| ▲ | 10111001 a day ago |
| > Just as academics must cite any AI-generated machine outputs they rely upon in their research and writing, they can also cite Wikipedia if they use it in their work. Doing so can highlight Wikipedia’s value to other academics as a source of knowledge and provide greater transparency in one’s research processes. Despite longstanding skepticism of Wikipedia among some scholars, citations to Wikipedia in academic journals appear to be increasing – even in high-impact publications in subject areas like the health sciences. As someone who's contributed to Wikipedia and seen how the sausage is made: that's stupid. Even Wikipedia itself considers wikis (including itself) to lack sufficient authority to be cited as a source. Such citations could be easily gamed (if you cite a particular change) or are useless (the content you cite may not be there in the future), and are obvious pathways to "citogenesis." |
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| ▲ | wahern 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| It's sad that papers are citing to Wikipedia. Citation 101 is to cite to primary sources if possible, secondary otherwise, at least for substantive claims. Wikipedia isn't a secondary source, or as you point out any kind of legitimate source. Even if Wikipedia were perfectly reliable and accurate, it'd at best be a tertiary source, but it'd still be better to shorten the chain (unlike a tertiary source like a dictionary, which arguably is in a sense a kind of primary or secondary source). And citing to Wikipedia only proves how lazy an author is given Wikipedia itself usually cites to primary and secondary sources, so they couldn't even be bothered to copy+paste the reference, let alone actually read and analyze it first. (Many times I've come across citations that don't support the Wikipedia claim, and sometimes even contradict it, though that's hardly unique to Wikipedia. At least with Wikipedia I can try to do something about it. But even a bad citation is valuable precisely because it can be followed and verified in context.) |
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| ▲ | Alpha3031 a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Academics citing any website should consider also pointing towards (or at least creating) an archived version via something like the Wayback Machine. Wikipedia is not the only website that changes over time, and most don't have a easily accessible revision history. |
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| ▲ | jolmg a day ago | parent | next [-] | | > Academics citing any website should consider also pointing towards (or at least creating) an archived version via something like the Wayback Machine. It's probably better for the user to search the original URL themselves on the Wayback Machine. If you cite with a Wayback Machine link when the original link still works, you're just creating needless work for a non-profit. An archive isn't a CDN. > or at least creating I agree on creating. | | |
| ▲ | bombcar a day ago | parent | next [-] | | Or at least have the decency to make sure there's an archive of it when you looked at it - so many times I've found sources sited and Wayback as one from two years before the cite, and one year after; completely missing what the cite was about. | |
| ▲ | GauntletWizard a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | The wayback machine doesn't archive every version of every page. If it's important/authoritative enough to be cited in an academic work, it's important enough to be archived with it. Universities should be investing in that kind of infrastructure, and it's shameful that they're not already experts. | | |
| ▲ | cowsandmilk a day ago | parent [-] | | > Universities should be investing in that kind of infrastructure, and it's shameful that they're not already experts. Do you also expect universities to have an archived version of every article and book their professors cite? | | |
| ▲ | busssard 17 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | The authors usually has a copy of a cited article in their reference systems. at least as pdf.
So yes i dont see why they shouldn't also keep a pdf copy of cited websites with metadata attached this could then be stored on a university server for future reference. | |
| ▲ | yangm97 a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | This is not a honest comparison. Books are mass produced and don’t rely solely on their authors paying hosting bills and willingness to not change stuff to keep existing. Relying entirely on a single nonprofit (archive.org) to provide a honest snapshot of every cited link, at the time of citation, sounds much more unreasonable. | | |
| ▲ | Alpha3031 a day ago | parent [-] | | A lot of national libraries also undertake web archiving within their scope (e.g. under their national TLD) and I've sometimes found that they have items not covered by Wayback, but it's not as easy to request additions to it. The risk of having a single point of failure is certainly real, and it would certainly be nice for a coalition of libraries to maybe fund a second alternative and mandate the use of both, or something like that. |
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| ▲ | GauntletWizard a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | Yes. 100% yes. Obviously and clearly, yes. Universities have huge libraries and archives. It used to be a point of pride how big their libraries and archives were. University libraries bound and collated their periodicals. They converted them to microfiche to save space, but the integrity was paramount. Yes. Libraries should be able to back-reference every citation that is included in every paper that they publish, and so should the journals. That is paramount to the scientific method. Anything that you have not verified yourself should have a clear citation that you're able to prove. |
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| ▲ | xboxnolifes a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | For static content, the best option is probably to download the webpage as a PDF and add it to the appendix of your report. |
