r/AskHistorians • u/gingerkid1234 Inactive Flair • Sep 13 '16
Meta Rules Roundtable #18: Why Wikipedia is not a source
One of our oft-enforced rules is that Wikipedia is not a valid source. We do not necessarily have problems with Wikipedia in general, it can be an extremely useful reference about a wide variety of subjects. But it is not suited for use on /r/askhistorians. From our rules:
However, tertiary sources such as Wikipedia are not as good. They are often useful for checking dates and facts, but not as good for interpretation and analysis. Furthermore, Wikipedia articles are open to random vandalism and can contain factual errors; therefore, please double-check anything you cite from Wikipedia. As outlined here, Wikipedia, or any other single tertiary resource, used by itself not a suitable basis for a comment in this subreddit.
The main problem is that it is, as I said, a reference, like an encyclopedia. It has some information on a broad range of topics, but does not intend to exhaustively discuss any particular subject with rigor. A tertiary source alone would not be a good basis for an answer. Generally going to a reference text, rather than a subject-specific work, is an indicator that the commenter either knows better sources and is choosing not to use them, or does not have adequate command of the material. If your go-to is one of these sources it's probably an indication that you're not in any position to evaluate the quality of the material you're reading.
Why single out wikipedia, when all tertiary sources fall under the same restriction?
We single out Wikipedia because its editorial practices cause some specific problems, and because its ubiquity means that people try to cite it a lot more than traditional encyclopedias. There also are issues specific to wikipedia that make it, in some ways, worse than a traditional encyclopedia. See this article. Editors of wikipedia are a fairly exclusive group, who are not subject experts in history (or any subject, for that matter), and who have certain biases in what they write about. That is perpetuated by the wikipedia common practice of particular editors feeling they "own" a page, and rolling back changes anyone else does, even if it does not change existing material, despite wikipedia's repudiation of that.
Another issue that article doesn't touch on is that in many subjects, it is clear that proponents of a particular academic or academic theory have had an outsized contribution to articles in that a particular subject. While what's there might rightfully be a part of scholarly discussion, a casual reader may assume a fringe theory is widely accepted when it isn't.
Wikipedia cites its sources for the article I’m citing, why can’t I use it?
Citing sources is not necessarily an indicator of quality. The sources could be misinterpreted, out-of-date, or not representative of the range of opinions among scholars. For the reasons above this is a particularly troublesome task on wikipedia, where there's no way of verifying whoever added the source knows whether a source is reliable, and whether it represents academic thought on a subject.
It is for that reason that simply reading and citing what Wikipedia cites isn’t any better—you’ve picked your sources through the lens of the Wiki editor, who could be someone with no particular expertise. While in some cases this is not a problem, you’re still not necessarily seeing the body of scholarship on an issue. It be mentioned that simply citing Wiki authors without actually reading the sources, even if you do not re-use Wiki’s writing, would be considered plagiarism, since you are copying their citation work without doing the study yourself and without attribution.
What if I wrote the wikipedia page?
In formal academia re-using your own work is considered self-plagarism, which is bad (you're double-dipping, basically). We aren't strict on self-plagarism in general, but if you were to do this, it's important that you say you're copying your own work so we don't think you're plagiarizing. We don't have a firm rule on this, but it'd really be better if you didn't use wikipedia if you're the one who wrote it, since we have no way of verifying that you wrote it.
Even if it weren't for that, there are certain preferred elements of a wikipedia article that make it poorly suited for use on /r/askhistorians. Wiki writers are instructed to use secondary sources only, whereas we prefer comments to use primary sources and secondary sources where possible. Wikipedia does not allow for addressing the reader, but we don't mind that. Wikipedia has elaborate rules for capitalization, spelling, grammatical style, etc that we don't really follow. Users are free here to engage in back-and-forth discussion (and even encouraged to do so), which would not be possible on wikipedia, as it is not a forum or a discussion venue. Images work differently on wikipedia and on reddit. Wikipedia has a particular "house style" for citations, which we're not picky about.
Basically, what makes a good wikipedia article is pretty different than what makes a good comment on /r/askhistorians. So even if there weren't plagarism issues with this, it's probably not a good idea.
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u/restricteddata Nuclear Technology | Modern Science Sep 13 '16
A few years back I caught a student plagiarizing a Wikipedia page, poorly. One that I had written. Sad. But a useful anecdote to tell kids today when I warn them about how eagle-eyed I am about plagiarism and how dumb and obvious it usually is (as I tell them, I have read literally thousands of undergraduate papers — you get a feel for fishiness pretty quickly).
