Saturday, August 1, 2020

Done with Wikipedia

I will no longer read, link, or publish comments linking to Wikipedia, and I encourage others to adopt the same policy.

Update: This turned out to be too strict a constraint. And as much as I would like it to be otherwise, Wikipedia still tends to be more reliable and more up-to-date than the alternatives, at least for less political topics.

4 comments:

Unknown said...

Would you be willing to give a brief explanation for why? Or perhaps link to one?

Bruce Charlton said...

I've been using Infogalactic for my published links for a while; but - speaking personally - avoiding Evil Institutions altogether, in a world of nothing-but EIs, seems like too much effort and too restricting and not possible.

Wm Jas Tychonievich said...

Unknown, the proximate cause of my decision was the discovery that, above and beyond mere "bias," the website has explicit policies requiring contributors to lie and to suppress relevant information, and that these are even more extreme than those of such outlets as the Washington Post.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style/Gender_identity

(Yes, I know I just said I wouldn't link to them, but rules are made to be broken.)

Bruce, I agree that avoiding evil institutions entirely is neither possible nor worth attempting. (I am, after all, writing this on a Google-hosted blog.) In this case, though, I think it's both relatively easy to do and worth what marginal effort it requires. Wikipedia is the informational equivalent of fast food, and there's no excuse for consuming it when so many alternatives are so readily available. I will continue to use Wikipedia to find the correct Chinese translations of terms too specific to be in dictionaries, but that's about it.

Unknown said...

Thanks, that is alarming.

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