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| ▲ | timr a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Recently I did a deep dive on some minor historical event in the 1800s that I won't bother to go into detail here, except to say that it has been claimed by an activist editor who has made it a personal mission to re-frame the event as an example of "westerners" committing sexual violence against helpless "easterners". While certainly this kind of story is common throughout history, in this case, there's absolutely no documentary evidence of the event, and what little evidence exists points in the other direction. This is not just the weight of evidence -- it's what all current historical experts believe. It's what all major encyclopedias say about the event. Nonetheless, the Wikipedia editor clings to a bad reference (in an extremely biased book) that makes an off-hand assertion. This assertion, in turn, is sourced with only a single citation to a 1960s-era historical novel that a) didn't actually support what the author claims, and b) essentially made up signficant details of the event in question, based on popular movies and rumors of the time. It's garbage all the way down. Nevertheless, anyone who edits this article to reflect accurate current knowledge is immediately embroiled in a war with the editor, because unfortunately, there's no "trusted source" that says the opposite of the bad citation. And so the lie remains. To fight this battle would require escalating the issue and possibly getting the editor removed. Who has time? Again, this is a minor historical event that nobody cares about, and you still cannot trust it as a source. I have seen enough things like this across Wikipedia that I no longer trust it for anything that might intersect with modern political opinions. |
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| ▲ | econ a day ago | parent | next [-] | | More generally, if there are two incompatible versions of an article to be had and editors can't write a neutral article (could have various reasons) initially the largest group "wins" which may be overruled by so called established editors which at times works out even worse. If the topic is actively propagandized or insulting to one or more people the thing may drag out for years. | | |
| ▲ | timr a day ago | parent [-] | | Yes, exactly. I think it should be obvious [1] to anyone that Wikipedia is unreliable for extremely contentious subjects or modern politics. But if you point to those as examples of editorial bias, you get mired in of-the-moment political bickering. The reason I raise this example is to show that even in a boring area that should be unrelated to modern politics, you still see the rot. [1] "should be" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in this sentence. Unfortunately, too many people have had their higher reasoning centers liquified by partisanship, and cannot acknowledge inconvenient facts even when they're blatant. | | |
| ▲ | econ 20 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | An example would be a minority view on something. Even experts may strongly disagree if it should be included. | |
| ▲ | the_af a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | Are other encyclopedias or sources of information less or more likely to fall prey to this kind of bias? Maybe in Wikipedia it's just more open, so you notice it more? I've also noticed bias, especially in anything political (or that admits different political or ideological interpretations, such as history). However, I think you have one thing backwards: the more obscure and niche a topic is, the more likely you'll find it biased, since it has fewer editors looking at it. --- Edit: reply to breezybottom, as I'm rate-limited: > Encyclopedias in general are not primary sources, and should never be cited. Note this is not what I'm arguing. I mentioned Wikipedia as a source of information, which it is, not as a primary source to be cited. | | |
| ▲ | timr a day ago | parent | next [-] | | Plainly less. It’s not a question. Every source has bias, but wikipedia has the additional problem that anyone with a torch to burn, regardless of experience or knowledge, can become a dictator for the content on a topic. Say what you will about encyclopedias, but they generally farm their writing work out to subject-matter experts, and at least try to be neutral in their editing. > I think you have one thing backwards: the more obscure and niche a topic is, the more likely you'll find it biased, since it has fewer editors looking at it. Maybe, but the point remains: this bias has fully permeated wikipedia. | |
| ▲ | breezybottom a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Encyclopedias in general are not primary sources, and should never be cited. | | | |
| ▲ | 10111001 20 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > Are other encyclopedias or sources of information less or more likely to fall prey to this kind of bias? I think it's less likely, because other encyclopedias are written by paid professionals (or at least some cohesive group whose reliability you can evaluate). > Maybe in Wikipedia it's just more open, so you notice it more? I think it's more likely on Wikipedia, because no one there is getting paid, so you have to ask yourself, what's their motivation for doing so much work? Sure you have the altruistic gnomes, just laboring to do a good, fair job for its own sake. But you also have people with an axe to grind, propagandists, and other obsessives, and they contribute to basically propagandize their POV. The dumbest ones get banned, but the smarter ones learn to twist the rules and use things like slow long-term persistence to get their way. |
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| ▲ | WalterBright a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > a single citation to a 1960s-era historical novel People get annoyed when I say "The Jungle" by Upton Sinclair is a novel, as is "The Grapes of Wrath" by Steinbeck, and are not appropriate as a historical reference (outside of being a literary cite). | | |