Wikipedia can be useful. Let's not pretend like we don't all use it when checking little things, or even looking for an overview on certain topics. Sometimes it is immensely useful and even well-written. Sometimes it is downright amusing with its levels of trivia ("Milord was likely the most famous animal in the Russian Empire at that time"). But we know it has limits — some of its pages are actually pretty great, better than many allegedly peer-reviewed encyclopedias. But some of them are total shit, the worst of the worst. Being able to differentiate between the two types is sometimes straightforward (lots of "citation needed" etc. tags), sometimes it is much more subtle. So nobody relies on it, even if it can be used as a nice way to quickly look into something.
To put it another way: academics don't rely on any encyclopedias. Wikipedia is both an encyclopedia and one that is occasionally very spotty. So you definitely don't want to rely on it.
Which is not to say you can't use it for various things. We live in a world awash in dodgy information — Wikipedia is just one manifestation of that world.
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u/jschooltiger Moderator | Shipbuilding and Logistics | British Navy 1770-1830 Sep 13 '16
A few years back I caught a student plagiarizing a Wikipedia page, poorly. One that I had written. Sad.
That is fantastic. I bet, as far as plagiarism conversations go, that was an especially interesting one.
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u/restricteddata Nuclear Technology | Modern Science Sep 13 '16
I was a grad student then, so I just sent it up the chain. I didn't bother telling the people up the chain that I had written the article, and that I can recognize my own mangled prose anywhere. :-)
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u/wOlfLisK Sep 13 '16
I can empathise with that student, I've never been amazing at avoiding plagiarism myself. It's not like I ever intentionally copy something but I often find myself thinking "That's pretty much exactly what I want to say said in a better way than I could... Well shit, I can't even reword it without it becoming plagiarism".
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u/restricteddata Nuclear Technology | Modern Science Sep 13 '16
I always tell the students that nobody ever sets out to just copy and paste Wikipedia as a term paper. That's a bad 3am decision, one made in a mood of panic and desperation. I tell them that whenever they start to think about doing that kind of thing... they should just relax, breathe deep, and send an e-mail to me that says, "hey, I don't have this done and it's 3am and I'm panicking — can we meet tomorrow and talk about how I can get it in late?" and the burden of the whole world will lift off of their chest. Turning in something late might not get as good a grade but at least they won't be kicked out!
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u/TrendWarrior101 Sep 18 '16
Do you know how to argue with users who refuses to listen to other's point of view? Even if my points are sound and considered, there are users with agenda who refuse to change and keep the information as it is, and I have tons of problem as of now.
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u/restricteddata Nuclear Technology | Modern Science Sep 18 '16 edited Sep 18 '16
The way you "win" at editing a Wikipedia article is to master their rules (usually the deep ins and outs of WP:NPOV, which is a convoluted "cascade" of dubious epistemological distinctions* that can allow just about any perspective to get a foothold in an article, mixed with the rules on how disputes are supposed to be handled), and patiently, over a very long period of time, use them to your advantage. That is it. It has nothing to do with factual anything. It has to do with rule mastery mixed with a game of endurance — whomever is willing to argue and arbitrate the longest usually wins. This is why I eventually got tired of it and stopped participating. Read into that what you will.
(And I even helped write some of the rules, a very very long time ago! But it eventually got overgrown and over-bureaucratized and far too obsessed with process at the expense of expertise.)
*What I mean by "cascade" is that WP:NPOV ultimately devolves in a lot of sub-distinctions, like what is a reliable source, what is undue weight, what is neutrality, etc. All of these sub-distinctions can be picked at and wheedled at because they ultimately fail to be strong demarcation criteria — they do not unambiguously resolve and are dependent on highly subjective judgments and determinations — and thus can be used as a cudgel to work a position into an article. Once it is in an article it can be made to expand, like a tumor. It is a terrible approach to epistemology, clearly developed by people who have little experience with the sociology of knowledge, and as a result can reward the patient. The biggest way that highly oppositional opinions are weeded out is that the users who voice them tend not to follow the behavior rules correctly (e.g. violating the three revert rule, failing to cite sources correctly, end up blowing up and being abusive to other editors, etc.) and thus can be banned for that. Or they just lose patience with arguing online. It is a somewhat sick system. So if you are arguing with a long-term, entrenched editors you have to strap in for a loonnnggg ride, because it will require you pushing things through arbitration, etc., and being immaculately patient, professional, and rule-wise.
