> Content from a Wikipedia article is not considered reliable unless it is backed up by citing reliable sources. Confirm that these sources support the content, then use them directly.
But, unlike IMDB, it's (supposed to be) verifiable.
Except you can use obscure dead tree books as sources and no one will take the effort to check whether the book indeed says so. Use a book obscure enough -- especially in a non-English language -- and it becomes almost impossible to execute said check.
It depend so. The amount of trust I want to give. By citing an obscure book I can judge the fact "hm, that book sounds obscure, why isn't there some other source?" and then decide how much weight I give to it.
And if I don't have the book at hand I can identify the person who added the citation and can see what other edits they did to judge their domain knowledge.
But in case they do you can ask your other well established sleeper account for a book reference then reply a few days later with a: This is what I found posting. Then when asked you can point to yourself and say I've asked him. Do a conversation with yourself weighting how a book is hard to validate vs how important the information is to the article.
A bit of topic. Does anyone know, why the english Wikipedia site about the JFK movie does not talk about what was fiction, what was true in the movie and what is unknow? On the german page about the movie, they have a lot about it.
I understand there are differences in languages. But in this case, in english, the most important information is missing. So it's just a movie, all fiction?!?
In general you can sometimes get insight from the "Talk" section for these kinds of questions.
In this case, there was a "historical inaccuracies" section which was removed due to sourcing concerns. Not sure how well it holds up to what is (/was was the time) up on the German one.
Sometimes it can be up to chance or culture, sometimes editorial differences.
EDIT: Come to think of it, in this case maybe the German Wikipedia just has misproportionate coverage and activity for its speaker-base (this would certainly fit with my preconception)? I recall reacting to pages on topics from other countries where I'd be surprised to find it covered in German and not the native language,
1) Nobody said anything about qualifying what wikipedia is. However, this is wikipedia, as one can see by looking at the domain in the url, wikipedia.org. Even so, there are many pages that cover tesla at wikipedia.org. Besides, if you just google for, "What companies has Elon Musk founded?" without quotes you will get a google listing of companies founded by Elon Musk. The very first of those is Tesla!
2) That was the point of the parent's comment! There are many pages at wikipedia that contain conflicting information.
Okay, fair point about the second part - my mistake indeed.
But I have to push back about the first part. The throwawayaug8 did say "According to Wikipedia Elon Musk is the founder of Tesla. That's how reliable Wikipedia is" - which I understood as a claim that "Wikipedia is unreliable". Then marak830 claimed that such claim is wrong and IncRnd claimed that the original claim is true because 'Simple' Wikipedia has an article with such text.
But I just have to disagree here - I believe that the 'main' Wikipedia is mostly or more accurate than any other Wikipedia - be it 'simple' or 'lithuanian' (https://lt.wikipedia.org/).
I believe that it's unfair to judge the main wikipedia project by using it's smaller 'translation' branches - the main one has hundreds of thousands of contributtors, and smaller wikipedias have way less.
In a same way I wouldn't say that whole javascript is bad because there are some bad frameworks that are based on it.
But I don't know, I am not an expert, I'm just a random wikipedia user :shrug_emoji:
PayPal was launched by a Tiel owned company that also bought another company that Musk didn't start, zip2. Musk became CEO of PayPal, and was fired a month later for incompetence.
Elon Musk is legally "a founder" of Tesla, but that's different from having founded Tesla, and that difference doesn't say anything about Wikipedia's credibility.
External users are not part of it. It's a "curated" model. IMDb clearly stakes their reputation on accuracy and comprehensive coverage. IMDb's TOS ensures that you relinquish all copyright claims and grant them an exclusive license to your content. IMDb won't cite their sources nor attribute contributors. They own and control everything on the site. Their rates for abuse and misinformation are unpublished. IMDb is an opaque, black box.
Wikipedia has a similar model for protecting articles known as "Pending Changes". Anyone can submit an edit to the article, but the revisions and new data is held back from the "front page" publication until approved by someone with the proper user rights. Almost anyone in good standing can obtain those rights, and it's 100% transparent. Every edit is reviewable by anyone with Internet access, every edit is attributed and licensed under CC-BY-SA. The servers, editors, and bots track and tag vandalism and other forms of abuse with public records. Verifiability is mandatory.
Me and my gang of companion editors, who have a long edit history going many years back (100% deleting content) shall revert your audits and reject your issues. There are 10 of us! You have no further questions. If you continue being disruptive you will be banned.
