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Wikipedia is Trustworthy and Reliable - FutureIQ

3,387 views Wait, is this logic right? • Feb 09, 2024
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Slog Reference: Is Wikipedia Reliable

Description

Some say Wikipedia is not trustworthy, while others constantly refer to Wikipedia as a credible source. Who’s right? Can you trust Wikipedia as a good source of information? It is only after examining the inner workings of the popular information site that we can judge whether to trust it or not. How does it gather information? Can stake your life on it, and more. We explained all these aspects in this video.

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Hope you enjoyed FutureIQ by Navin Kabra and Shrikant Joshi. Do hit us up on Twitter:
@ngkabra http://twitter.com/ngkabra
@shrikant https://twitter.com/shrikant

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Watch other episodes of The FutureIQ podcast: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAppTB0r5_TaYueZ0adD42Wiw5X-wTE4v

Chapters:
00:00 Introduction
00:33 Vandalism
02:20 Who fixes changes?
07:12 The accuracy
11:00 Opinion-based topics
13:02 Biases
15:01 Reputation worship
17:09 Critical information
18:25 Wikipedia fun-facts
21:07 The conclusion

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Transcript

Shri Kant is Wikipedia reliable anybody can edit Wikipedia how can it be reliable right so even though anybody can edit Wikipedia it is still highly reliable and there is data and research to back this seriously yes so that's what we are going to look at in this episode how and why Wikipedia is reliable and the few times when it could be unreliable how do you get still get reliable information out of it okay this promises to be interesting correct so let's start with anybody can edit yes and you are sitting there imagining some idiot putting like you know all kinds of stuff in the Articles yeah this is called vandalism yes okay so there are
studies so for example in 2003 IBM did a study along with MIT media lab and they looked at how much vandalism happens and how uh when it gets fixed and they found that most instances of vandalism get fixed within minutes okay in fact they get fixed so fast that most users will never notice wait this is 2003 that's 20 years ago 2007 PC Pro magazine did a different study where they intentionally introduced 10 errors okay and some of them were very obvious glaring errors but some of them were defly subtle errors okay nine out of the 10 errors got fixed within an hour right in 2007 University of Minnesota looked at a large number of vandalism cases and
found that most of them get fixed within the first or second time somebody views a page with an error like this right in fact the probability of you seeing a page which has some uh vandalism m in it is less than half% 37% in fact wow and this are not old studies there have been dozens of studies uh since then all of them pretty much say the same thing right yeah but who who is sitting there editing Wikipedia back to what it is supposed to be yeah so first of all Wikipedia has Bots okay automatic programs which go around looking at every change and then using artificial int Ence to decide whether it is vandalism or not when it is very sure
that it is vandalism it will revert the edit immediately right it gets fixed all hail are AI overlords of Wikipedia second line of defense right all recent changes go into a page on Wikipedia saying these are the recent changes and there are human editors who sit there and who just spend their time looking at the recent changes and if they don't like the change if they think it's a case of vandalism revert it or even if they think it's a case of uh somebody making a claim without citing a reference for that claim they will undo it right I've had that happen to me I have tried you can call this the recent changes petrol so there are these guys
sitting at home and you know their idea of a good time is to revert recent changes people have made right and I thank those people they are doing a huge service to the world and not getting any almost no credit for it absolutely agreed but let me let me channel my inner and ask you who are these people where do they come from except we're asking that in a good way yes in addition right uh there are people who are very interested in a particular topic or a particular page and then they put themselves on a they put that page on a watch list saying that if anybody makes any edit to this page I should know so when you are
interested in a topic every edit comes to you and there's a bunch of these people and they will go they have expertise and they will look at the edit and if they don't think it is uh Justified right see it can't just be true it has to be true and justifiable Wikipedia says that you can't put your opinion there even if it is true unless you can back it up with a source and the source has to be a book or a mainstream media publication or something like that wow even if Shri Kant makes a claim about shrihan that I was there that is not acceptable primary sources are not allowed only secondary sources a newspaper has to report it I
would love to be a fly on the wall on these discussions oh these discussions are all sitting right there in Wikipedia what every page if you go to the top it says article and right next to that there's a tab saying talk okay so if you click on talk that is called the talk page about that article where people who are editing this page are having discussions about is this allowed is this not allowed what about this this source is not reliable enough right so some of those I mean it is so instructive to read the talk Pages it is like you know entire mini movies going on there like there is a single word
that some people are trying to add and some people are trying to remove and there can be five pages of discussion on that one word okay back and forth like entire Wars okay these are called edit Wars by the way but not just for the edit Wars but a lot of the discussion you will notice is very civil and and based on logic and based on the rules of the Wikipedia right so it is I mean it is mind-blowing you have to look at it to see it in action n is clearly a fan of the edit Wars I am a fan of Storage Wars I am a fan of the whole editing process edit Wars is a tiny tiny