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u/LegalAction Sep 13 '16
My (least) favorite example of why Wikipedia is bad:
Julius Caesar did not gain the tribunician power in 48 BCE. The only people who think he did are Abbot 1901 and the people who read Abbot 1901 and nothing else. Abbot doesn't even give a reason why he thinks this. Probably because of one comment in Cassius Dio that no one takes seriously. Goldsworthy doesn't even discuss Caesar in relation to the tribunes.
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Sep 14 '16
[deleted]
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u/LegalAction Sep 14 '16
And Caesar isn't a precedent listed in the lex de imperio Vespasiani. But who can account for flat out wrong statements of fact?
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Sep 13 '16
I'd assume there have been attempts to correct the entry, but the edits have been walked back every time...?
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u/wOlfLisK Sep 13 '16
Wikipedia's main problem is that long term editors are given priority. It makes sense in a way but unfortunately it means that people with a rough idea are trusted more than actual experts. So in a case like this, an editor might be able to revert back to their edit where they cited Abbot 1901 because as far as wikipedia is concerned it's a valid source and his ego is too big to admit he's wrong. It also means that if the long term editors have an agenda to push, they can but that's an entirely different issue.
Oh and in some cases such as celebrity bio's, the subject of the article can't change it because they're so rigid in what can be sources yet are so lax in the validity of the source. There's a lot of issues but it's still a decent site to get rough overviews if you're unfamiliar with a topic.
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u/LegalAction Sep 13 '16
the subject of the article can't change it because they're so rigid in what can be sources yet are so lax in the validity of the source.
Or in this case the subject is 2000 years dead.
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u/StoryWonker Sep 14 '16
So is Commentaries a valid source for Caesar's life, in the eyes of Wikipedia?
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u/LegalAction Sep 14 '16
Why wouldn't they be? They're memoirs.
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u/StoryWonker Sep 14 '16
the subject of the article can't change it
I know this isn't quite what that says, but I was amused by the idea of memoirs and autobiographies being viewed as unacceptable sources.
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u/LegalAction Sep 13 '16
I don't know. I had one experience trying to edit an entry a decade ago. That was enough.
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u/Chamboz Inactive Flair Sep 13 '16
Wikipedia's pages on the Ottomans are almost universally based on Orientalist scholars whose work predates the major revolution Ottoman studies underwent from the 1980s onward. Other favorite sources include random websites, books by historians who aren't specialists in the Ottoman Empire, books by people who aren't historians at all, and books published in the nineteenth century.
Thankfully, it appears that the old community which used to work on Ottoman-related pages is now entirely dead, which has allowed me to gradually begin a process of fixing some of the awful mess which they left behind, without having to cut my way through Wikipedia's usual red tape.
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u/SilverRoyce Sep 14 '16
Thankfully...the old community...is now entirely dead
remind me never to get on your bad side. i can guess what you've been doing on the side
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u/keyilan Historical Linguistics | Languages of Asia Sep 14 '16 edited Sep 14 '16
I use it to double check language stuff. Not linguistics stuff, but like, how did this guy romanise his name that's different from whatever the official modern romanisation is, or if I need to double check the most common English spelling of मुचलिन्द. All pretty superficial.
If I try to actually read the articles about my field, I get irritated really quickly. In our department a few people are really pushing others in the dept to edit/update relevant articles since, wrong as Wikipedia generally is, people do rely on it, so we need to make it right for the stuff we do. But I just can't be bothered. I have too many experiences with fixing/writing an article and then a year later seeing it butchered beyond recognition.
I've also run into problems as an undergrad, back when I was contributing a lot. I wrote a paper on an obscure (to the average person) Islamic political movement in Persia way back when. There was no Wikipedia article for this topic, so after I turned in the paper, I went and wrote an article based on the research I'd just done. Unfortunately the professor was slow to check papers and I was too eager to post the article, so in the end I got busted for plagiarising the Wikipedia article, that I wrote, after I wrote the paper. I ended up having to show the prof that the account behind the article was mine, and the time stamp showing it was after I'd turned in the paper. It was a dumb move on my part but I was thankfully let off the hook. Thanks, Dr. Whateveryournamewas.
That's also one of the articles I spent a lot of time on with good sources that was then murdered by consensus. The article only briefly mentions the historical events anymore and is now about some other thing that kinda once borrowed the name of that earlier group, but not really. It's an awful article.
