As a general rule, if I can avoid it, I do not link to Wikipedia from this site. I sometimes use it as a launching-point for my actual, in-depth research into a topic, but I try my damnest to avoid linking to it as a primary or sole source of a piece of information.
Why? Because of things like this :
Wikipedia has decided to delete the page titled ‘Forward (generic name of socialist publications.)’
Wikipedia wrote this morning that after reading many comments and “various good points made on either side,” they deemed that there is “little or no connection between the disparate publications of the same or similar name other than similar ideological outlooks.”
That seems awfully peculiar that this happens right now, just weeks after Obama’s campaign announced their slogan would be ‘Forward.’ The page has been up for almost a year and a half, so why now?
Crowd-sourcing facts can be useful, but has all the potential in the world of going sideways – it does not matter how many people agree that 2+2=5, they are all wrong, but in a world like Wikipedia, they may not be the ones who lose the edit-wars. In this specific case, the staff of Wikipedia (whatever the hell that means) are claiming that socialistic publications of the same name – “Forward” – have no “unity between them”, so there is no point in keeping a page listing and documenting all of them. Which would be fine, except, as the article indicated, that page has existed for a year and a half now, and Our Glorious President just a few weeks ago decided that “Forward” was going to be his new campaign slogan.
I guess “hope and change” rings kind of hollow these days.
Like the author of the article, I sincerely doubt that President Obama and his campaign staff were attempting to make an overt, or even covert, reference to socialism*, but I do think destroying a historical reference simply because a political entity decided to hijack the word smells suspiciously like the actions of the politburos of countries that used to be socialistic. He who controls the present, and all that…
(* – Me, I hear “forward” and immediately think of Pickett’s Charge, the Battle of Crecy, lemmings jumping off a cliff, or other… appropriate… events.)
(Courtesy of Snarky Bytes.)
But 2 + 2 = 5 can actually be true for very large values of 2.
float x = 2.49;
float y = 2.48;
float sum = x + y;
printf(“x = %i, y = %i, sum = %i\n”, (int)x, (int)y, (int)(sum));
As a rule though I avoid most historical and current political information on Wikipedia. At most I use it as a launch vehicle. About the only thing I do go there regularly for is hard engineering and math information. For example Laplace Transforms.
Looking up band/album information and the top speed of 60′s fighter jets are the main things I use it for.
What’s up with the broken link syntax lately, Linoge? So far you’re three posts for three.
For more howlers check out this bit
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ostalgie
“Next to nostalgia for everyday aspects of life, ‘Ostalgie’ was also inspired by the absence of unemployment and poverty in the GDR. Indeed, ostalgie could be inspired by the longing of the Ossies for the social system and the sense of community of the GDR. Before 1990, there was no unemployment or poverty in the eastern part of Germany.”
Followed by a literal moral equivalency of the State banning “freedom to travel” and people not being able to afford vacations.
The problems of crowd-sourcing facts aside, Wikipedia doesn’t even work that way, as we can see here, when their inner circle wants the facts to go a certain way that’s how it’s gonna go.
Rather like the Mass Media’s pretense of “impartiality” that.
@ Barron Barnett: 2.49 != 2. I may be an engineer and prone to rounding, but even that is a stretch for me
.
And, yeah, that is pretty much what I use Wikipedia for – I may end up citing their sources, but I refuse to cite them.
@ bluesun: Well, there may be better sources, but there probably are not faster ones
.
@ Erin Palette: It was a strange artifact of copying the posts out of Evernote into the WordPress app on my Android phone. No idea what caused it.
@ The Jack: Well, that is the danger with crowd-sourcing – who decides what information is considered to be “good” and what information is considered to be “bad”? There has to be some kind of filter after all, and some human ended up designing it…
And, even better, they guilt-trip you into donating to support their rape of the facts!
Wikipedia’s got some strange concepts around sourcing — a cynic might consider their primary goal the maintenance of the party line, rather than the dissemination of truth. For example, they prefer secondary sources to primary sources.
(That’s right — they’ll take another person’s report on what you said over your actual statement.)
Oh, trust me, I am well familiar with that aspect of Wikipedia. This site was used as a source in the edit on CSGV’s page regarding having their Twitter account suspended – y’know, because it was their actions towards me that got it suspended – but that edit was removed because “blogs are not good sources” or somesuch nonsense.
Yeah, because the first-hand account of events is obviously without merit… *headdesk*