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Rightly or wrongly, quite a few people seem to have gotten a bad "Wikipedia is zealous about deleting stuff to [vague emotional speculation] save disk space" vibe. Putting a more-accurate label on the situation would not help their displeasure.

Editorial-resource-wise, there is a huge difference between:

- "a decent general editor can glance over this article long enough to label it as [1] plausibly legit, [2] obvious drunken rambling, [3] some kid's knock-knock joke collection, [4] ax-grinding extremism, [5] etc."

and

- "a subject-matter-expert editor can determine whether this Korean-language article about Roman legal practices in (the Roman province of) Hispania Baetica under Emperor Caracalla (198-217) is passably correct and current".

I am not a studious follower of things Wiki, but quite a few people seem to feel that Wikipedia is really not handling the situation well at all.

1 comments

It's easy enough to detect blatant vandalism (even then some are not caught).

But it's very easy to write an article which superficially looks great - nice structure, polished language, links to other wikipedia articles etc, but at the same time can be completely false and talking about something which doesn't actually exist, or does exist and paints it in a completely incorrect light.

Again, not all such articles get caught today, but in general it's a manageable problem with the "Notability" and "Reliable sources" tools. Either there are supporting sources and you can easily verify the information, or there aren't, and you delete the article.

Now imagine that you relax these requirements and somebody writes that beautiful article full of details but with no supporting sources. It can be completely false, an elaborate hoax, self promo or part of a smear campaign. What do you do?

> but quite a few people seem to feel that Wikipedia is really not handling the situation well at all.

Yeah, they mostly have only very cursory information about what are wikipedia's goals and how it works internally.

> Now imagine that you relax these requirements and somebody writes that beautiful article full of details but with no supporting sources. It can be completely false, an elaborate hoax, self promo or part of a smear campaign. What do you do?

At least Wikimedia could hire generalist experts for the major areas of science for each major language that have the time to review contested or suspicious articles, based on the cited sources or actual research. Many governments have such a public service for the members of parliament (e.g. the "Wissenschaftlicher Dienst des Bundestags" in Germany, see https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wissenschaftliche_Dienste_des_...), which every MP can ask to provide guidance on any question they need for their work.

Wikimedia is a platform, not a publisher, just like YouTube or Twitter. That's a little-understood, but fundamental part of the Wikimedia Foundation's identity.

See e.g. https://diff.wikimedia.org/2021/10/05/a-victory-for-free-kno... where they explicitly say, "the plaintiff argued that the Foundation should be treated like a traditional offline publisher and held responsible as though it were vetting all posts made to the sites it hosts, despite the fact that it does not write or curate any of the content found on the projects." (My emphasis.)

(By the way, for an alternative view of that specific case, see –

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2... as well as

https://www.vice.com/en/article/5dgpnq/wikipedia-and-google-... )

Liability is one consideration here. It is not uncommon for people to be libelled on Wikipedia, but the Wikimedia Foundation, as a platform, is protected from liability under Section 230. So they really have no interest in doing something that will result in their being held responsible for Wikipedia content – such as hiring experts to vet and correct said content. It will never happen: they are and want to remain a platform.

Here is a famous example of such an article which looked great, appeared to have sources, and even won distinction as a "Good Article":

"After a half-decade, massive Wikipedia hoax finally exposed" https://www.dailydot.com/unclick/wikipedia-bicholim-conflict...

There are a few more examples here:

https://www.theregister.com/2017/01/16/wikipedia_16_birthday...

And on Twitter just yesterday, someone tweeted a confession https://twitter.com/aobate/status/1466101687773503493 that SIXTEEN YEARS ago they made up a person on Wikipedia ... the biography still exists today (though probably not for much longer, hence the archive link):

https://archive.md/BBRC4

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Henry_Farrow

Dr. William Henry Farrow (20 June 1805? – 17 November 1876) was a physician born and trained in England. Farrow practiced in Montreal, Quebec and Toronto, Ontario. He is most notable for providing one of the first detailed descriptions of synesthesia.[1] Farrow reported the details of the illness, (in this case temporary) in an article published in the Lower Canada Journal of Medicine.[2]

Footnotes

1. New, Chester (1929). Lord Durham. Oxford University Press. pp. 374–376.

2. "An Analysis of Confusion Occurring between the Senses". The Lower Canada Journal of Medicine. The Medical Society of Lower Canada. 12: 56–62. September 1838.

It's always worth remembering that Wikipedia has different sorts of quality problems from conventional encyclopedias.