In my experience, Wikipedia can be a starting point to get the ball rolling on your own research, but if you rely on it in any way, you're not only missing out on the likely more important research being done, you also probably going to end up being wrong.
However the worst case of this is when someone changes articles to include citations of their own work. There are a couple really terrible linguistics papers written by non-linguists that somehow got published, and the authors have gone an edited every Wikipedia page that relates to the topic so that it cites their paper. You know it's them because their Wikipedia account names are their real names. The paper is really awful, scientifically unsound, linguistically nonsensical, and would be obvious as such to anyone in linguistics who actually deals with the topic, but because it sounds good to a lay person, and because they've injected their shit all over Wikipedia, you see it get cited again and again by people who don't actually know. It's Kardashianesque and more than a little frustrating.
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u/CptBuck Sep 14 '16
The Islamic studies entries on Wikipedia are a goddamn mess. 99% of the time they are presenting basically a Saudi-ized (or sectarian equivalent) devout religious view of the topic at hand (i.e citing hadith and sira with no source skepticism whatsoever, usually with a ton of interpretative citations from, often, Pakistani English-speaking religious scholars) or they go in completely the opposite direction by citing Western skeptics with no regard to the place of these scholars in the historiography. These "skeptical" articles tend to be the ones that have analogy to new atheist skepticism of Christianity. So, actually the historicity of Muhammad is not much of a controversy in Islam the way it has been for Christianity. And yet that article gets skepticism, whereas an article on, say, the development of Shiism is told almost entirely from the perspective of contemporary orthodox twelver Shiism, e.g.:
Shia Muslims believe that just as a prophet is appointed by God alone, only God has the prerogative to appoint the successor to his prophet. They believe God chose Ali to be Muhammad's successor, infallible, the first caliph (khalifa, head of state) of Islam.
Well, is that true? Did they always believe that? Did Ali's supporters believe that? Were there Shia who ever believed more or less than that?
Among the sources then included a bit further down for information about "Hassan ceding the caliphate to Muawiyah" is from a wesbite for an Islamic research institute in Qom, Iran.
Or, alternatively, it Wikipedia might simply not have an article on the topic (in English) whatsoever.
As a result, I'm often far more comfortable referring to 50 year old entries in the 2nd edition of the Encyclopaedia of Islam than I am with anything in Islamic studies from Wikipedia.
An utter mess.
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u/kookingpot Sep 13 '16
Wikipedia is useful as a starting point, sometimes. It's useful to get an overview so you know where to start in your own research. It is not the one-stop shop that so many people try to use it for. It is a reference tool that gets you started on the real research.
I have occasionally recommended Wikipedia pages in answers on AskHistorians, but only after I have read them, looked at the citations, and using my knowledge as an expert in my field, I know that the citations are good citations and the Wiki editor is writing from a position of authority. But that's because I also know what's up with that topic. There have also been many occasions that I read a Wiki page to try to get an overview of a topic, and found that it was actually very poorly cited, biased, and not up to the standards of AskHistorians, and so I did not recommend it. I've seen many Wikipedia articles that looked well-cited, but all the citations were blogs, websites, and books a hundred years old. Very much a poorly-supported article, even though it looked good on first glance. I've also seen plenty of articles that do cite plenty of academic articles, but only from one side of an argument, and so very important objections get covered up.
The way I use Wikipedia is to get a feel for sequences, the rough outline of a topic, and some dates and stuff to work with. I often try to see what works the author is citing, and Wikipedia is often good in that they provide links to many sources that I can then follow through on, and see for myself if the argument is good or not.
This next bit is very important. Never copy sources without reading them. This isn't just about plagiarism, although that is a serious issue. This is about accurate scholarship. I have seen articles where certain articles are cited in support of a point, but the cited article is actually making the exact opposite point. The researcher didn't read the article closely enough, or misquoted it, or something, and the editor didn't catch it, and the bad citation got published. As a researcher, you have to follow up citations that you are using, you have to know what the original author actually said, and not just parrot a potentially misquoted citation. Always always read the source for yourself before you use it, to avoid other people's errors.
So even when you are using Wikipedia as a starting point, getting some sources to start out with, and getting a feel for the topic at hand, don't blindly copy the citations, but read them for yourself.
The best way to get a bunch of citations is to find a current source on the topic (maybe cited on Wikipedia, or in a journal, or Google Scholar or something), read it and if it's a good article, go through its bibliography and get additional sources to read from there. As you read those sources, check out their bibliographies for things the first article didn't include. You can also find a couple starting point articles and see how much they overlap as well.
