Wikipedia To Colour Code Untrustworthy Text

Sounds a little like censorship to me.
Who determines a reliable source.
I may not have the credentials but perhaps I have the facts.
And what if one of the Reliable sources disagrees with the facts?

FrederickCushy

@shibathedog: I'm a university librarian and we complain about the databases, too! We hooked up our full text to Google Scholar, so students (and faculty) can do searches there and still get the stuff we pay for.

Go to the Google Scholar Preferences (just to the right of the search box) and scroll down to Libraries. Search for your school and see if they've hooked it up yet. (If you are on campus, the school might be listed already.) Basically, you get an extra link in the results when the article's from something Google thinks might be in your library. Not everything will be in there, but between the regular results and these, you should be able to find something that your professors will like.

RebeccaCT

@jupiterthunder: it's kinda like comments showing up greyed out from "unreliable commenters" on Gawker sites. It's most likely a good comment, but it might not be.
If they simply just removed them, no one would be able to become a starred commenter (or a "reliable source" on wikipedia).

psychiccheese

Chuck Norris is not going to like this.

Bright orange sounds like a good way to get me to avoid reading that text from unreliable sources.

Maybe it's just a wording issue, but if the text is from an unreliable source why not just remove it? I'm assuming they mean not yet proven to be reliable.

jupiterthunder

@shibathedog: I know what you mean. Here's the method I used for the two situations (yours and the one the article references).

Use Google and then try to locate the same sources within the database b/c instructors sometimes made you feel like sources had to come for the school's offerings. Then for Wikipedia, I did the [basically] reverse. If I find it in Wikipedia, I'll do a Google search for a more widely acceptable source. The latter I tell my students to do b/c in many cases, they, and many adults, find it too easy to skip on evaluating the credentials of the person/organization providing the information.

jupiterthunder

@OCEntertainment: Yeah, basically.

@OCEntertainment: Maybe its just a bad idea to ever attempt to make wikipedia acceptable for academic reasons. Is that so bad?

In school I never used wikipedia for a paper, but I would often use it for my own personal use if I was interested in a topic.

mherlihy

@Platypus Man: In my opinon, people just need to learn how to (and more importantly, when to) use Wikipedia. It's a different sort of knowledge then most people /think/ they're used to. It's not suitable for academic research, you can't right a serious paper and site data from Wikipedia. But that doesn't mean you can't use it to find other resources for serious papers, or just for satisfying your own curiosity or for other "less stringent" matters.

You're point is very interesting and very important, but consider this: if you're reading a Wikipedia article, you should always keep in the back of your mind that it's publicly edited and therefore prone to certain errors. However, the same is true most other places on the Web, which most people don't take into account. Anybody can easily create official looking webpages with whatever data they want on it and most people don't stop to think that they might want to take that data with a grain of salt.

So really, Wikipedia is no /less/ accurate then the Web in general (and you could certainly argue that it has a tendency to be /more/ accurate in general due to the collaborative effort and watchdog like attention many of the articles receive), and it's more likely to be regarded cautiously than most of the Web.

Well, that's my 5 or 6 cents on the subject. Anyway, I'm intrigued to see how well the coloring works, but I hope not too many people use it: an extra HTML span tag with a class attribute on every single word!!! That's going to seriously bump up the content length and hog network bandwidth.

@shibathedog: pfft, part of my post got cut off, whatever...

shibathedog

@OCEntertainment: It's because colleges, or at least the one I go to, make students use the most PITA research databases ever created. At my college they give us access to tons of databases and I refuse to use any of them. They are so poorly designed. It's worse than searching Usenet by downloading headers, WAY worse, and that's pretty bad. You can't find anything on there, and the articles you do find are usually barely relevant. (they give us tools to search multiple databases at once and it's still terrible, don't even try to manually find the correct database to search on your own, that is also impossible because the database listing is crap too) Google is much better. I have no problem finding studies and quality sources of valid info from it. I get a strong feeling none of it has been updated since the 90s except the content. I wish I could show it to you guys but I would have to give you my login. It is an absolute nightmare and some professors require you use sources from it. I usually just pick some at random and hope they don't notice.

shibathedog

@SuperTuna: Hey, we don't call websites colored anymore.

jetRink

I want to know where I can get one of those key chains.

@OCEntertainment: Ah, the inevitables of life.

I'm glad that this is an "optional feature." I'm curious to see how reliable it ends up being, if only to see how well Wikipedia can institute such a sweeping new feature. I don't plan on using it, though. Ever.

@Platypus Man: or in other words, Pluto has a chance at becoming a planet again...

Also, does WikiTrust not realize this will only make it that much efficient for people wanting to vandalise an article? (if they only target trusted content to change, then eventually even credible authors will inevitably lose their credibility).

So what you're telling me is that ALL of Wikipedia is going to be colored, am I right?

SuperTuna

@Platypus Man: What do you think Snopes is for? ;-)

Of course.....

[xkcd.com]

Future Predictions: A surprising amount of text on Wikipedia will be white already, persisting for a good amount of time, written by reliable authors, particularly in the sciences, and of course with much orange in articles concerning political figures and celebrities.

Schools will continue to bar it as a legitimate form of research because "everyone can edit it."

Students that *are* permitted to use Wikipedia will continue to rely on it as their sole source of information because they don't know how to properly research and confirm info.

People will continue to call the current and all future presidents "Hitler".

But what if a lie has been on Wikipedia for a long time, with no one catching it, and in fact spreading through the net, therefore making it appear more valid? How will Wikipedia treat that?

Platypus Man

So Wikipedia will be adopting the "red shirt" designation like Gawker has? I guess they better prepare for an "Orange Tide".