| ▲ | timr a day ago | parent [-] | | This was less bad than that (a rigorously researched novel), but yes, the same basic idea. The fundamental problem with that kind of narrative non-fiction is that you don’t know what you’re citing - is it the fiction part, or the non-fiction part? Both? The fact that a “legitimate” academic text cited this novel as a sole reference is an indictment of the entire book. | | |
| ▲ | thedailymail 21 hours ago | parent [-] | | Both The Jungle and Grapes of Wrath were pretty rigorously researched, but were not really 'historical' novels at the time of writing (both described roughly contemporary places and events), so the research was closer to field work or journalism. | | |
| ▲ | WalterBright 21 hours ago | parent [-] | | Are you sure about that? My dad grew up in the Depression. He sat next to Okies in school in Long Beach. He also had a doctorate in history. So I asked him about TGoW. He said it was an exaggeration, as was most of Steinbeck's work. As for TJ, Sinclair could have done it as an actual history book, i.e. putting down the results of his rigorous research. But he didn't, and so he could make up whatever he needed. The entire book was a pitch for socialism. | | |
| ▲ | wahern 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Unfortunately, in time both will become definitive historical reference sources, if they haven't already. Before the collapse of Google Books, when for a brief, glorious moment Google came closest to achieving the dream of making accessible all the world's knowledge, I could much more easily trace back historical "facts" to a single popular book in whatever field, but then keep going back through older material and often find contradictory accounts and narratives. History is messy. There's of course what actually happened, but almost immediately narratives start to branch. Then at some point, years, decades, or maybe centuries later, narratives converge back to a single "truth", typically based upon a single, popular author's gloss. There can be some subsequent divergence and reconvergence, but that first convergence really seems to be nearly as defining if not more defining than the actual event(s). |
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| ▲ | justsaywhich a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Just say which article this is about. You're leaving out a lead someone else could use to kick out that editor, or fix his mistakes down the line when he's gone. | | |
| ▲ | timr a day ago | parent [-] | | I don’t want to get accused of brigading, and also, I think it has the potential to be a distraction from my point. | | |
| ▲ | atdt a day ago | parent [-] | | Your point is terribly weak unless you cite the article in question. The hallmark of an edit war is two editors who are each absolutely convinced that they are editing in good faith while the other has an ideological axe to grind. | | |
| ▲ | timr a day ago | parent [-] | | I’m not in an edit war. I’m reporting what other people have done. When I saw the edit “war” (in reality it was the same editor and multiple different people making the same edit over years), I did research into the sources being cited because I was interested. Based on what I found in the primary literature, I would have made the edit, but I gave up when I saw the situation. |
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| ▲ | annzabelle a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I was able to edit this to fix it, but the geography of New Zealand page had a reference to Southland having a "tundra like climate." Invercargill, which is in Southland, actually has a temperate oceanic climate and a record low of -9C or 15F. I find wikipedia is really vulnerable to Gell-Mann Amnesia where any article about a topic on which you are very familiar has blatantly incorrect information, but then you open a different one and read it as though it were true. Of course this is true of other sources, famously newspapers, but I think wikipedia is more vulnerable, especially on topics that are very emotionally salient to its power editors. | | |
| ▲ | timr a day ago | parent | next [-] | | If you had to get in a fight to edit that, it really is the height of wikipedianism. I can totally see how this kind of question would intersect with climate activism though. | | |
| ▲ | annzabelle a day ago | parent [-] | | I didn't really have to fight to edit it, but it had been in the article for many years, despite being blatantly false (tundras have mean temperatures below 0 C for 6+ months out of the year, while coastal Southland has a mean temperature of 5 C in July, the coldest month). My best guess is some kid thought that Southland was cold and knew that tundras were cold, and added a sentence to the article comparing Southland to a tundra. Whenever I catch something like this, I wonder how many things like this are in there that I don't notice. And this one isn't even really touching anything that is controversial. | | |
| ▲ | nephihaha 14 hours ago | parent [-] | | It is probably a reference to upland areas of Southland. Some of those do qualify as tundra although most of it is forested. | | |
| ▲ | annzabelle 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | It specifically said coastal southland before I edited it, it would've worked to change it from "tundra like climate in coastal southland" to "tundra like climate in apline regions of the south island" instead, you're right. |
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| ▲ | nephihaha 14 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I think the Southland reference is to upland areas. Invercargill itself is temperate (but often cold) and has a lot of trees, as does Stewart Island to the south. I've camped in both places. |
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| ▲ | tourmalinetaco a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | Exactly. They also game the “no primary sources” rule to write pure fiction in modern political articles because a “trusted source” (aka a journalistic rag they agree with) purposefully didn’t include that information, and in fact may have blatantly falsified events. |
