Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by ieie3366 3 hours ago
And the worst is the cycle:

1. There is incorrect information on wikipedia.

2. Legacy news publishes an article, using wikipedia as source (of course).

3. Now the incorrect information is essentially canonized

5 comments

If you spot it in Wikipedia, point it out, it does get removed. Leaving a comment on the talk page <!-- or in the article --> gets editors on-board to patrol for accidental attempts to add the incorrect information back in. Wikipedia does not like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citogenesis
On the other hand, some of the best is when a hoax written by a monk in the north of England some time around 1300 is debunked by late 20th century scholarship, and eventually someone makes Wikipedia no longer re-hash a propagandist revision of the Battle of Stirling Bridge re-set in Wales that stood unchallenged for almost 7 centuries.

* https://youtube.com/v/mLdB5s7-h0w

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletio...

or:

1: the media has a vested interest in only reporting a certain slant, because it involves criticizing the media

2: because the media is the only source deemed reliable, that slant becomes the truth

Circular references. This methodology has been called out by several researchers. NYT, WaPo are key users of this technique.

Off the top of my head: https://citationintegrity.org/

Wikipedia features prominently as a defaulter.