Boi,
All comparisons of WP with other sources were cherry picked. They picked articles where the science was well established, or they picked articles which were being edit warred to exhaustion if you know of comparisons where that isn't the case then cough them up.
Wikipedia happens to figure high in Google search rankings. That is the only reliable relevance that it has to any subject. Often its high ranking is to the detriment of far more reliable sites. Richard II king of England in 1345 - three years that resided in a feature article. Thomas Rainsborough the noted Ranter a year. Jagged85 years and years falsifying articles in History, Medicine, Mathematics, and Literature, and allowed to carry on doing so for several years after discovery. Much of his nonsense remains.
Ignoring the millions of "X is a footballer in the 6th division of the Y league", "X is a moth in the Y family", "X is a village of 50 people in the region of Y" type articles. Most of the rest are like John Dee. An unreadable hodge-podge of 'maybe facts' culled from ancient sources, and mangled into nonsense to avoid charges of plagiarism. Article that give as much weight to gossip and sensation as they do to achievements. Lets try "Alfred Gilbert" where the pursuit of gossip has lost the actual story of his life.
On 05/04/2015 12:07, Gerard Meijssen wrote:
Hoi, Research is not what we compete with. Research is not encyclopaedic either. The research I refer to compared a set of subjects and compared those in several sources... Then again why bore you with information you already could know..
Cherry picking an article from Brittanica is wonderful, it "proves" your point, it however fails to convince.
Your God or mine, the fact is that Wikipedia is a most relevant source. Given your complaint about the John Dee article, there is an opportunity for you. You claim to know the subject matter. Thanks, GerardM
On 5 April 2015 at 12:06, Lilburne <lilburne@tygers-of-wrath.net mailto:lilburne@tygers-of-wrath.net> wrote:
On 05/04/2015 06:36, Gerard Meijssen wrote: Hoi, Reliable is not an absolute. Wikipedia is in the final analysis an encyclopaedia. It is not original research. One can indeed engage in original research by cherry picking the sources. Studies have indicated that Wikipedia is as reliable as its competitors. Nonsense. Reliability has only ever been checked in the case of well established scientific knowledge (where it was found to have 30% more errors), and highly disputed content. It has not been checked over the millions of articles that are neither of the above. Take the WP article on John Dee and compare it to the Britannica article. The Britannica article is both readable and well rounded. The WP article is a rambling mess that tries to present Dee the Mathematician, Scientist and natural philospher, but is thwarted at every turn by those that want John Dee to be foremost the magician and conjuror. Perhaps in the end Dee the mathematician wins out, but it is a close run thing, and one has to pour over the stilted language and mish mash of thought processes to get there. Ironically enough many of the sources used to promote Dee the magician are instead promoting Dee the mathematician. I think you have it backward. Given that Wikipedia is best of breed, people do care about Wikipedia Zero. God help us if that is the case. Fortunately there are far more informative and reliable sites about then wikipedia. Unfortunately they tend not to be on the first page of a search engine's results. _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org <mailto:Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org> Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, <mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org <mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org>?subject=unsubscribe>