You can just read a wikipedia article and look at the sources. that's usually enough to see through wikipedias bs. Most wiki editors are too dumb or too lazy to read/vet/critically examine what they link.

You'll see a bunch of cites on a sentence and read those and come to find out it's just different articles quoting the same Radio Free whatever, or anonymous sources. Some times just hearsay. I can't remember exactly what article it was (Mao's mangoes?) but two cites were different reporters reporting on a talk that was given by some professor to a special interest group and not only that but it was a retrospective. Basically guys remembering the talk years later. Now that I think of it, most reporting is about to that standard anyway. Miserable fucks.

lol yeah it was mangoes 2, 5, 7 and 8 quote the same Lady just saying things. 4 is a description of the book Alfreda Murck (aforementioned lady) wrote about the mangoes.

[–] absolutefuckinidiot@lemmygrad.ml 4 points 10 months ago (1 children)

So many citations on wikipedia are like this, that’s a great example. I remember reading the page on the city of New Delhi a couple of years ago and coming across the claim that most Indian people don’t even realize the city is polluted, or something like that. My first thought was, how the fuck is that possible, obviously people can physically see the pollution and know what a clear non-smoggy day looks like. Struck me as a very odd and most probably extremely racist claim.

The citation for it was a NYT article about pollution in New Delhi and I could not find a single line in it that referenced local people not realizing the city was polluted. No clue at all how they got that claim from the source but it was presented on the page as a verified fact. Can just imagine some western kid doing middle school project on pollution and coming under the assumption that Indians somehow don’t understand the concept.

This is a relatively benign example but I’m sure the more you dig into a lot of this shit the worse it gets.

[–] ikilledtheradiostar@hexbear.net 5 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Yeah it's pretty much every article, If you bother clicking the links. What's funny is in that mango article the talk tab mentioned the cites sucking but the person was unable to change it. So basically if you want to discredit Wikipedia just hit random and check the cites. Any fair minded person will at least start being curious. Or maybe not LIB brain is powerful.