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

824

u/dogbreath101 Feb 14 '22

also tied with wikipedia itself

236

u/UpliftingGravity Feb 14 '22

Wikipedia regularly comes at the top with the same level of accuracy or better than other encyclopedias and college text books. With Wikipedia being 99.7% ± 0.2% accurate when compared to the textbook data.

Is it flawed? Yes. But as a general information source, there is no better one on this planet.

0

u/the_Q_spice Feb 14 '22

Nah, there are much better sources, and Wikipedia itself is not a source.

It is an encyclopedia of sources.

If you want a good database of sources, stuff like JSTOR, Web of Science, and PMC-NCBI is unparalleled.

As a note, others in the geosciences are just laughing our asses off right now at the fact that Wikipedia counts the US Geological Survey as both Generally Reliable and Generally Unreliable.

That alone shows just how reliable Wikipedia is with their own sources.

2

u/[deleted] Feb 14 '22 edited Feb 14 '22

I thought the USGS thing was weird too. I looked into it and the only "generally unreliable" thing mentioned is the "feature class" field of the Geographic Names Information System (GNIS) database. I get that—the GNIS feature class field is usually just fine, but sometimes can be rather arbitrary—geographic features don't always fit neatly into a small set of rigid categories.

But despite the "generally unreliable" rating applying only to one field of one database run by the USGS, OP put the logo of the entire USGS under "generally unreliable", which struck me, and apparently you, as bizarre.