Readit NewsTheresNoTime commented on New Year Zone – Countdown to 2023 in every time zone newyear.zone/... · Posted by u/aaaronson
Nice!
I really feel like the lack of well-structured citations is what's keeping many Wikipedia articles back. It's just not good enough to throw some paper reference (potentially behind a paywall) or a news article after a full paragraph of text.
Often when editing a page, I am left wondering where exactly the previous editor has gotten a fact from. The Wiki markup even allows "quotes", i.e. short extracts of what exactly you're referring to, but I've yet to see anyone beside myself actually use it consistently.
Having a structured list of references for a given topic in a Wikipedia article is incredibly helpful!
Great points! In an ideal world, editors would note exactly where in the referenced work they found the information — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Citing_sources#Ident... has some guidance on how to do that :)
Except it IS unreliable, even with citations. Wikipedia is straight up garbage.
Just one very recent example: https://www.engadget.com/chinese-wikipedia-editor-fake-russi...
Maybe I need to add a section (in bold, flashing red text?) reiterating that you need to read the citations and not rely on the content?
This recent example is awful, yes, but relied heavily on a Wikipedia project which has less strict referencing rules, and was consumed by people who didn't take the time to fact-check — we're about on par with Encyclopedia Britannica (ref: https://www.nature.com/articles/438900a)
As always, excited to see what CF have been working on :)