fraction of it okay all right but my point is despite all of these editors and despite all of this oh by the way one thing that happens is that sometimes an edit War goes so out of hand that it can't be controlled it's just you know people going back and forth one guy adding it and the other guy removing it and so on right by the way most of them are guys but yeah so Wikipedia has a next level of uh thing right higher level editors administrators they can protect a page saying that right now this page or this topic is very controversial we are going to stop edits or at least you know only people with a
certain amount of experience in editing or certain reputation only they are allowed to edit random people are not allowed to even edited right so there are levels and levels of uh processes they have put in place learning from 20 years sounds like there's an entire corporate structure in the background right oh absolutely absolutely there is a structure despite all of this corporate structure they still don't get 100% of it right there is still 37% that you said was flawed right so you're saying because of that Wikipedia is unreliable y exactly the question you have to ask yourself at times like this is compared to what okay for example if you had a god sitting here right who knew everything
about everything and you could ask questions and the God answered correctly accurately at all times right yes then compared to that God sure Wikipedia is unreliable but you happen to be one short of such Gods yeah so what do you have what's your alternative to Wikipedia um encyclopedia britanica right so let's compare Wikipedia to encyclopedia britanica right nobody is running around in the street saying encyclopedia britanica is unreliable okay but people did studies so there is this research in 2005 nature did a study they took 42 articles on scientific topics and they took article on the same topic from Wikipedia and encyclopedia britanica and they were given to experts in that particular field of science and
the experts were told to look for errors and omissions okay okay and that's it right blind evaluation the expert didn't know whether this had come from Wikipedia or from encyclopedia britanica the result of the study was the quality of Wikipedia and britanica was almost the same okay serious errors per article on an average four in Wikipedia four in encycl opedia britanica oh minor errors four in Wikipedia three in encyclopedia britanica also keep in mind that Wikipedia has 10x the number of Articles as encyclopedia britanica right so it is it has much more information and the information is roughly the same quality there are similar results for say German Wikipedia versus Microsoft andarta or German Wikipedia versus Brock House
multimedial okay a different study 2012 University of Melbourne on mental health related articles found that on up toess their word okay up toess Wikipedia beat encyclopedia britanica on breadth of coverage Wikipedia beat encyclopedia britanica on referencing Wikipedia was better the only thing that Wikipedia was worse on was readability in fact that has been mostly true most of the studies have found that Wikipedia is not as readable as encyclopedia britanica they are paying writers to write well but in terms of accuracy they are comparable okay interesting let's compare with something else textbook right so in 2014 a study by German and swiss universities looked at pharmacology okay okay and they compared Wikipedia to an actual textbook used by doctors for
pharmacology okay they found that Wikipedia was 99.7 % accurate and 84% complete okay overall what they decided was that Wikipedia is an accurate and comprehensive source of drug related information for undergraduate medical education and there are dozens of other studies with similar results right so yeah Wikipedia is as reliable as any of the best other sources you can think of okay okay okay but U you said something about uh edits on Wikipedia needing to be facts and justifiable so what happens with uh contentious opinion based topics like politics or religion what do you so in general that is one of the things people worry about right because most of the edit Wars happen on a controversial
topic like politics or religion right so on Wikipedia you're not allowed to just State your opinion right like oh Trump is an idiot you are only allowed to say that so and so article in so and so newspaper said this okay that is one and whether it is worth including here that's what the edit War becomes about right okay but here is the important point right a study by the Canadian Library Association in 2006 found that on Wikipedia on an average right except for a few cases of edit Wars the two sides typically there are two sides right actually engage with each other and like I said you can see this on the talk page
they are having a civil conversation based on the rules and logic they engage with each other and there are negotiations happening and finally you end up with an article that both sides can more or less live with okay notice this does not happen anywhere else okay this happens only on Wikipedia a 2017 NCSU Harvard U Chicago study looked at all topics in politics social issues and science 233,000 articles 5% of all of English Wikipedia and what they found was that articles which are like attracting a lot of attention right they tend to have more balanced engagement because both sides land up there and the more polarized the topic of the article is the higher quality the result is in
terms of being neutral and handling both points of view right H wow so Wikipedia is a very reliable source of information uh it has no problems there is a problem of a different kind which is bias okay some of the important ones so a lot of people feel that Wikipedia has a liberal bias okay part of the reason could be I mean some people claim that well Wikipedia has a liberal bias because reality has a liberal bias or a different way of stating it is that the average person across the world is a little more liberal than the average person in us or average person in India uh but in any case it's slightly more uh liberal than
conservative that is there another is male bias most of the editors tend to be male and tend to be young so things they are interested in get higher coverage and things they find less interesting gets lower coverage right yeah so for example the entry on lightsabers is much longer than the entry on the printing press but lightsabers are fun yes you are a male of the correct age right but other real more serious problem there is that women tend to get under represented so Wikipedia has a concept called notability okay Shri Kant can't go and create an article about Shri Kant there it'll get deleted because shant is not considered a notable person no so now if
