True, there are some things which Wikipedia says that are accurate, but I still would never link directly to a Wikipedia article in any of my website articles. To me, it is just untrustworthy. I'll rather look independently at the research I find and come to my conclusion based off of what I see in the data and the bias. I have been proven wrong many times before when researching.brimstoneSalad wrote:
The thing with Wikipedia, is that it's only about as credible as the academic experts who are in charge of it.
Think of a college: You go to the physics department, and you get really rigorous and reliable information.
You go to the humanities, and you'll get a lot of nebulous fluff.
The same is true on Wikipedia. Wikipedia is only as rigorous as the science of the topic itself is hard. Once it gets down to issues of "opinions" and rhetoric, it falls apart.
Physics and Chemistry are spot on, Nutrition is pretty good too, Psychology is a bit more dicey, and it goes on from there as the academic discipline itself the article is dealing with becomes softer.
So, if you go there for pop culture, you'll get out of it the same amount of rigor and accuracy that the topic deserves: Which is not a lot.
And in terms of political research like this? Well, it's not the hardest of sciences.
Wikipedia uses whatever sources are available, but who is doing research on gender pay gaps?
Anyway, the article actually isn't bad. It doesn't support his position as much as he thinks it does if you read it.
Look at the pay-gap section, for example:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_in ... es#Pay_gapIt's a fairly well rounded explanation. Most women with children don't get management jobs because they have other responsibilities, and won't put in the work of men. Since men stay at work and fulfill those responsibilities (at the cost of family obligations), they do.wikipedia wrote:Pay gap
Main article: Gender pay gap in the United States
Women's median usual weekly earnings as percentage of men's, for full-time workers, by industry, 2009[17]
With regards to the gender pay gap in the United States, International Labour Organization notes as of 2010 women in the United States earned about 81% of what their male counterparts did.[18] While the gender pay gap has been narrowing since the passage of the Equal Pay Act, the convergence began to slow down in the 1990s.[19] In addition, overall wage inequality has been increasing since the 1980s as middle-wage jobs are increasing replaced by larger percentages of both high-paying and low-paying jobs, creating a highly polarized environment.[20]
According to researchers at the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the primary cause of this gap is discrimination manifested in the tendency of women to be hired more frequently in lower paying occupations, in addition to the fact that male dominated occupations are higher paying than female dominated occupations, and that, even within comparable occupations, women are often paid less than men.[21]
In addition to the gender pay gap, a "family gap" also exists, wherein women with children receive about 10-15% less pay when compared to women without children.[15][22] According to Jane Waldfogel, professor of social work and public affairs at Columbia University, this family gap is a contributing factor to the United States' large gender pay gap.[22] She also noted that men did not seem to be affected by this gap, as married men (who are more likely to have children) generally earned higher than unmarried men.[15][22]
The problem in the article is that it's primarily focused on Women's issues, but male issues are discussed elsewhere on Wikipedia quite well:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Men%27s_rights_movement
This is more of a categorical problem than a content problem.
It's unfair for gender inequality to be in the Feminism portal, when it should be in the rights portal or something.
These issues should all stand side by side in a general article like that.
This is something that will likely be fixed at some point.
For instance, when writing an article and researching, if I come to feel there is reasonable doubt to show that my post would be inaccurate, I will either alter my post to connect to what the evidence says, or simply not post the article at all. But as someone with experience in journalism, I don't trust Wikipedia as a credible source.
