Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by mountainb 1421 days ago
The citations on Wikipedia articles are often either broken, in a foreign language, or not up to an academic standard. However, following this practice is what eventually lead me to stop using Wikipedia for anything. When I tried to trace the citations to make my research easier, I found it actually made it a lot slower because I kept running into junk. Before I actually paid attention to the citations on a broad selection of articles, I was under the mistaken belief that Wikipedia was "good enough."
1 comments

They have weird requirements for citations. Want to cite a link to a blog where a guy has spent 20,000 hours researching a topic but doesn’t have a degree? Not allowed. Want to post a link to a NYT article written by a journalist with no relevant experience in that same field? Go for it. It’s really strange. It’s like they’re aiming for narrative over fact or something.
To be fair usually when the nyt article is wrong they issue a retraction and when the blogger is wrong they triple down
Citation needed.