Promoting Science and Critical Thinking
Wikipedia articles contain references that enables fact checking. This is the backbone that makes Wikipedia a reliable source and not simply an authority telling you what is correct. Verifiability matters … In Wikipedia, verifiability means that other people using the encyclopedia can check that the information comes from a reliable source. Wikipedia does not publish … Read more
There have been a few media stories about editing bots battling it out on Wikipedia and so I wondered what the alpha source for this was. It turns out that it all stems from a paper published within the Open Access Journal Plus One. Even good bots fight: The case of Wikipedia First the Basics … Read more
There is an article in the UK’s Guardian that reports that Wikipedia has banned the Daily Mail because it is an un-reliable source … Wikipedia bans Daily Mail as ‘unreliable’ source Online encyclopaedia editors rule out publisher as a reference citing ‘reputation for poor fact checking and sensationalism’ Wikipedia editors have voted to ban the Daily … Read more
The TL;DR; (Too Long; Didn’t Read) answer for the question in the subject line is that Wikipedia is. When you have vast swathes of the human population interacting on social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter then it tends to naturally devolve into bubbles. For example those that support Hillary will be sufficiently motivated … Read more
We are all perhaps overly familiar with the issue of weird or dubious statements and claims. Up pops one that triggers your BS alarm, and you then wonder how you can dig into it and find the truth. The rather obvious solution is of course to google it and see what turns up. While that might not always yield links to … Read more
Over in the Huff Po (well yes, they can act like woo central at times), we have an article that consists entirely of Deepak Chopra expressing his complete and utter frustration about his Wikipedia page being evidence based … to paraphrase, “how dare you question things like telepathy, minds without bodies, and “quantum consciousness”. Oh, and … Read more