But basically, never stop at just Wikipedia, unless you just need to refer to some basic outline information.
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u/Stuhl Sep 13 '16
This is basically a follow up question, but what are some sites where I find proper sources/papers? In Informatics/Mathematics/Biology there are multiple paper aggregation sites. Does something like this exist for history?
Let's say as an example, I'm interested in learning about Pre-European South-East African Civilizations. How would I go about researching about that for myself? Just google and take what I find?
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u/kookingpot Sep 13 '16
Fields will often do it different ways, but there are a lot of ways you can get started. Some fields have specialized encyclopedias that are written by scholars in the field and edited by a well-respected scholar in the field. In my area, this is the Stern, E., Leṿinzon-Gilboʻa, A., & Aviram, J. (1993). The New encyclopedia of archaeological excavations in the Holy Land. Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society & Carta, and after each entry, provides a bibliography of sources that you can go look up yourself.
Now, this type of tertiary source can get dated pretty quickly, so another way to do it is to find a respected scholar in the field (perhaps one who wrote the encyclopedia entry you are interested in) and see what else they have written (you can usually find this on Google, or their university's faculty page).
Another way to keep up is to find a journal that covers the areas you are interested in. For my field, there are several good ones, such as the Bulletin of American Schools of Oriental Research, or the Journal of Field Archaeology, or Palestine Exploration Quarterly, or Geoarchaeology, among others. Many of these will have searchable indexes for topics, so if there's a particular journal that really covers your topic well, you can search it for articles.
There are database aggregators out there that are also helpful for finding articles across a number of journals. JSTOR is one of the most popular ones in the humanities, but there's a ~5 year delay in articles getting added to JSTOR, so it's good to find resources, but you won't find the most current stuff on there. But you can use it to find good journals that you can then search the journal archives for current stuff.
Finally, there's Google Scholar, which gets you all sorts of stuff, including journal articles. I'm often able to find good starting point articles with Google Scholar, and sometimes I can find pdfs of articles that my school doesn't have.
In your example, you can use JSTOR to start with, and maybe find some articles there, or even a journal or two that cover the specific topics you want to know, and then you can search those journals for more current articles. And as I mentioned in my other answer below, academic article bibliographies are your best friend for finding additional sources to read.
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u/wOlfLisK Sep 13 '16
As somebody currently on an archaeology degree, this comment might be a lifesaver! One issue I came across when writing my first essays last month is that most sources are locked behind paywalls. Some places like JSTOR allow me to log in using my uni credentials but sometimes I'm just outright locked out which is insanely infuriating when I'm trying to find something relevant to the very specific topic I was told my essay has to be about. Any advice about finding relevant stuff that isn't locked behind paywalls?
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u/jschooltiger Moderator | Shipbuilding and Logistics | British Navy 1770-1830 Sep 13 '16
In addition to the suggestions from other users here, you may be interested in our six-part series, "Finding and Understanding Sources."
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u/pipkin42 Art of the United States Sep 13 '16
There are database aggregators. I know about my field, which is art history. The main aggregator there is the Bibliography of the History of Art, though honestly I don't use it a terrible lot.
If you're interested in a topic, often a good way of approaching it is to find the most recent book you can about it from a scholarly press and look at the footnotes and bibliography of that book, seeing where that author got her/his sources.
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Sep 13 '16 edited Apr 11 '18
[deleted]
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u/chocolatepot Sep 13 '16
Perhaps it's because many artworks on Wikimedia Commons have poor information about the source? Some seem to have been uploaded by the museums that own them, but many have no information about where the artwork comes from, who it's by, and when it was made. (Very frustrating.)
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u/pipkin42 Art of the United States Sep 13 '16
I agree that the metadata on WM Commons is often shoddy - I try to only use images that I find there after having seen the artwork before, either in person or in a published scholarly source.
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u/WARitter Moderator | European Armour and Weapons 1250-1600 Sep 14 '16
As u/chocolatepot alludes to, there is often very little provenance or metadata information on Wikipedia Commons images. This means it can be hard for a beginner to distinguish say, an original image from a 19th century line drawing. This is true of the medieval armour and weapons articles, which include illuminations from the Middle Ages, public domain 19th century illustrations and pictures of reenactors.
The upshot of this is that if you know what you are looking for you can find fantastic resources on Wikipedia. If you are just starting you will have trouble separating genuine primary pictorial sources from the rest.
