Academics have a duty to defend open knowledge systems like Wikipedia

[1] "should be" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in this sentence. Unfortunately, too many people have had their higher reasoning centers liquified by partisanship, and cannot acknowledge inconvenient facts even when they're blatant.

The fact that a “legitimate” academic text cited this novel as a sole reference is an indictment of the entire book.

I can totally see how this kind of question would intersect with climate activism though.

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.

If an editor is an expert in a field and you can verify it it would be most useful to the encyclopedia to treat them as such. This is not actually a special privilege but how people normally do things.

I can gather citations and glue them into an article but someone with actual expertise knows which parts are important, what isn't and what is missing.

Wikimedia is of course free to have an encyclopedia project to entertain children with to much time on their hands but they will continue to lose good editors. You can't have both.

If you disarm the man before throwing him into the alligator pit he won't survive but it will be great for the alligators.

The mention of marxism is puzzling, but re: the Middle East / Israel, I think it's impossible for any kind of written publication to report anything relatively recent on this topic that won't make anyone enraged about bias. So it seems a bit unfair to claim this is how Wikipedia is "being lost to ideology", because this is a property of the various Middle East conflicts, not of Wikipedia. Let me emphasize: nothing that could be written anywhere about the Middle East or Israel, today or in recent years, can possibly avoid enraging a large number of people all over the world.

Based on what you're saying, I think your real issue is that your own ideology and biases clash with whatever you perceive about Wikipedia. If Wikipedia had a less "marxist perspective of history" (!) or relied more on whatever you think is more reliable about the Middle East and Israel, then we'd have another commenter claiming Wikipedia is hopelessly biased in the opposite direction.

Unfortunately this boils down to "I don't like it", which is very subjective and very hard to evaluate in a neutral way that everyone agrees must mean "Wikipedia is being lost to ideology", as you claimed.

I think we all agree political and recent-ish history are mired in controversy and these divisive topics are problematic in Wikipedia, but ultimately hard to report on neutrally anyway. I guess they could settle for a insincere "neutral" tone that left everyone unsatisfied; Wikipedia supposedly tries to do that.

> The middle east articles involving Isreal use a lot of sources known to be unreliable like middleeasteye and Al-jazeera.

Good luck finding any written publication of any kind that everyone will agree is unbiased and reliable on this topic, and that won't upset a significant number of readers.

Re: specifically Middle East Eye, Wikipedia's own article on it is critical and highlights controversies. As for using it on articles about the Middle East, it would only be a problem if it was the only reference, but this doesn't seem to be the case in a cursory search I did. So aren't you effectively asking they ban some sources but left others, which ironically would introduce bias? Same with Al-jazeera or any other news outlets you dislike.

Not saying that doesn't happen, but do you have an example of such a page?

Primary sources aren't really considered reliable on wikipedia (with some exceptions), so if such a situation is happening (and you have a source for whatever version you think is correct, since just trust me bro doesn't go far on wikipedia) and you can't resolve it on the talk page, probably time to escalate the situation.

How do you propose to discuss "alternative interpretations and solutions" if you believe that doing so is "anti-intellectual and dogmatic".

I'm honestly confused how you could respond this way to my comment. It sounds like you are criticizing yourself (?)

every paper has a review section built into the background section, which goes through the same peer-review process that a review does. usually these are much better and more up to date than review articles since they're written by scientists trying to put their findings into context, rather than reviews which are often handed by professors to their PhD students/postdocs who need to fill their CV with papers after a few 'dry' research years, and often peddle their group's take on a given topic rather than being neutral.

I can't tell you the number of times that I've read something in a review then gone on to read the original cited paper and found that the review inaccurately summarized the paper. often the review author didn't even read the paper, just summarized something from the title or abstract. this happens for primary papers too, but reviews are in no way more reliable, and in my opinion the farther you get from the source data the more errors propagate.

it's also a bad policy for seemingly controversial topics. the medical establishment is composed of humans with plenty of biases and groupthink, so a perfectly good idea can be shunned or ignored for decades if it's inconvenient to the establishment. this creates a chicken and egg problem for finding funding to study those ideas, or to know they even need to be studied.

in grad school we learned to 'embrace the controversy' in grant writing. instead of picking a side, steel-man the different opinions and evidence for each, and cite the differences as a reason for further study & explain how you'll figure it out.

wikipedia doesn't need that last part, but I think it will be a good habit for editors to learn to truly critique a primary paper.

the only thing reviews have going for them is they are more accessible/skimmable to the average reader. my guess is that the rule about citing was written to make it easier to be an editor. anyway, technically the wikipedia regulations don't outright ban primary literature as long as you give the necessary caveats, but there are plenty of megalomaniacal admins don't care about nuance (e.g. MrOllie)

You really believe that applies here?

Its hard to say its relentless when not a single piece of evidence has been given so far.

Its hard to say its tangential when it speaks to the original poster's thesis.

Not at all. Mainly because this is asking for the first line of examples, not repeatedly bogging down the conversation with constant requests for additional evidence.

Also it matters because in this kind of vague remarks that Wikipedia is unreliable, or that articles are wrong, almost always the people claiming this fail to provide specific examples, instead relying on some general feeling of frustration and shared belief that it must be true. But if they provided a specific example of a factually incorrect article, maybe other people would disagree. Or if they provided an example of ideological bias, maybe it would turn out the complainer is in the minority in believing that was biased. And if it turned out that this were controversial topics that most encyclopedic articles struggle with in some form, maybe it isn't a problem with Wikipedia. So examples matter!

Yes, the reviewers' comments and the authors' rebuttals are generally confidential, and there are good reasons for doing it that way. One significant reason is to allow the reviewers to make their comments freely, without worrying about how those comments might be perceived by the public or how the authors' reputations might be impacted; likewise with the authors' rebuttals. Another reason is to avoid tainting the review process in situations where a paper is rejected from one journal and re-submitted to another -- the second set of reviewers should not know that it was previously rejected, nor should they know why it was previously rejected.

On the other hand, the peer review process is "open" in the sense that there is no explicit credential required to be a reviewer, only expertise in the field (typically determined by publishing papers -- in principle someone with no formal education could publish enough papers to start getting invitations to be a reviewer). It is also "open" in the sense that anyone can submit a paper for review as long as it adheres to formatting (page layout, font size, etc.) and length requirements.