Talk:Criticism of Wikipedia

Note: This is the Talk page for the Wikipedia article on external criticisms of Wikipedia. Users interested in discussing their own problems with the project should go to the Village Pump where there are specific sections for dealing with various issues.

For critical examination of Wikipedia by Wikipedia itself, see Wikipedia:External peer review/Nature December 2005 (40 science articles) and Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2005-10-31/Guardian rates articles (7 articles of general interest).

Why is this not part of the main article on Wikipedia?

This seems to be customary for all other entities but not this self serving, non-encyopedic entity? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 85.2.156.224 (talk) 22:33, 22 May 2010 (UTC)

Carolyn Doran and "hive mind"

Can someone think of a good addition to the "hive mind" section that uses Wikipedia's response to the Carolyn Doran article? Most of the stuff I add to articles seems to get reverted, so I'm not even going to try. --Fandyllic (talk) 11:06 AM PST 6 Jan 2008

Article on Wikipedia in the Harvard Educational Review

This article may be related to this page:

Fall 2009 Issue of the Harvard Educational Review

High School Research and Critical Literacy: Social Studies With and Despite Wikipedia by Houman Harouni

http://www.hepg.org/her/abstract/742

"Drawing on experiences in his social studies classroom, Houman Harouni evaluates both the challenges and possibilities of helping high school students develop critical research skills. The author describes how he used Wikipedia to design classroom activities that address issues of authorship, neutrality, and reliability in information gathering. The online encyclopedia is often lamented by teachers, scholars, and librarians, but its widespread use necessitates a new approach to teaching research. In describing the experience, Harouni concludes that teaching research skills in the contemporary context requires ongoing observations of the research strategies and practices students already employ as well as the active engagement of student interest and background knowledge."

Critisisms of critisisms

In preparation of the addition of the section "Critisisms of critisisms", those interested may compile information here. Rolyatleahcim (formerly known as Zzzmidnight) (talk) 02:37, 24 May 2010 (UTC)

Why is there no criticism of the new Vector skin?

Judging from other criticism articles about websites, whenever a website changes its design it must be included in the website's criticism article, sources be damned. So, I'm waiting. Sceptre ^(talk) 00:55, 19 May 2010 (UTC)

The criticism would need to be reliably sourced and notable in scale. Simply saying "I don't like it" is not a RS. So far, there has been little evidence of widespread criticism of the new interface, although some people were bound to complain about it.--♦IanMacM♦ ^{(talk to me)} 06:21, 19 May 2010 (UTC)

There is a reliable resource: the system administrators can query the SQL-database in order to count the number of registered users, who changed their default skin back to the normal MediaWiki default. prohlep (talk) 22:24, 13 June 2010 (UTC)

Psychotropic drug articles

It has been my experience that many of the articles in Wikipedia are often either biased or contain misinformation when it comes to descriptions of psychotropic drugs (antidepressants, benzodiazepines,atypical antipsychotics, mood stabilizers, etc.)One need only look at the discussion page on Effexor, for example, to lose confidence that one is in good hands scientifically. This is particularly unfortunate, since many people rely on Wikipedia information as background for taking medication. This is curious, since the quality of some other scientific articles, e.g., chromatography, are quite good. Perhaps the main "problem" with Wikipedia is not the quality of articles, but the unevenness of quality presented-unfortunately for the reader, one never knows if the article being examined contains mostly accurate or inaccurate information. Dehughes (talk) 20:47, 13 June 2010 (UTC)

It's not the point of this article, or its discussion page, to make criticisms of Wikipedia based on your own experience or opinion; it's the point to gather and summarize the criticisms that have been made as documented in reliable sources. *Dan T.* (talk) 22:20, 13 June 2010 (UTC)

Bias in the direction of scientific atheism

There is a relatively bigger portion of the article on diverse biases.

However I miss an important, disturbing bias. The scientific atheism appears unbalanced. Frequently it is masquaraded by "I am on the correct clean base of sciences".

OK, the population, suffered from the communist agressive agitation, from the scientific atheism, ...

... the members of these population can detect faster if someone is cheating with the science, and in fact supports the atheism, incorrectly disregarding the real neutrality in the question of religion.

The main tool of scientific atheists is, that they do not accept, that they view is not scientific, but religious.

They believe in the atheistic interpretation of the scientific experiments.

See for more details, the works of Mihaly Polanyi, especially his leading publication, the Personal Knowledge.

This atheistic bias must be mentioned in an own subsection of the article.

prohlep (talk) 22:36, 13 June 2010 (UTC)

You may be right, but you must cite concrete examples, and be able to cite opinions to that effect.In any case, we're not sure what you mean by scientific atheism.Science, by its very nature, is concerned with what is quantifiable, with what can be observed by the senses and measured by the mind. So it can make no assertion for or against the existence of God. That question is outside its scope.You will need to be more specific.Gazzster (talk) 23:22, 13 June 2010 (UTC)

wrong, many times scientists if they cant explain, they use intelligent design theory to justify certain creations, universe's, scientific, nature's actions!

additional info on 100% truth on wikipedia can be found wikipedia-watch.org lol!!!