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u/sandj12 Sep 13 '16
Images work differently on wikipedia and on reddit.
I read that simply as a technical point. One of the reasons you wouldn't write an AskHistorians response like you were writing for Wikipedia is that the platforms handle images differently. E.g., it's common to link to an image in-line on reddit, as opposed to using floating images with captions in the margins on Wikipedia.
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Sep 13 '16 edited Sep 13 '16
[deleted]
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u/jschooltiger Moderator | Shipbuilding and Logistics | British Navy 1770-1830 Sep 13 '16 edited Sep 13 '16
Hi there, if you're interested in a relatively lightly moderated, discussion-focused history sub, you may want to check out /r/history. It's a default, which comes with its own set of quirks, but many of our readers also enjoy it.
Edit: Please, folks, stop downvoting /u/imnotlegolas -- they have expressed a desire to find out about other history focused subs and have not been in any way uncivil or disrespectful about this.
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Sep 13 '16
History is turning into garbage, just like every other major sub. Jokes and memes voted to the top, highly voted answers that are just plain wrong and get corrected in their replies which are 50/50 wrong themselves.
If you want real, accurate, current answers to history and science questions, you go to the well moderated "ask" subs. If you want garbage in and garbage out, you don't.
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u/AFKarel Sep 13 '16
Sometimes articles about current discoveries get posted there, which are nice to read. Also people posting about things they find that belonged to their relatives can be interesting. The discussion in the comments or any questions/inquiries are in my experience indeed quite the mess. Use with caution I would say.
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Sep 13 '16
Oh the articles are fine, you just have to wade through the comments with thick, latex gloves.
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u/wOlfLisK Sep 13 '16
/r/history is great. I personally prefer it to the rigid moderation of this sub although it's far more generalised than simply discussion.
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Sep 13 '16
Citing sources is not necessarily an indicator of quality. The sources could be misinterpreted, out-of-date, or not representative of the range of opinions among scholars. For the reasons above this is a particularly troublesome task on wikipedia, where there's no way of verifying whoever added the source knows whether a source is reliable, and whether it represents academic thought on a subject.
And who determines this to be the case or not in this sub? Why are the mods here less biased and more knowledgable than those editing Wikipedia?
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u/gingerkid1234 Inactive Flair Sep 13 '16
And who determines this to be the case or not in this sub? Why are the mods here less biased and more knowledgable than those editing Wikipedia?
An important part of our format is that other users are able to disagree with a misinformed post, and when a post is substantially incorrect we have a large team of mods who can review the issue at hand to determine if two sides of an argument are valid or if one is misinformed. While it's not infallible, wikipedia just doesn't have that sort of discussion-review mechanism. To the extent wiki editors review things among themselves (which I'm not sure they really do very often), the people involved in making those decisions are not historians nor do they have any demonstrated historical knowledge or expertise, unlike mods of this subreddit (who are not all historians, but many are, and all have some demonstrated historical knowledge and expertise).
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u/wOlfLisK Sep 13 '16
Wikipedia should never be cited but I've found it pretty useful to get an overview of the topic if I'm unsure about it and to find sources for whatever it is I'm writing. It's an amazing first step but should never be the final one.
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u/SilverRoyce Sep 14 '16
i've actually been surprisingly disappointed (based on expectations) on how good wikipedia is as a first step. perhaps it's not the first step though but the second or third step where it runs into problems a lot of the time
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u/Omena123 Sep 13 '16
citing someone who is citing is bad
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u/LegalAction Sep 13 '16
Why? We all cite things. Finding an historian who cites no one is both unlikely and undesirable.
Knowing the difference between what the source contributes and what the source draws on is the key.
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u/eternalkerri Quality Contributor Sep 13 '16
The main uses I have always found with Wikipedia has always been:
1.) Double checking dates.
2.) Decently curated lists. For example Spanish Explorers.
3.) Decent pictures of the topic material.
4.) Timelines.
5.) Links to sources. This allows me to read the material for myself.
6.) Ball parking and refreshers. It's mean't to be an encyclopedia entry, not a deep analysis.
7.) They're fun to read during slow days at work.
That's about it. Outside of dates for events I don't really even trust statistics listed in Wiki articles unless they're sourced and I can verify them on a reputable website. The biggest thing I get out of Wiki articles is discovering something new to go look up on my own on the web, like websites and articles about say...Spanish exploration and settlements in the Southeast United States.