jacobolus

Steve Huffman: "We're going to evolve Reddit to being a primarily logged-in experience [...] We’re making the change because it’s better for user experience" (lol)

This depends somewhat on the nature of the factual inaccuracy and how easy it is to verify the truth of the matter.

If the inaccuracy is provable by evidence found in what Wikipedians consider to be reliable sources, then you can just remove or correct the claim, citing the appropriate source, and if there is a dispute it gets discussed on the talk page or, if consensus is not reached there, at some other discussion page where there are more eyeballs.

If the inaccurate version is the mainstream story as found in the bulk of recent reliable sources (like scholarly books and newspaper stories), then correcting it is harder: you need to find sources that are even better than those, e.g. by a respected historian who specializes in something topical writing a peer-reviewed journal paper. It works even better if you wait for a scholarly consensus to crystallize around the improved version of the story. In the mean time, the language of the article can usually be changed to present something neutral to readers, e.g. saying that the traditional story as presented by scholars X and Y is A, but that scholar Z disputes this and proposes B instead.

You might consider revisiting this on Wikipedia. It's probably not too late to remove the boss's promotional page.

Owners also have a lot more time to notice all of the stuff that's not quite right. The cars with touchscreens for example all have an absurd number of weird, sometimes very annoying, software bugs that come up in edge cases or only occur intermittently that you probably wouldn't notice if just taking a test drive.

Few car owners spend a lot of time thinking about the stuff their car didn't screw up or have a good basis for comparing those to a wide range of comparable vehicles.

The "Tea Party" was an astroturf operation organized by GOP operatives and funded by the Koch brothers and some other billionaire donors. Its appearance of popular support was substantially artificial and heavily amplified by supportive GOP-aligned media.

What kind of "left" version are you imagining?

Real wages are inflation adjusted. So if everything costs 336% of what it did in 1980, and the real ages are 112% of what they were, then that means nominal wages are 376% of what they were.

If you never do research on Wikipedia, then fine, don't cite it. That's kind of irrelevant though.

> after all, primary sources are better

This is sometimes true, and sometimes not. For some topics, the Wikipedia article is an amazing overview, significantly better than available alternate sources.

> in the case the Wikipedia author was wrong, I will avoid a mistake

Wikipedia authors are not the only people who can be wrong. All kinds of sources, including primary sources and scholarly secondary sources, contain factual errors, sometimes subtle ones. You should certainly try not to say wrong things, which is why you should approach all sources with a critical eye.

But people cite non-primary sources all the time. The most important thing is to say where you got your ideas/claims, because when you don't, the result is misleading to your readers. If you get your claim from one source, but then cite a different source, that's terrible practice that causes significant trouble. But this happens all the time, and telling people to "never cite Wikipedia" is a major contributor.

It's a retirement destination for elderly people from the northeast?

I don't understand your point. People who are experts in the field are treated as experts. They just don't get to unilaterally make all of the decisions.

Wikipedians have all kinds of credentials, which they are allowed to publicize if they want. Many Wikipedians have their full names and links to their personal websites, scholarly work, etc. on their user page.

There are also plenty of pseudonymous Wikipedians with credentials that they keep secret or vague. As long as they don't edit pages where they have an undisclosed conflict of interest, that's also fine.

Credentials can lend someone credibility in discussions. They just don't grant special editing privileges.

In my opinion, if you used Wikipedia, you should cite it. If you instead got your idea from "lunch room conversation", or a private email, or whatever, you can also cite that. It's a really huge problem that people pull ideas from Wikipedia, attribute them to something like "paper 4", but then it turns out that what Wikipedia said and what papers 3 and 4 said were not the same, and what Wikipedia said was actually based on some other paper 5 that turns out to be a bunch of bullshit, or a Wikipedia author made it up and wrongly attributed it to paper 3, or a Wikipedia author didn't understand paper 3 and made a total hash of it. Etc.

This of course also happens plenty when Wikipedia isn't involved, but for whatever reason people seem to have the mistaken idea that citing Wikipedia is inherently bad. There's no rule against citing Wikipedia, or tertiary sources in general, from professional work.

When a later person (e.g. a scholar or Wikipedia author) is trying to understand your work, it's incredibly helpful to know where some claim or idea came from. Otherwise they have to jump through extra hoops to trace the actual attributions and figure out where mistakes came from.

Wikipedia's original research policy is not relevant to what works you should cite in academic papers. A Wikipedia article is not supposed to contain the original research of its authors, because it's the wrong venue for such work, and because when such material is added it typically turns out to be nonsense or spam, but rejecting it on the grounds that it is unsourced is much easier.

Wikipedia doesn't consider itself to be a reliable source, for obvious reasons: that's directly circular.

But Wikipedia must always be cited if you use it, otherwise people reading your work (including Wikipedia authors and other scholars) cannot trace the provenance of the ideas you discuss.