{"id":27464,"date":"2015-07-09T01:00:10","date_gmt":"2015-07-09T05:00:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=27464"},"modified":"2015-07-02T22:28:36","modified_gmt":"2015-07-03T02:28:36","slug":"qotd-people-trust-wikipedia-because-an-argument-is-better-than-a-lecture","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2015\/07\/09\/qotd-people-trust-wikipedia-because-an-argument-is-better-than-a-lecture\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: People trust <em>Wikipedia<\/em> &#8220;Because An Argument Is Better Than A Lecture&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>That&#8217;s because, as I&#8217;ve been trying to scream at you people for the past three years, the corporate mass-media news industry sucks. More specifically, the once proud fourth branch of our government has been reduced to screaming-head opinionators formulating commentary on the basis of politicized ratings. In other words, <em>Wikipedia<\/em> and the news are in two different businesses: one is about facts and the other is about shock and spin. Argue with me all you like, you know it&#8217;s true.<\/p>\n<p>But perhaps even more importantly, the general public trusts crowd-sourced <em>Wikipedia<\/em> articles more than the news because an argument is always more trust-worthy than a lecture. That&#8217;s the real difference. If you want to know how good a teacher in a school is, you gather up the best student, the worst student, the principal and the teacher and then analyze what they all say together. You don&#8217;t ask the school&#8217;s PR director. <em>Wikipedia<\/em>, even when it comes to contested or hotly-debated articles, does this extremely well, even concerning itself. The linked article above discussed a number of articles about how reliable <em>Wikipedia<\/em> is, some of which disagreed with others, and all were <em>found on the <strong>Wikipedia<\/strong> page for itself<\/em>.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<p><em>Regardless the disputes over individual studies and their methodologies, how I found them is almost as telling as their results. I came across them because <strong>Wikipedia<\/strong> provided external references, allowing me to corroborate the information. This is one of the site&#8217;s great merits: the aggregation of multiple sources, correctly linked, to build a more complete picture. As the results of the <strong>Yougov<\/strong> poll perhaps suggest, this surely seems more reliable than getting the coverage of an event from one newspaper. <\/em><\/p>\n<\/ul>\n<p>The truest answer to a question can rarely be told by a single source, which is what makes the sources section of a <em>Wikipedia<\/em> page so valuable. What is the corollary in a news broadcast? Perhaps a single expert? Maybe once in a while they&#8217;ll have two sides of a debate spend five minutes with one another? They&#8217;re not even close. The argument itself can be instructive, but that argument never happens on most news shows.<\/p>\n<p>This doesn&#8217;t mean you blindly read <em>Wiki<\/em> articles without questioning them. But a properly sourced article is simply more trustworthy than a talking head telling you how to think. <\/p>\n<p>Timothy Geigner, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.techdirt.com\/articles\/20140812\/05492428187\/why-do-people-trust-wikipedia-because-argument-is-better-than-lecture.shtml\" target=\"_blank\">&#8220;Why Do People Trust Wikipedia? Because An Argument Is Better Than A Lecture&#8221;, <em>Techdirt<\/em><\/a>, 2014-08-18.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>That&#8217;s because, as I&#8217;ve been trying to scream at you people for the past three years, the corporate mass-media news industry sucks. More specifically, the once proud fourth branch of our government has been reduced to screaming-head opinionators formulating commentary on the basis of politicized ratings. In other words, Wikipedia and the news are in [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[28,41],"tags":[213,101,444],"class_list":["post-27464","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media","category-quotations","tag-newspapers","tag-tv","tag-wikipedia"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-78Y","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27464","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27464"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27464\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":27465,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27464\/revisions\/27465"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27464"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27464"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27464"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}