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| ▲ | syockit a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Isn't citing encyclopedias shunned in academia in the first place? Wikipedia is an encyclopedia and should be treated as such. I understand that access to primary sources can be difficult at times, but in that case, wouldn't an argument based on a citation from an encyclopedia have a shaky foundation? |
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| ▲ | yorwba a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| If you look up something on Wikipedia and include it in your work without citing it, it's an even worse pathway to citogenesis, since someone trying to check whether you can be used as a source for Wikipedia won't know that that's where you got it from in the first place. Of course for most things you should have no need to refer to Wikipedia at all, and hence also no need to cite it. |
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| ▲ | jacobolus a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Wikipedia doesn't consider itself to be a reliable source, for obvious reasons: that's directly circular. But Wikipedia must always be cited if you use it, otherwise people reading your work (including Wikipedia authors and other scholars) cannot trace the provenance of the ideas you discuss. |
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| ▲ | theamk 21 hours ago | parent [-] | | Isn't this directly against WP:NOR, specifically WP:TERTIARY? Every fact must be supported by reliable first-party source, and the idea's provenance is that source. In the research, there are often long paths that lead to the ideas: lunch room conversation -> paper 1 -> web search on term seen -> paper 2 -> web search on another term seen -> wikipedia page -> another wikipedia page -> original source (paper 3) -> paper 3's citation list -> paper 4 -> fact for your own paper We always cite only the very last item in the chain, paper 4. I'd might cite other papers I've seen, but only if they are relevant. I was taught that the tertiary sources, like encyclopedias, are never to be cited, unless they have original facts which cannot be traced to other sources. | | |
| ▲ | jacobolus 20 hours ago | parent [-] | | In my opinion, if you used Wikipedia, you should cite it. If you instead got your idea from "lunch room conversation", or a private email, or whatever, you can also cite that. It's a really huge problem that people pull ideas from Wikipedia, attribute them to something like "paper 4", but then it turns out that what Wikipedia said and what papers 3 and 4 said were not the same, and what Wikipedia said was actually based on some other paper 5 that turns out to be a bunch of bullshit, or a Wikipedia author made it up and wrongly attributed it to paper 3, or a Wikipedia author didn't understand paper 3 and made a total hash of it. Etc. This of course also happens plenty when Wikipedia isn't involved, but for whatever reason people seem to have the mistaken idea that citing Wikipedia is inherently bad. There's no rule against citing Wikipedia, or tertiary sources in general, from professional work. When a later person (e.g. a scholar or Wikipedia author) is trying to understand your work, it's incredibly helpful to know where some claim or idea came from. Otherwise they have to jump through extra hoops to trace the actual attributions and figure out where mistakes came from. Wikipedia's original research policy is not relevant to what works you should cite in academic papers. A Wikipedia article is not supposed to contain the original research of its authors, because it's the wrong venue for such work, and because when such material is added it typically turns out to be nonsense or spam, but rejecting it on the grounds that it is unsourced is much easier. | | |
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| ▲ | creata a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > Such citations could be easily gamed (if you cite a particular change) What do you mean by "gamed"? |
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| ▲ | econ a day ago | parent [-] | | If the source doesn't agree with my world view you may not use it. My favorite version is when topics are stuck decades ago and newer sources are rejected as an attempt to make the topic look real |
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| ▲ | markovs_gun a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| People who say you should be allowed and encouraged to cite Wikipedia in academic contexts have clearly not spent enough time on Wikipedia. I love Wikipedia and I think it's one of humanity's greatest achievements- however, it has a lot of flaws and really shouldn't ever be used as a substitute for real in depth research. There are major trends and biases in the types of articles that are high quality and those that are low quality. For example, obscure Marvel comic book characters often have much longer and more detailed Wikipedia pages than ones for most pre-modern historical figures. |
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| ▲ | ViktorRay a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Yes I was always taught in school that one shouldn’t cite encyclopedias. Encyclopedias, including Wikipedia, are tertiary sources. When writing papers in school and college, secondary sources were what we were supposed to cite. |
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| ▲ | thaumasiotes a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > Even Wikipedia itself considers wikis (including itself) to lack sufficient authority to be cited as a source. Those two things are not alike. Nobody can view themselves as sufficient authority to be cited as their own source. (The late Victor Mair was an exception; he was happy to "support" his own claims by citing wikipedia articles that cited unsourced claims from him.) |
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| ▲ | mmooss a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > they can also cite Wikipedia Academics require primary source evidence - e.g., experimental or documentary. Wikipedia is a tertiary source; by policy it forbids primary sources and requires secondary sources. |
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| ▲ | adsharma a day ago | parent | prev [-] |
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