Wikipedia sucks for science according to John Timmer

Most entries, but not all. Disturbingly, all of the worst entries I have ever read have been in the sciences. Wander off the big ideas in the sciences, and you're likely to run into entries that are excessively technical and provide almost no context, making them effectively incomprehensible.

This failure is a minor problem for Wikipedia, as most of the entries people rely on are fine. But I'd argue that it's a significant problem for science. The problematic entries reinforce the popular impression that science is impossible to understand and isn't for most people—they make science seem elitist. And that's an impression that we as a society really can't afford.

Read article here:  http://arstechnica.com/staff/2015/12/editorial-wikipedia-fails-as-an-encyclopedia-to-sciences-detriment/

(The images G+ pulled for this article sucked, so I found my own Wikipedia failure image)

  1. I once tried to clean up a Wikipedia entry on an astronomy topic that focused on unimportant details and missed the big picture. Within a day it had all been changed back.

  2. Most of the scientific entries in Wikipedia are overly-complicated and hard to understand. If you actually take the time to figure out what they're saying, you also discover that they're nearly always wrong.

  3. I haven't found that to be the case and I haven't really heard that as a common complaint.

  4. The quality of an article depends on the audience. There are plenty of wikipedia articles in math that are excellent but would be incomprehensible to a non-mathematician. Maybe there is room inside wikipedia for more than one kind of article.

  5. This Kim is so much classier than the "I, Me, Mine"
    version with the fat ass and 4 pounds of make up.
    yechhh…..

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