Hey guys, this may or may not have its place in a full thread, but here goes.
Rant, crucial to this thread but still a rant
I hate, and I mean hate, the stigma around wikis. So many people I know don’t trust wikiHow or Wikipedia all because “aNyOnE cAn EdIt ThEm.” Well, true, but that’s why admins and patrollers exist. To block disruptive users and remove edits that don’t further the wiki’s mission. I can’t believe just because we’ve opened our editing gates to everyone no one trusts us. We source from reputable places, and even though people who come to edit here sometimes do more harm than good by vandalizing and whatnot, we still are kind and welcoming to these people until we absolutely cannot be. Even some of my most favorite teachers always say this before we start a project where we need sources: “DoN’T uSe wIkIPeDiA pLeAsE” and it irks me to no end. There are communities of millions who just want to teach others what stuff means or how to do stuff or even about different fandoms that people hold dear. There are people, including me, who see wikis as more than just a site. They see them as places to make friends, cheer up after a bad day, to learn things you probably can’t learn in your classes. And there are still these people who think wikis are nothing more than places where lies and conspiracy theories spread, where trolls and people who have nothing to do with their lives live online. I’ve heard some of the same people who criticize wikis say the Internet is a proverbial garbage fire, and I’ve just wanted to scream, “Well maybe if you all stop attacking some of the nicest internet communities you’ll find, and instead focus on the real “garbage fires” cough
Reddit
cough
, and not judge sites based on their editing permissions, maybe we’d all have a shot at a more peaceful internet.” This may be a bit biased, coming from a current proud wiki user, but I truly believe wikis are amazing things, that can heal others when they’re at their lowest points, and ultimately bring more joy and knowledge to people’s lives.
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In educational arenas, wikis are all (for the most part) “secondary sources” and worse, completely “unsourced”. That’s why teachers regard wikis as the walker
in a Horse Derby. No use including it; it’ll never get to the finish line with all those other racers coming in 1st, 2nd, 3rd and so on. Same with places like Answers ™ and Quorum ™, etc.
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I know, I don’t agree with people who distrust wiki’s. I mean the information on Wikipedia and wikiHow is much more reliable than the information on some “news” websites that I’ve seen. In fact, many people believe just about anything that someone randomly posts on Twitter (which is not reviewed), or on a blog (which also is not reviewed), or something that their favorite television show host says (which, depending on the network, is subject to extremely little scrutiny), but if it shows up on Wikipedia, then they say that it’s not trustworthy, which is kind of amusing in my opinion. And additions to Wikipedia are actually reviewed, and if you look at the talk page on many articles, you can see just how much scrutiny edits get.
Also, something that some people who don’t like wiki’s also don’t understand is that most open source software, such as Mozilla Firefox, Chromium (which is Google Chrome’s rendering engine), VLC Media Player, Linux, and even the Windows 10 Calculator App, all accept code contributions from guess who… anybody. The code commitments are reviewed in a similar way to how we do it on wikiHow, where the code has to be approved before it’s added to the main program. But I’m sure that none of the people who distrust wiki’s suspect that these open source programs have viruses in them. I’m also sure that most of those people would happily run a calculation through the Windows 10 calculator and believe whatever the result was without any questions, even though its code is written by random people, and can be edited by anybody.
Maybe you can point these facts out to people who distrust wikis. It would probably surprise them quite a bit.
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True. Its quite amusing, actually.
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I have a feeling that people claim wikis aren’t reputable because of their ignorance (sorry, but it’s true) and they assume
that anyone can edit anything so “I can just go vandalize and no one will find out hahahahaha.”
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