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?

  • Kohen Shaw
    8•3 years ago

    I don’t think that Wikipedia being hard to edit due to too many rules is a bad thing, editing a Wiki article should be a well defined process. I do think that there should be many different ways of contributing to Wikipedia.

    On your second point, we must “advertise” not only wikipedia as a resource, but also contributing to Wikipedia globally. Lots of people seem to not know that you can edit Wikipedia content.

    And for your last point, when dealing with remote written content, personal experience cannot be taken as a source. So you need to rely on the scientific way of addressing sources.

    • Richard
      5•3 years ago

      If the article in question is something that needs sources that are scientific. What if you want to update a page about a band (for example) you are actually in, are you then not one of the valid sources? (I think @SnowCode@lemmy.ml is referring to this).

      • Kohen Shaw
        3•3 years ago

        Oh that makes sense. In that case I guess Wikipedia could use a way to verify “original source” of information. if they don’t have that already

      • SnowCodeOP
        3•3 years ago

        In deed that was one of the thing I got in mind. I don’t think the academic writing rules can be applied to any topic the same way.

      • @Niquarl@lemmy.ml
        1•3 years ago

        I think the idea is to try to get less bias. A lot of French MPs offices edit their MPs page, sometimes not even malicious but sometimes just reorganising critiques or whatever. Wikipedia has had to ban a couple of IP adresses because of this.

        • Richard
          1•3 years ago

          In a lot of cases that makes indeed sense, that if i create a personal wikipedia page and declare myself person awesome the awesomenest and emperor of the world that that will not fly. But academic writing rules can’t be fully translated to be talking about people, or groups, or particular things. It really depends on the topic which ruleset you can apply (and i guess Wikipedia is trying to do that).

          • @Niquarl@lemmy.ml
            1•3 years ago

            I suppose you could say that an academic could write a paper about it then use that as their source? Maybe a form of verified accounts could be implemented into wikipedia in a sort of test run.