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by jjmarr·2y ago·view on hn ↗
Because ultimately, Wikipedia's criteria for allowing articles is whether or not the subject of such has sufficient content in reliable secondary sources (like newspapers or academic articles) to base an article on. Otherwise, most of the article is going to be someone's personal opinions or their own research. Most minor American roads and Pokemon don't have that coverage beyond showing they exist and their route. Allowing those articles to be created is a signal that "there's reliable newspapers or academics covering the history of this highway" when in truth if a history section is ever added, it's not going to be based on anything beyond what the editor came up with.

That is what distinguishes Wikipedia from large language models or Google which'll say they have information on a given topic even if their sources are questionable. The value-add of Wikipedia is curation, and when the quality of one's outputs is a function of one's inputs, it's sometimes better to just not give an output when the input doesn't exist.

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>has sufficient content in reliable secondary sources (like newspapers or academic articles) to base an article on

Which is, of course, completely ironic. Wikipedia's notability criterion depends heavily on books in some library stack that essentially no one will ever actually check or appearances in other print form that no one will check either.

I've found a couple of minor "folk histories" of things that appear to not have been true after looking at actual books (which may have not been actually accurate either though they seemed plausible).

There's an opposite irony, too: Wikipedia doesn't want to be a location for original research, but moving the pages out of Wikipedia means they could now be a suitable citation source for articles on Wikipedia.
From my understanding this is also sometimes a method used to get fake info on Wikipedia. Get the fake info on a secondary source, then cite that on Wikipedia.
For extra irony, get the fake info into Wikipedia long enough that someone uses it, and then use what they wrote as a source to put it into Wikipedia.

(There's a WP: page about this problem that I think gives it a name, but I can't find it right now.)

Aha, someone else mentioned it in these comments: "citogenesis", and it was indeed Randall Munroe's coining, and the meta page is

https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Wikipedia:List_of_citogenesis_in...

I've seen this kind of stuff used in some activist style groups as well before. Someone may be trying to push some kind of agenda. While in an argument with someone they link to a Wikipedia article. That Wikipedia articles source ends up linking to the activist groups own site. That site then links to some kind of sketchy or very broad conclusion piece of "research" that is unreproducable.

So I feel like Wikipedia's rule don't necessarily make their content any more reliable. It just adds a step if you're looking to push some kind of biased/iffy opinion onto a page.

And it's not just a Wikipedia thing. When I was researching a book a number of years back I found some fairly consistently repeated origin stories which, if you went back to some older books, basically weren't the whole story.
Definitely, but that's what it means to be an encyclopædia. Wikipedia is very definitely relying on foundations that are shakier than anyone expected when the project was started -- but still (at least in my opinion) firm enough to build something net positive.
There's an XKCD cartoon in that vein. Best to get it in print somewhere but getting information onto what is a plausibly credible source is better than nothing with respect to getting it into Wikipedia via a citation.
Not really ironic, because they can be checked.
As a practical matter however... Almost no one's going to visit the $SMALLTOWN historical society and do so. They're going to do a web search.
That's part of why digital libraries are important!

Wikipedia has its own "Wikipedia Library", which is a system to allow active editors access to high-quality sources. But if it has to be resorting to Sci-Hub or libgen to check sources for Wikipedia, that's also a form of public service.

Active _non-anonymous_ editors. Anonymous editors can't access TWL.
It relies on databases donating access to Wikipedia editors. There are other restrictions too. Most of the stuff in TWL can be accessed with a university library card that many alumni are eligible for.
Someone has probably checked them at some point. And that's good enough for me
Not if that someone was a neofascist with an agenda to rewrite relatively minor history.

Sadly that happens, and it happens a lot more than most people realize. It's way too easy to fake a reputation on Wikipedia.