia editor, it frustrates me when journalists don’t fact check Wikipedia and end up reproducing errors, because Wikipedia can only work the way it does if we have reliable sources to cite,” Stuart Geiger, a Ph.D. student at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Information wrote in an e-mail."

marcus says

I like wikipedia, and use it regularly. But not because I think it's better than doing extensive research on my own.

For my usual purposes, it's useful and accurate.

That is a very accurate statement about wikipedia. For the most part, it's convenient and useful. However, if you quote statements from it, people that do their own research will recognize where you got the information.

theoakman says

Wikipedia is good for anything non-controversial.

Fully agree with this statement. There are a ton of editors that are of tremendous value to Wikipedia, but then you have some members that want to spin an agenda m

FortWayne says

I've seen biased opinions when it came to politics or national events. But you can never get away from that, whoever writes will always be biased.

And lets not forget that in some circles, citing facts is considered bias in the extreme.

"Today, soft drink makers and other food companies are still hiring so-called scientific experts to back their claims that their products are harmless. On Dr. Robert Lustig's Wikipedia page, most of the studies cited there to repudiate his views were funded by Coca-Cola." (The remainder are probably funded by the corporate beneficiaries of HeritageFoundationCare.)

"Researchers found errors and inaccurate assertions in 9 out of 10 Wikipedia entries on the costliest medical conditions"

I suspect most of those inaccuracies result from industry-driven PR.

Corporate influence on science? Say it ain't so!

http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2014/04/cosmos-neil-tyson-lead-industry-science-denial

Relax: Corporate-funded science is sound science.

That's why I read only research funded by the tobacco, pharmaceutical, or coal industries.

Time to bump this thread, since another Wikipedia problem became evident today: pages can be too speedily deleted, particularly if they lack the support of a PR team or religious zealots defending them. It becomes a race against an unspecified deadline, to meet unspecified criteria, rather than working towards a defined goal on a reasonable schedule.