When there is a heated, with a lot of strong and exaggerated arguments on both sides, and I don’t know what to believe, or I’m overwhelmed with the raw information, I look at Wikipedia. Or even something that is not a current event, but the information I found on the internet doesn’t feel reliable.
I’m sure some would find flaws there, but they do a good job of keeping it neutral and sticking to verifiable facts.
No, absolutely not.
For purely scientific articles Wikipedia is great. But anything remotely controversial or even political on that site should be taken with a grain of salt.
There’s too many editors out there who enforce their biases and wage war on such articles.
This is why you don’t take anything at face value. Check the sources, which you should be doing on Wikipedia anyway.
A wikipedia sources list is not some sort of list of all available data on a subject. It’s a list of what information was used to build the article.
On anything remotely divisive, there will be available primary sources for multiple viewpoints, and obviously a slanted article will largely contain sources supporting its slant and leave out sources that don’t. Just checking the sources can easily result in the illusion of consensus where there is none.
I’m going out on a limb and assuming basic fact checking skills here, yes.
Checking facts in a list of curated facts is not fact checking.
Most people do not actively have access to scholarly works, nor the aptitude to review it, nor the time to do so.
In this case, the primary relevant fact checking skill would be searching for sources independent of Wikipedia, in which case, why was one starting with Wikipedia in the first place?
Because it’s a crowdsourced way of collecting and correlating those sources.
Often, collecting and correlating sources that agree with one viewpoint of a complex issue, which is the whole problem we were discussing. If a wiki article is camped by an admin with a slant, as they often are, the sources do not represent some neutral middle ground or wisdom of the crowd, they represent the things that ended up in the article and nothing more. If you want to learn the facts of a controversial topic, why would you start with a potentially biased list?
But the fact that a lot of editors fight about such issues means that it ends up being somewhat neutral, no?
Depends on who’s currently winning the fight.
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Found you! While he appears to be way more than a Russian troll, he was indeed very insulting in his edit summaries. The admin also appears to be an invested contributor to the article who merely coincided with this event; it seems they were merely resolving this discussion. Pending edits (ones that require approval) are separate from the usual edits people fly by.
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*citation needed
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You got a better one stop shop resources or should we just rely on whatever fake news vomits today
Fake news can’t even keep their story straight from months to months lol
Visit multiple news sites and employ media literacy and common sense.
Yes… Read the same article reposted by each fake news site with their own editorial touch that add or leave out facts on topics that hardly affect you on daily…
To find better news sites, you have to want to find them. Otherwise you’ll just be living in a sad reality.