W8: Thoughts after reading "Reliability of Wikipedia" / YANG RUIXIN

Points to discuss

The first thing to understand is that Wikipedia has never claimed authority. See what he says：Wikipedia is a multilingual, web-based, free encyclopedia that is based on a model of openly editable content. It is the largest and most popular general reference work on the Internet and is named as one of the most popular websites by Alexa rank.

My understanding

1.Focus：reference work. “reference” is “for what it worth” 

2.What is authority? Is the credibility high or not? Academic credibility is divided into two aspects, one is the credibility of the author, the other is the credibility of the information carrier.

The credibility of the author is to see how high the identity and achievements of the author are. For example, MIT physics professors are more credible than physics undergraduates at Shandong University and undergraduates are better than high school students. And so on. The credibility of the information carrier is to see whether the carrier is professional. Professional journals, more than the general publishing authority. Books that have been published are more authoritative than unpublished web blogs.

3. A lot of people think that Wikipedia's "authority" is not that its content is really authoritative, but because all its content requires second-hand information and requires a reference. First-hand information —— is your own experience, for example, you see the sky is blue, you say the sky is blue；Or you do an experiment, you take out the experimental data is a hand-in-hand information. Second-hand information —— is what you listen to, such as the news you see in the newspaper, the text in the textbook, the articles in the science journal, and so on.

Why does Wikipedia require second-hand information? Because wikis are open and freely compiled, the editor can be a university professor or a dog behind the screen, which you can't control at all, so the credibility of the primary data is very unreliable. More importantly, it is impossible to verify.

Second-hand information, although not guaranteed that all information itself is authoritative because he is what you hear, so he will certainly have a source.

When someone questions the professionalism of an entry, the value of the reference is reflected: the content of any qualified entry can verify the source, that is, put the credibility on the table. In other words, he handed over the judgment of authority to the reader himself.

My opinion

The user can use his own brain to judge whether he is credible according to your source. This so-called authority is transparent and open. What he wants is not to ensure that every entry is right, not to make himself an authority, not to teach you what truth is; but to ensure that everyone has the right to use his own brain, to distinguish between right and wrong, and to distinguish between credibility.