articles about women get created there is a slightly higher chance that they get deleted as being not notable enough because those males didn't find it notable enough right there are women working on trying to fix this problem shouldn't there be like an objective standard for notability uh so there isn't there is an objective standard but it's there still subjective at the end of it right the other problem with Wikipedia is what is often called reputation washing oh yeah okay so somebody has a bad article on Wikipedia and they want to clean it up right so overall conflict of interest wested par is trying to edit articles about themselves or their customers okay so there is a woman called soraa FIA who is
out in the open saying that she writes commissioned article for writers and musicians for $30 per hour she will create and update and you know improve articles for you okay Microsoft had offered to pay a guy uh money to edit o XML article okay okay some technology that Microsoft is interested in and they actually the company officially tried to pay someone to fix that article right wow a longstanding admin admin is pretty high high up in the Wikipedia hierarchy right a long-standing admin was banned from Wikipedia because they found out that over a period of many years he was making Pro iipm edits iipm was an MBA University uh in India and let me read
from Wikipedia neutral point of view uh was shut down after multiple allegations and lawsuits concerning the institutes used of false advertisements and fraudulent practices and apparently there was a Wikipedia admin who was making Pro iipm edits and REM removing anti- iipm edits for a long time and somebody has estimated that it probably affected the lives of 15,000 students wow so bad things happen but you know where I found out about all these problems with Wikipedia on Wikipedia on Wikipedia itself okay so that is the process working yeah right so that is definitely the process working and uh I believe u Wikipedia is also um dangerous if you look at it as a doctor yeah yeah
I mean so you know it has reliable information but it has reliable generic information right it won't apply to your specific case so don't use the medical information there directly always go to a real doctor and so on right so don't take everything in the Wikipedia to be the truth okay every once in a while there will be a sentence that might be wrong so what you should do for important things is look at the source from where that information has come uh and take your judgment as to whether that source is reliable every once in a while you should read what is written in the article because what can happen is what's written in the article and what's
captured in the Wikipedia can be slightly different and if you want to know when you should do that then we've done an episode on uh how to detect misinformation and how to detect BS on the internet if it is ready by the time you're seeing this you'll find a link in the description if not then uh do subscribe to the channel and you'll get a notification whenever that episode is out so I don't want to end this episode without talking about a couple really funny things about Wikipedia right okay so for example sometimes when reality and Wikipedia have a mismatch reality gets edited excuse me what so baseball player Mike Trout H Somebody went and
edited his Wikipedia entry and saying that his nickname is the milville metor okay he didn't have that nickname somebody just made it up but a Newsday writer ended up seeing that article he he used that nickname in an article and after that everybody started using that nickname it became a real nickname right so sometimes people edit reality to make Wikipedia true okay oh H Wikipedia it's another even more interesting thing right okay so for example Sasha Baron kohen the guy who played Borat right some Anonymous editor put information in his article saying that he worked at Goldman Sachs before becoming an actor in in the Wikipedia article yes okay and it is believed that somebody from
Goldman Sachs did this okay later two newspaper articles right from proper newspapers the independent and the guardian when they talked about Sasha bar kohen they mentioned this okay later on some editor noticed that there is a claim here but it doesn't have a citation so they removed that line okay after that a different editor said oh why did you remove this line there are two newspaper articles saying this so they put that line in back with citations this time did no one think of asking Sasha Baron Coen if has worked at Goldman Sachs that's not allowed you can't allow ask directly you can only put in Wikipedia things which are there in secondary sources the no primary
sources rule yeah of course over time this particular thing has been fixed but there are probably other incidents where there is a circular thing right a Wikipedia reference causes newspaper articles and then those newspaper articles become the source for that reference okay and this happens frequently cytogenesis really cytogenesis XKCD has a cartoon on this yeah uh this this happens very frequently in terms of uh certain musicians uh whose deaths keep happening on Wikipedia well yeah that happens right uh death by wik Wikipedia is every once in a while somebody will go and edit some celebrities page saying he died today right so there's a list of people like this who have died without dying so the most important thing I want
to point out is that your instincts can be wrong right everybody's first instinct is to say Wikipedia cannot be reliable because anybody in the world can edit it yeah but you have to look at the data the real world can be more complex than simple logic that your brain understands so don't go by Instinct that's first second is generally for important things get into the habit of checking references right every once in a while I have found important misconceptions people have uh because they were not looking at the references carefully right and you keep doing this often enough you get a finger feeling for when it is worth doing this and when you are likely to find
something funny uh you you develop that instinct right fingertips feeling we've done an episode on it again if it is ready by the time you're seeing this you'll have a link in the description third important thing is whenever you are saying oh this is good or this is not good ask yourself compared to what right that's an important question that's the most important question that you should be asking when you're trying to uh debate something like this as I've realized today compared to what well compared to this episode you should probably check out uh an episode we did called wisdom of the crowds aha episode segue we lined it up for you shrikant nain future
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