Obviously these two points act as good arguments against treating Wikipedia as "reliable," but I think it's still worth delving a little deeper into them.Ming wrote: ↑Mon Aug 17, 2020 8:58 pmThe issue with flat-out vandalism is two-fold. First, there simply aren't enough eyes to go around anymore, so anything done to an obscure article is going to sit around, no matter how blatant it is. Second, most people aren't that great proofreaders, so unless they are specifically looking for them, they are just going to roll right over a lot of even slightly subtle problems.
On the first point, Wikipedia is dealing with a systemically self-degrading situation because human vandal patrollers (both active ones and potential recruits) can see the writing on the wall and know that they'll eventually be replaced by improved bots, which makes the whole activity less rewarding on a personal level. The number of patrollers could easily dwindle to a crisis point — a crisis that will have to be dealt with by implementing those improved bots, except they apparently don't quite exist yet. So, Wikipedia may be heading into a kind of "unhappy valley" soon, in which their vulnerability to the more subtle forms of vandalism will be worse than it has been since the 2004-2006 "explosive growth" phase. Maybe a lot worse than that, since there are far more articles now.
The second point is sort of personal for me, since I used to proofread formal documents and publications for a living, and I'd like to think I was pretty good at it. The fact is, people just don't proofread things at all anymore, and the usual response when this is pointed out is "who cares." When pressed, people might say "we ran it through spell-check," implying that this is somehow good enough. People don't use grammar checkers either, because they still suck too much — they'll miss really obvious word-choice and usage mistakes (which are often just typographical errors) while pouncing on every instance of "passive voice detected" like it's some sort of unforgivable sin. And as long as people in professional settings are allowed to get away with this, which they nearly always are, the situation will continue to deteriorate — and Wikipedia pages will increasingly reflect that.
I'm not saying automation will "never" solve these problems, because it probably will, eventually. But in the meantime, there will definitely be plenty of opportunities for "vandals" who are subtle and clever. Wikipedia is fortunate that most people, in general, are neither subtle nor clever, but it won't really take that many people who are to keep the site's reputation where it currently is.
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