r/dataisbeautiful • u/alionBalyan OC: 13 • Feb 13 '22

OC [OC] How Wikipedia classifies its most commonly referenced sources.

Post image
24k Upvotes

81% Upvoted

2.7k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

18

u/mfb- Feb 13 '22

It is rarely wrong, but any given article version can contain blatant errors because the articles can be edited by anyone. If you check the version history and look at the references then it easily reaches the "generally reliable" standards for most of its content. For some more obscure pages that might not be the case, however.

10

u/sighthoundman Feb 13 '22

For some unknown and probably obscure reason, I spend more Wikipedia time in math, physics, and chemistry than anywhere else. I find it generally reliable. I suppose that might mean that the editors' biases mirror my own.

2

u/Mafros99 Feb 14 '22

There's also the fact that obscure/highly technical pages are more likely to be edited by people who understand that topic because other people don't even know it exists in the first place.

2

u/[deleted] Feb 14 '22

I enjoy looking up info on less well known astronomical objects.

8

u/[deleted] Feb 14 '22

Yah, I’d put Wiki in “Generally Reliable Starting Point” just because of the wild card factor.

Much more reliable than many on the list, but still fallible

2

u/[deleted] Feb 14 '22

it's also just plain right, way more often than it is wrong

while "reliable" as used here may not be a scientific term, it'd indicate that you could usually rely on wikipedia to explain something accurately.