[markdown]

Which is why Wikipedia is so western-centric. I could be the world expert in my field, say... coconut picking. I haven't published any papers about picking coconuts, and neither is it a subject that the newspapers want to write about.

If I wrote wikipedia entry about picking coconuts, it would be immediately deleted because personal experience isn't a citable source. I need to tell some other fool about what I do, have him publish it in an article, and only then am I worthy of sharing my knowledge on wikipedia.

I've seen absolute hogwash in wikipedia articles about my field (not really picking coconuts lol) but I can't correct them because I can't find an article where someone else has written about the topic.

[wpietri]

The number of people who think themselves world experts in something is truly enormous. Wikipedia needs to be maintainable by people who aren't topic experts. They can't just go around anointing people that sound expert-y to them, as that would introduce far more bias, western and otherwise.

Wikipedia's job isn't to push forward the frontiers of knowledge. It's to summarize the stuff you can look up elsewhere.

[LocalH]

Wikipedia's job is to push forward the frontiers of the documentation of knowledge.

[wpietri]

Could you show me what Wikipedia policies you base that on? Because I don't think it's correct.

[markdown]

> Wikipedia's job isn't to push forward the frontiers of knowledge. It's to summarize the stuff you can look up elsewhere.

Citation needed.

[dragonwriter]

> > Wikipedia's job isn't to push forward the frontiers of knowledge. It's to summarize the stuff you can look up elsewhere.

> Citation needed.

The exact policy under discussion in this sub thread (and, to a lesser extent, the other two in Wikipedia’s trio of core content policies) is exactly a statement of this:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_resear...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Neutral_point_of_v...

[mardifoufs]

To push forward the frontiers of knowledge is literally not the point of an encyclopedia, by definition. Even if it was, how could you see frontier pushing happen with volunteer editors ? With more unsourced/trust me bro/self describes experts editing online? I kind of doubt that

[ericye16]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_research

[bawolff]

And that's a good thing.

Wikipedia prioritizes verifiability over completeness. Are there downsides to that trade-off? Absolutely. But i would rather that over trusting random people on the internet to know what they are talking about.

[dragonwriter]

Note that Wikipedia has this policy focussed on being a tertiary source; Wikiversity, another Wikimedia project, welcomes original research.

A lot of what people complain about Wikipedia ruling out is in scope for either Wikiversity or Wikibooks; it's not a “we don't want that” issue but a “we have structure, and within that structure there is a better place for that”.

[bawolff]

Yeah, but realistically wikiversity doesn't have much to show for it.

[dragonwriter]

> Yeah, but realistically wikiversity doesn’t have much to show for it.

Because people don’t really want a public wiki to publish original research, they just want to vandalize Wikipedia because of its social impact and use their claims of personal expertise as an excuse to evade Wikipedia’s existing content policies.

[eternityforest]

It's sad that wikibooks and Wikipedia have almost nothing interesting that's complete.

[bawolff]

Wikipedia and wikibooks have plenty of interesting things. Wikiversity less so.

[eternityforest]

Oops, I meant wikibooks and Wikipedia.

Wikibooks has a few things, but almost nothing seems actually complete and hardly anyone seems to work on in, compared to Wikipedia

[jakemauer]

I didn't know about Wikiversity, thanks for sharing.

[throwawaylinux]

You really think a self-proclaimed expert coconut picker would do that? Just go on the internet and tell lies about their alleged profession?

[saghm]

No, but I definitely think people would lie about being an expert coconut picker, and I think the number of trolls on the internet who would find it funny to try to get false information into articles vastly outnumbers the number of coconut picker experts who don't have any way to verify their credentials.

[mardifoufs]

Yeah while I don't personally like the extreme over reliance on just secondary sources to the point where it leads to driving out actual experts, I can't imagine how bad it would be with just even less strict sourcing rules in general. Actually I can, that was pretty much wikipedia until the big clean ups that happened at the end of the last decade and I'm glad we are past that... interesting early stage.

[ummwhat]

In my personal experience, the demographics of America are about 50% employed in a startup, the median education level is PhD, and the most common religion is Judaism.

