Tuesday 19 August 2014

Is Wikipedia A Reliable Source?


I've always felt that Wikipedia has gained an unnecessarily bad reputation. People claim that it cannot be used as a valid source of information as it can be edited by anyone, which simply isn't true, all the information on Wikipedia has been correctly sourced and any that isn't is swiftly removed. That is almost exactly the same process as any other website, meaning that Wikipedia should be considered on par with any other source of information. However recently a little situation arose that made me realise that this isn't the case. It all started when I edited a few pages on Wikipedia to include my own comments on various songs by sourcing my own personal reviews, something that I'm not particularly proud of now, but I was desperate for views then. This was the response I got from that:



Now this message informs me that my edits to various Wikipedia pages have been removed by this user as they are not a "reliable source". I will fully accept that I am in the wrong here, it does say on the guidelines for editing that blogs shouldn't be used as sources, and I guess that makes sense, they don't want their pages to end up like the YouTube comments section and so I accepted my punishment with minimal fuss. However I do have a problem with why it was removed, it was removed for not being a reliable source. The edits I made were in the critical reception section of the page and consisted of entirely opinionated sources, and so how my own personal opinion can be seen as 'unreliable' is misguided. An opinion cannot be unreliable as it doesn't contain facts, it is simply the thoughts or feelings of an individual. More to the point, why does my review get removed and not the other critics? Are there opinions more 'reliable' than mine? Sure they can be more valid than mine but in terms of reliability they are exactly the same, both just opinions.

The user even has the audacity to give me a link to the 'reliable sources' page, which I really should have replied to by giving them a link to the page on 'irony', or maybe 'ignorance', as they clearly haven't read that page themselves. But what I'm really trying to get at here is that Wikipedia is moderated, and essentially run by this hierarchy of editors who in this case seem to abuse their given power by laughing at the opinion of a mere peasant of the internet such as myself, and then choosing to remove it for whatever reason, which if I am not mistaken is the definition for censorship. Censorship of course is heavily used in the media and propaganda, and whilst I am not claiming Wikipedia is slanted I will say that this ability to 'cherry pick' information to feed to the majority makes articles very biased and in turn very unreliable, which makes the picture above rather ironic. You may say that I was jumping to a conclusion there but it does seem strange that out of all the reviews on the page, mine was the only negative one, and mine was the only one to be removed, but with a little more searching I found my answer:



This next picture ends up proving my point, it's a screenshot of that user's page. It's predictably filled with all the usual ironic accolades that Wikipedia has heaped on this person, notably the reminder that "Wikipedia is not censored" when she in turn just censored my opinion for an invalid reason. There's also the equality award that they must have obtained by treating the views of stupid commoners like myself lower than any critics, which is in no way equality, and proves that Wikipedia is actually rewarding her for the censorship of articles and biased selection. But the proof comes from the fact that she belongs to the "Katy Perry WikiProject" implying that they are a fan of Katy Perry, a person who I criticized in my review, and so of course this person would hate too see them mocked all over the internet and so just deleted it because they can. This bias when creating articles does indeed prove that Wikipedia is a biased and unreliable source that unfortunately cannot be edited by anybody, just the selected few. 

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