> really high-quality information that is useful for decision makers in relevant fields
Decision makers of any import have no shortage of high quality information. The availability of information is not a significant limiting factor on good decisions by powerful people. For example: Trump has the greatest information resources in the known world at his command yet he makes shitty decisions basically nonstop.
A shortage of information is not the social problem of today. The big social problem today is the selection of information. That has more to do with tribal trust and culture than the information itself.
For all the shortcomings of Wikipedia (and there are many), it is a source of information that is widely trusted and used across tribal boundaries. A "news" organization that achieves the same thing would be good.
There are plenty of people and orgs doing great investigations. The problems are getting them eyeballs, and getting past the trust barrier.
>The reason why Wikipedia is such a great first stop for knowledge is because it has citations you can follow.
I don't know the actual statistics, but it seems like in my experience, at least 50% of the time, the linked sources are dead links, or don't have the information they're purported to have.
> It's true though, Wikipedia really is terrible and full of fake citations that lead nowhere. It's an anti-knowledge base that sometimes has good information.
Yeah, Wikipedia is garbage puffed up beyond all belief. I literally just today saw something just like you describe.
It should be viewed very skeptically on anything anyone disagrees over (because then it's just snapshots of an agenda-pushing battle).
Every source is biased. Wikipedia tries harder to be less biased. And hey, you can frequently change the bias if you just go and edit the article yourself.
I suppose I should read Wikipedia and Conservapedia and take the average of the two to get closer to the truth? :-)
There have been numerous studies[1][2][3][4][5][6] which have consistently shown Wikipedia as a reliable source of information. Nobody is suggesting it's 100% accurate, but it's accurate enough that it shouldn't be dismissed as unreliable.
> The teacher instead should be directing the children to print or digitized encyclopedias
Any data source you encounter needs to be validated. Wikipedia is a fine source for lots of types of data, traditional encyclopedias aren’t known to be any more accurate. The reality is you have to think about the importance of the information you’re looking up, but most people shouldn’t be referring to primary sources as they are much harder to validate than secondary sources.
“Wikipedia has a similar number of errors to professional and peer-reviewed sources”
> Even GPT3 uses Wikipedia which does have (mostly) factual data with cited sources.
There's a LOT of stuff on Wikipedia where the source is a link to some random, long article and it's unclear where exactly the referred to information is coming from. Gets significantly worse for any "hot" topic.
> It has a well-sourced Wikipedia page for crying out loud.
You’ll have to read most of it as well, the juicy parts and citations are towards the bottom.
Bootlickers have the burden to prove data is not misused these days—not the other way around.
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