Personal experience is hogwash. Everyone is convinced their personal experience is an accurate view of how things really are, and everyone is wrong. I have no idea if the "world's best coconuts pickers first hand experience" is as laughably wrong as my first person experience of American demographics, and I have absolutely no way to find out. Wikipedia standards exist for a reason.

[taneq]

> Everyone is convinced their personal experience is an accurate view of how things really are, and everyone is wrong.

You're convinced that your personal experience of everyone's convictions and the veracity of such is accurate. By your reasoning, you must be wrong?

...or are you? A most ingenious paradox.

[pmoriarty]

Larry Sanger, who cofounded Wikipedia, left Wikipedia to found a competitor named Citizendium, where experts were supposed to play a greater role than on Wikipedia. It failed.

The Encyclopedia Britannica, which had articles exclusively written by experts, was also outcompeted by Wikipedia.

It's unlikely that Wikipedia is going to change its model to give experts a greater say than they already do, but it would be interesting to see if another expert-curated encyclopedia could eventually compete. Maybe if some incredibly well-funded company like Google or Apple got behind it it could work (though that reminds me of Microsoft's Encarta, which also failed).

[TedDoesntTalk]

> Encyclopedia Britannica, which had articles exclusively written by experts, was also outcompeted by Wikipedia.

They were competing on free vs paid. You make it sound like they were competing on experts vs non-experts.

[brigandish]

Britannica is still running, I use it. It certainly doesn't have as many articles nor eyeballs as Wikipedia, but as I wrote above, it's a damn sight better. This outcome would probably have happened - as the example you've given shows - regardless of whether Britannica (and other existing encyclopaedias) had used a different pricing model, which really shows that they're not in direct competition. Same sector, different consumers.

[saghm]

I might be remembering wrong, but wasn't Encarta mostly offline (or at least, it required an offline installation)? I vaguely remember my family having an Encarta CD among all our CDs in the computer desk drawer; it must have been the late 90s or early 2000s, so I was still pretty young, so I might be remembering wrong. Did Encarta ever try to go fully online? I feel like that's one of the big reasons why Wikipedia was able to grow so fast; being web-based means that anyone can access it with software they already have installed and share links with their friends/family with very little effort. Maybe there was a way to share entries in Encarta, but I have trouble imagining it had as little friction as just sharing a URL.

[taneq]

Reminds me of whoever it was that bootstrapped a "fact" into Wikipedia "truth" by ninja-editing some obscure public figure's wiki page with a fabricated piece of trivia just as they hit the headlines for whatever reason, which made it into a published (if hastily researched) article about the figure. Then when a Wikipedia editor reverted the edit, they re-added it, citing the article as a source.

[brigandish]

This is why I check Britannica as much as Wikipedia now, especially for any topic that might be touched by politics, such as history, or even science (or especially science, given how bad it's getting on Wikipedia). The quality difference is remarkable, and is just one more counter to my previous assumption of the internet will make everything better!

Ah, young and halcyon days!

[goto11]

There are plenty of sites where anybody can claim they are an expert on anything and expound their expertise. Even here on HN you can get away with claiming you are the world expert in coconut picking, as long as no other coconut pickers turn up in the thread.

Wikipedia follows different standards. Not everything have to be Twitter/Facebook/Reddit/HN.

[IshKebab]

I agree it's a somewhat arbitrary line, but you can easily work around it by writing a blog post and then citing that. Slightly more work but at least you won't have to deal with the rule nazis. Now if only there was a way to work around the question closers on StackOverflow...

[ciphol]

How do you distinguish between genuine personal experience (even assuming personal experience is reliable) and lies invented to promote an ideological narrative? Generally they can't be distinguished. Thus Wikipedia disallows both.

[staticassertion]

I'm sure they recognize that weakness but also that it's necessary. Wikipedia can't be "The source" of information, that would change its fundamental premise.

[dorfsmay]

True for the England wikipedia, but the mods for the wikipedias in other languages enforce the rules differently.

[mardifoufs]

> True for the England wikipedia, but the mods for the wikipedias in other languages enforce the rules differently.

To sometimes very very mixed results (at best).

[dicknuckle]

Wikipedia is trying to protect itself from undiagnosed Dunning-Kruger.