Summary:
Good examples of unreliability in my judgement resolve yes, options that do not meet the submission standards resolve N/A, submissions which are not good examples of unreliability in my judgement resolve no.
I will not trade in this market, and my current plan is to close the market in one week and give a 1000 mana award to the best submission.
Please submit Wikipedia articles in the format [article name] - [link to article]
I'm also open to suggestions for improving this format, so please let me know if you have any. I may update these rules while staying within the spirit of the question.
Premise:
I usually trust Wikipedia, enough that I like using it for market resolutions sometimes. But I know it's not infallible. I'm making this market to solicit examples of its fallibility, so I have a better idea of how much I should trust it in general.
An article doesn’t have to be unambiguously wrong about something to be unreliable. It could simply be too confident that something is true based on the available evidence, or it could be not confident enough that something is false even when it’s been totally debunked. Anything that would make someone think ‘Wow, I would not want to base a market’s resolution on this article as an authoritative source of truth.”
Ideally a submitted article would be obviously unreliable to most manifolders, not requiring you to be an expert in the subject to know that it’s bad. The goal of this market is to find articles that most reasonable manifolders would agree are unreliable. That's what makes it a good example.
Submission standards:
It should be on English Wikipedia.
It should not be labeled with a disclaimer that the article is known to have problems.
It should not be about COVID-19 or any still-controversial War. This is what we’re usually already questioning Wikipedia on, I’d like an example on another topic.
It should not be a very new article, or about a very obscure topic where unreliability is to be expected.
It should not be unreliable just because it's currently be in the middle of an edit war.
It should be a plausible submission, which some people might bet yes on. Don't add things just to bet no on them.
If I think a submission does not meet these standards, I may N/A it. I may also N/A an option if I can't come to decision about if it's a good example or not, but I will try my best to do so.
Resolution:
To make this more fun as a market, I will try to remain vague about my opinions on submissions here, so that you can have counterparties for your bets. I promise not to tell anyone my opinions in private.
I will try to do one early Yes resolution and one early No resolution as examples, and then no more resolutions until market close except for N/A-ing answers that don't meet the submission standards. After market close, I'll resolve all the other submissions.
I'll offer the final disclaimer that I tried for a good while to find good examples of obvious unreliability, and I've failed to find any that meet my standards. I've found some articles I think are pretty bad like Gamer and Neoliberalism, but I don't think they are good examples of the site being unreliable.
I wish you the best of luck!
1,000
3.00I hate to see liquidity go to waste. Re-opened so people can buy/sell as they please based on the announced resolutions. Just be careful since someone might theoretically still change my mind on some of them, particularly the ones where they never left a comment to begin with and I didn't see what was wrong with the article.
I'll do resolutions tomorrow.
@Joshua PEPFAR stopped doing circumcisions in Africa when their statistics showed that the younger the man the higher likelihood of complications. The page also has nothing about nerve endings in the foreskin in it, just a quick assurance from an American organization that it has no effect on pleasure.
@asmith In general I think this is such a controversial topic that it's not going to be a good example of unreliability unless it was much more blatantly biased in favor of circumcision.
@asmith Circumcisions have a very low complication rate, especially when performed by medical professionals. Nerve endings are not a reliable indicator of pleasure, but there are studies that show no effect. All of that is in the article.
It's been some time since I got deep into this topic but I remember reading the Wikipedia article some years back and being impressed by how balanced it was, especially in a sea of misinformation on this topic.
@IsaacKing Can I ask you to remove the paragraph in this article about Genghis Khan banning circumcision? The sources explicitly say it's not true, it was only forbidden for a short time by Kublai Khan. The page is semi-protected so I can't edit it.
@Shump What about the gliding sheath effect? Are you going to say that's nonsense too?
Just ask one intact man and one mutilated man what parts of their respective penises are and aren't sensitive.
Is there anything so obvious that "studies show" is not a convincing rebuttal?
@asmith can't take you seriously if you go around calling people "mutilated". Also even google doesn't know what that is.
Okay, resolution time!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kafka_on_the_Shore
Gives an incorrect summary of what seems to be an important part of the plot. Resolves yes.
