Sam Wilson: wikipedia

Fremantle
2026 January 16 (Friday), 9:46AM
· Wikimedia · Wikipedia · research ·

There was an interesting thread this morning about reasons that people get annoyed at Wikipedia. There were some comments about how hard it can be to get even well-cited material into articles. Which is probably fairly true in many parts of Wikipedia. I don't really edit it very much; I spend most time on Commons and Wikidata, and I think that's because I'm more interested in archiving and documentation than the really quite tricky work of summarising existing research.

Dariusz Jemielniak put it well this week in saying that Wikipedia is "a systematic literature review that anyone can improve, based on a sophisticated system of peer review." Looking at it like that, it becomes clear that before you can edit you really should a) have a good general knowledge of the topic, so that you can evaluate sources appropriately and see how they fit into it in general; and b) have source literature to work from.

The thing that doesn't seem to get talked about all that much is the idea that, for all the — vastly more extensive — knowledge that doesn't belong in Wikipedia, people can set up their own 'pedia wikis. Just set up MediaWiki and start writing about the things you care about!

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Sam Wilson: wikipedia

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