"Personally, I think Wikipedia's quality is too poor for that."
You should see some of the crap in the books at Alexandria: The world is flat and there are four elements and other bollocks. Obviously I'm taking the piss. The content is sometimes just as important as the factual accuracy of the content. For a given value of factual accuracy.
WP is written by people and holds a vast amount of stuff. It is flawed in my opinion in many ways but that is the human experience.
I live in a town called Yeovil in Somerset, UK. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yeovil . Several years ago I noticed an incorrect old name for the place and I tried to correct it. I appealed to the Domesday Book which is considered quite authoritative hereabouts but I linked to the only site I could find which sold copies of it. My edit was thrown out by the local Somerset editor rather than being fixed. I own a coffee cup bought from the local museum that lists the >60 spellings of this tiny town over the last 1500 odd years. The editor wouldn't accept that either "original research" WTF! I didn't put the names on the mug - archaeologists, historians and a bunch of tax gatherers hired by a hoard of Normans back in the day did that. OK, no they didn't - they scrawled stuff and the museum gathered together the scrawls and made my mug. I did one for a tourist shop on the Plymouth Barbican wrt the Mayflower complement, about 30 years ago. To be fair, I simply copied the names off the board near the Mayflower steps!
My point is that WP is what it is and you need to see it for that. It is both a store of knowledge and also a store of knowledge and blatant lies and everything in between ... about knowledge. It contains its own metadata and also omits vast amounts of it.
WP is without question in my mind absolutely magnificent but you do need to learn how and when to interpret it to fit in with your idea of factual - whatever that is.
> You should see some of the crap in the books at Alexandria: The world is flat and there are four elements and other bollocks. Obviously I'm taking the piss. The content is sometimes just as important as the factual accuracy of the content. For a given value of factual accuracy.
But that reflected the actual state of knowledge at the time, which is what you'd really want to study.
> Let me put it this way: Wikipedia wouldn't even allow Wikipedia to be used as a source for one if it's articles, because it's too unreliable
Er.. I think you're missing the point of citing sources. If an otherwise unverified claim could cite as its source another unverified claim, it would make citing sources meaningless. If a wikipedia article wanted to cite a verified claim from another wikipedia article that did have a verified source, they may as well just use that original source as their source too.
I think your example actually shows wikipedia in a very good light.
> Er.. I think you're missing the point of citing sources. If an otherwise unverified claim could cite as its source another unverified claim, it would make citing sources meaningless. If a wikipedia article wanted to cite a verified claim from another wikipedia article that did have a verified source, they may as well just use that original source as their source too.
1) The Wikipedia guideline doesn't mention that logic, 2) quite a lot of Wikipedia doesn't cite anything, and 3) it not unusual for a passage in Wikipedia to not actually be supported by the citation given (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:WhatLinks...).
In any case, this is getting off topic. My point was that, if you're looking for an ark of cultural knowledge to survive some apocalypse, Wikipedia's a bad choice. IMHO, something like Project Gutenberg plus a newspaper archive would be about 1000% better, and take up far less space. If you got space to spare, throw in Libgen. Wikipedia's not a replacement for its sources, and I pity the future scholar that would have to rely on it without being able to check them.
But unless your data storage is orders of magnitude more reliable than any current technology and you package your archive with an equally reliable computer to read it, the concept of a digital ark fails. If you don't to that, your archive will be unreadable, and and unreadable archive is useless.
You should see some of the crap in the books at Alexandria: The world is flat and there are four elements and other bollocks. Obviously I'm taking the piss. The content is sometimes just as important as the factual accuracy of the content. For a given value of factual accuracy.
WP is written by people and holds a vast amount of stuff. It is flawed in my opinion in many ways but that is the human experience.
I live in a town called Yeovil in Somerset, UK. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yeovil . Several years ago I noticed an incorrect old name for the place and I tried to correct it. I appealed to the Domesday Book which is considered quite authoritative hereabouts but I linked to the only site I could find which sold copies of it. My edit was thrown out by the local Somerset editor rather than being fixed. I own a coffee cup bought from the local museum that lists the >60 spellings of this tiny town over the last 1500 odd years. The editor wouldn't accept that either "original research" WTF! I didn't put the names on the mug - archaeologists, historians and a bunch of tax gatherers hired by a hoard of Normans back in the day did that. OK, no they didn't - they scrawled stuff and the museum gathered together the scrawls and made my mug. I did one for a tourist shop on the Plymouth Barbican wrt the Mayflower complement, about 30 years ago. To be fair, I simply copied the names off the board near the Mayflower steps!
My point is that WP is what it is and you need to see it for that. It is both a store of knowledge and also a store of knowledge and blatant lies and everything in between ... about knowledge. It contains its own metadata and also omits vast amounts of it.
WP is without question in my mind absolutely magnificent but you do need to learn how and when to interpret it to fit in with your idea of factual - whatever that is.