Psalm 46 (Shakespeare's alleged involvement) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psalm_46
Obviously bad coverage of an obviously bad theory. Better since Isaac fixed it, but still resolves yes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miracle_of_Chile
This is too complicated and controversial to serve as a good example of wikipedia’s unreliability. Resolves no.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_altruism#Other_criticisms_of_the_movement
Wild that they included the ridiculous criticism here as pointed out in the comments, before Isaac fixed it. Resolve yes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryonics
Yeah this is pretty biased. I’ve not signed up for Cryonics, but unreservedly calling it psuedoscience and quackery right in the opening paragraph is a completely uncharitable summary. Resolves yes.
Drug Liberalization - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_liberalization. Also see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arguments_for_and_against_drug_prohibition and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_prohibition#Cost
Too complicated and controversial to be a good example. Resolves No.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientology
I see nothing immediately wrong with this, resolves no.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precognition?wprov=sfla1
I see nothing immediately wrong with this, resolves no
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideological_bias_on_Wikipedia
Seems too meta and too complicated/controversial to be a good example. Resolves no.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ
Absolutely too complicated and too controversial to be a good example. Resolves no.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circumcision
The summary seems more pro-circumcision than I’d expect for a controversial topic, but I see nothing blatantly unreliable. Resolves no.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escape_velocity
This is a descriptivism vs prescriptivism thing, I don’t think that counts. Resolves no.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missile
This seems like a minor mistake. Resolves no.
Best answer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transgenerational_trauma by a mile. It now has a bunch of warnings on it, as it should. Isaac gets the 1000 mana for submitting this.
@Joshua I'll hold off on resolving until tomorrow in case anyone wants to make an argument for reversing any of these, but I don't think it was a huge amount of mana at stake for any one of them. Thanks for all the submissions, and a special thanks to Isaac for trying to fix so many of the problems that were submitted!
@Joshua this screenshot alone is well worth the 1000 mana:
I love Wikipedia, but holy shit I see why you're not supposed to cite it directly.
I expected my EA and Transgenerational trauma edits to be challenged more than they were; nice surprise that they've stuck.
Oh boy are the cryonics people rabid though. I tried removing the objectively false sentence in the introduction that claims cryonics has been scientifically proven to be impossible, along with providing a lengthy explanation of why this is false, and the edit was reverted almost immediately with no justification.
@Joshua Not arguing the resolution - the fact that it's arguable is a good enough reasoning for me, but I'm curious why Cryonics is so bad. The claims of it being a pseudoscience and about vitrification being irreversible are well evidenced. Maybe in the future we will have some techniques for corpse preservation that actually work, but right now it's doubtful that it's even theoretically possible for cryopreserved bodies to be revived.
@Shump I was a bit borderline on that one, and I admit I'm more sympathetic to Cryonics than most people probably are. I think the idea really does deserve to be taken much more seriously than the article does though. Like, later on under "notable people they include this for some reason:
Disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein wanted to have his head and penis frozen after death so that he could "seed the human race with his DNA".[75][76]
Overall, seems similar to the needlessly low quality criticism section of the EA article.
@Joshua Yeah that passage is kinda blatant. I also think that even in articles about pseudoscience, not every sentence needs to be negativr and remind the reader of that.
right now it's doubtful that it's even theoretically possible for cryopreserved bodies to be revived.
https://news.yale.edu/2019/04/17/scientists-restore-some-functions-pigs-brain-hours-after-death If we can revive brain cell metabolism in slaughtered pigs 4 to 6 hours postmortem, who is to say that it is impossible to do so after a longer period postmortem given proper preservation techniques?
@brp The key part here is
Given proper preservation techniques
We don't currently have those. Maybe at some point in the future
@Shump Right. I'm providing data which may shift whether it's "even theoretically possible," not whether it is practically possible with what can do now.
Historically, missile referred to any projectile that is thrown, shot or propelled towards a target; this usage is still recognized today with any unguided jet- or rocket-propelled weapons generally described as rocket artillery.
Nonsense, people don't refer to a bullet as a type of missile. It's correctly mentioning a different historical definition, but ignores its own disambiguation line at the top that says this article is specifically about guided missiles, and that people should refer to the "projectile" page for the other definition.
@IsaacKing I agree it's out of place in the article, but I don't think that qualifies it to be considered an unreliable article.
@Joshua Some articles have been edited since they were submitted. Are you gonna resolve by how they are now or how they were when submitted?