[Analemma_]

This is a great comment; I'll just add one other thing, which is something I've mentioned before in arguments about Wikipedia: Wikipedia's goal is verifiability, NOT truth. "Truth" is explicitly a non-goal of the Wikipedia project. For any given subject, Wikipedia is not meant to provide the truth about that subject, it's meant to be a summary and distillation of the existing reliable sources about it. If there are none, that's neither Wikipedia's fault nor its problem.

You can take issue with this goal, but that's how it works, and it's also how encyclopedias have always worked.

[ghaff]

>and it's also how encyclopedias have always worked.

Well... Hopefully verifiability and truth have some correlation. Otherwise I'd argue that verifiability isn't worth much. What is different from traditional encyclopedias is that they did make determinations about what was important (which is at least akin to notability) and would allocate articles and pages as appropriate. From today's perspective we might dispute the judgments of importance but they were there.

[tptacek]

The Wikipedia meta article this is drawn from does a better job of answering this concern than any of us can.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability,_not_t...

Argue with it if you must, but let's try not to make the thread tediously recapitulate it.

[btilly]

Hopefully verifiability and truth have some correlation.

Not as much as you would hope.

I have two sisters with Wikipedia articles. Let's pick https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jennifer_Tilly for one of them. It claims that her mother was Irish and Finnish, and goes on to list how many siblings she has. Those statements are verifiable but false. You can find an article written by reporters that said those things.

She isn't Irish, her step-father (my father) was. She also has 2 more brothers than are listed in that article. That is true, but not verifiable. Nor will they ever be verifiable. And therefore Wikipedia will never be corrected.

The problem here is that the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect (see https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/65213-briefly-stated-the-ge... for an explanation) guarantees that there will be lots of verifiable statements that aren't so. Wikipedia builds a coherent view of a subject on that sand, and it is very hard to find what it is mistaken about. But it is riddled with errors that will never get fixed because they were wrong in a verifiable primary source.

And information not captured in a verifiable primary source will never make it in. For example her grandfather was the T in https://www.cmtengr.com/. Good luck verifying that one!

[ghaff]

>And information not captured in a verifiable primary source will never make it in

In theory. In general? I was just looking at an article where I have a lot of personal knowledge.

Is mostly True, as far as much of my first-hand knowledge can tell. And leave aside a couple of the random personal insertions that are definitely True if outside of all proportion to the rest of the article.

But there's one section in particular that goes into even more detail than I knew even as someone fairly in the depths of this particular thing. (But it's very plausible and consistent with what I do know.) It's certainly not something that's ever been written about publicly AFAIK and the actual references in the article are minimal.

Which comes back to that notability/verifiability/etc. are nice theories--and may even make sense in the abstract--but there's a huge amount of inconsistency depending upon whether someone has taken notice of an article or not. (And, in at least some cases, I'm often happy with people not looking too hard.)

[tptacek]

Which inconsistency is, of course, what you'd expect from an all-volunteer project.

[ghaff]

Sure. I'm also not sure that the fact that Wikipedia's rules often fall through the cracks is entirely a bad thing. You end up with some unverified information. You also end up with maybe somewhat unreliable information that would never have been verifiable. Even if I can't fully endorse this sort of informal breaking of the rules, I'm not really opposed to it either.

[lonelappde]

Wikipedia says "her mother was of Irish and Finnish ancestry."

Jennifer Tilly is your sister, but her mother's step father is your father?

Her grandfather is her brother's father?

[btilly]

Are you seriously confused by my carelessness with pronouns?

Jennifer and I are siblings. Our mother's mother was Finnish. Our mother's father (the Tilly in CMT) was a complicated mix. Jennifer's father was Chinese. My father was Irish.

She was born Chan, I was born Ward, our names were changed to our mother's maiden name after her divorce from my father.

All clear?

[tptacek]

The "Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect" being the banal fact that reporters are sometimes wrong about things?

Have you tried leaving a comment on the Talk page of the article saying that you're Jennifer Tilly's sister, linking to something about you (you're obviously bona fide), and asking for a correction? WP has special reliability rules (WP:BLP) for "Biographies Of Living Persons".

It doesn't look like CMT has a Wikipedia article at all. Should it?

[btilly]

The "Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect" being the banal fact that reporters are sometimes wrong about things?

Sometimes?

I've yet to read a feature article written by a reporter on a subject that I know well which didn't have multiple mistakes.

Have you tried leaving a comment on the Talk page of the article saying that you're Jennifer Tilly's sister, linking to something about you (you're obviously bona fide), and asking for a correction? WP has special reliability rules (WP:BLP) for "Biographies Of Living Persons".

Actually I am one of the brothers that Wikipedia does not know about.

Back in the 2007-2008 period I decided to make some obvious corrections. They got rejected. I left some comments in talk. A couple of my comments are still there on Jennifer's talk page.

If you want to try to fix the page, you could use http://www.officialmegtilly.com/blog/megs_made_up_muffins/ and http://www.officialmegtilly.com/blog/hell_in_a_hand_basket/ as evidence that Meg has at least one brother that Wikipedia doesn't know about. Good luck getting it changed.

As for CMT, you tell me. It is a civil engineering company that has existed for decades and has a significant presence in multiple states. But there isn't much about them online other than the company website. Which, by definition, is not considered reliable.

[tptacek]

I have it in for the "Gell-Mann Amnesia effect" (is there even evidence that Gell-Mann believed in it?), but your point is well taken: Wikipedia's rules do heavily privilege journalism, and journalism is merely the first draft of history, not the camera-ready final.

It's possible that Wikipedia has carefully balanced this; if they didn't privilege reporting, a lot fewer articles would get written, about a lot of things people actually do want to look up in the encyclopedia. Reliance on journalism means they'll routinely get some bad facts, but there's a bound on how bad things will be that there wouldn't be if they just got rid of WP:RS altogether.

It's much more likely that nobody has carefully thought about this, and it's just a shambolic volunteer project taking advantage of what they have to work with.

My basic take about Wikipedia is that it's hard to argue with the results. However obnoxious their policies are to nerds like us (and I commented upthread about obnoxious experiences I've had working on it --- I no longer contribute!), it's a tremendously successful project, perhaps one of the most successful in the history of the Internet.

It's bad when they have bad facts, more so when those facts pertain to living people, even more so when someone has the correct facts and can't get them accepted, and especially so when that person is a family member of the subject.

It's less bad, to me at least, that an encyclopedia happens to lack a page, for now, on Apache Arrow.