Warning: I'm aware that most around here in Hexbear are aware of the existence of problems with Wikipedia, I've written this post so that the next time someone outside here accuses me of being an authoritarian, brainwashed and revisionist Tankie for saying that Wikipedia actually isn't reliable for a given topic, I have some reference post that I can direct them towards with my opinion on the topic. That said, if you haven't ever considered why Wikipedia can be so problematic, I think my post can be a nice little introduction to the topic. The post doesn't attempt to be a comprehensive list of all problems with Wikipedia, but instead a helpful, common-language approach to a few of the (in my opinion) biggest problems with it: the average Wikipedia editor being a western, white and male; and the predominantly western sources used on most articles. Anyways, of course I welcome additions or criticism to the post. Thanks :)

Wikipedia, being a free, online, collaborative encyclopedia, is mostly maintained by people who go out of their way to spend time making contributions to free, open knowledge, with a good-will unseen in most other media, i.e. not taking sponsorships or relying on advertisers, supposedly individual and independent users editing articles instead of political actors with an agenda (let's give Wikipedia even more credit by forgetting about astroturfing and brigading by private or governmental bodies). This is Wikipedia's greatest strength: it doesn't rely on a state mouthpiece or private funding to maintain its operation, and can be therefore be considered relatively directly independent from individual actors, again, forgetting about astroturfing and brigading for the purpose of this post. But stopping to think about it: who is actually editing Wikipedia, and where are they getting their information from? Ideally, the entire humanity as a collective would collaborate in Wikipedia, and users would take as unbiased and wide a sample as humanly possible, in the most well-sourced and referenced manner. Unfortunately, it is on this front that Wikipedia hides an ugly truth.

So, who actually edits Wikipedia? Thankfully, Wikipedia seems open about it: for the most part, western, English-speaking, white men with abundant time (i.e. affluent), mostly from English-speaking countries or from countries where English is predominantly taught. So: North America and Western Europe. This lack of diversity in itself has problems, such as women reporting Wikipedia to be of lower quality than men do (again, from the same article), but this implies another hidden problem: where does this biased sample of users take its information from?

As for where information in Wikipedia comes from, thanks to its standards with references (better than those in most other media available, at least in the west where I live), we again have answers. Wikipedia itself has a compiled, although incomplete list of “reliable sources”, colour-coded for our convenience: green for sources that editors consider generally reliable, red for sources editors consider generally unreliable or sources that have been deprecated, and yellow for sources were there's no consensus or there are particular considerations. A few examples of what Wikipedia editors consider reliable and unreliable sources follow:

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I've brought four examples that show the bias problem in full swing, the first two both being private companies, and the latter two being state-media. The Wall Street Journal is a fully accepted source with no extra requirements on the “notes” part of the table, whereas Russia Today is a deprecated Russian Government mouthpiece. Is this really fair? Obviously, we can expect Russia Today to be heavily biased towards pro-Russian Government positions in many politically charged topics, but can't we expect the Wall Street Journal to portray similar biases when it comes to pro-US Government positions? We in the west necessarily and rightly expect Russia Today to be biased in a particular direction in, for example, their reporting of the ongoing (as of the time of writing) war in Ukraine, but can't we expect the WSJ to be biased in a particular direction in, for example, the ongoing (as of the time of writing) genocide in Gaza? Let's see what a quick Google search brings up for WSJ and Zionism:

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Whoops. Colour me surprised. Western media portraying a Zionist, pro-Israel stance, known ally of the US Government. But no mention of this in the “reliable sources” notes for the WSJ in the Wikipedia list, reflecting the editors' bias.

Let's look at two state-sponsored (rather, openly state-sponsored) media: Radio Free Asia and Xinhua News Agency. Again, the USian source is good and green, going as far as saying that “editors have found there's little reason to think [it] demonstrates systematic inaccuracy [or] unreliability”, whereas the Chinese source is yellow and “the consensus is almost unanimous that Xinhua cannot be trusted to cover [subjects where the Chinese government may be a stake holder] accurately and dispassionately”. If you as a reader agree with this, that's fine, but I'm willing to bet you're in the same demographic group than the average Wikipedia editor.

This, unfortunately, doesn't stop at “mass media”. Academic sources for historical events equally suffer from this selection bias of white western men being behind the source more often than not, and the cold war-era climate and its consequences still mean that certain viewpoints more friendly to the US State Department will be much more widely funded, published and available than other viewpoints less agreeable to state propaganda. Again, how wide is the access to, say, old Soviet sources in Wikipedia for talking about historical topics? What's more likely to get funding and advertisement in 2025, a study on mass-incarceration of certain ethnic minorities in the USA, or a study on the situation of Uyghur nationals in China?

Before mischaracterization ensues, my point with this post isn't “we should blindly trust Russian and Chinese media and the Soviet Union did nothing wrong”, regardless of my own biases. My point with this post isn't even that Wikipedia sucks, Wikipedia is an invaluable resource for many topics, especially less-political ones or those which may be less susceptible to biases in the user sample, and its standards are much higher than those of most traditional forms of media. The problem, is that this isn't enough to guarantee a reliable and not one-sided account of topics that have a political, gender, racial or international dimension where the bias in user representation is that large (I'm sure I'm leaving out dimensions but this doesn't attempt to be comprehensive; after all, I myself am a western, white male, the irony isn't lost on me).

Finally, for anyone who may still not be convinced, think of the following: tomorrow, a Russian or Chinese initiative for an open source online encyclopedia begins, and in a few years, there exists an encyclopedic wealth of knowledge and articles gathered majoritarily by Russian or Chinese citizens, predominantly male and of the largest ethnic group of those countries, and predominantly therefore referencing the articles with predominantly Russian and Chinese sources. Would you consider such a project to be unbiased when it comes to politically or racially charged topics, whether national or international? If your answer is no, then why are your standards different for Wikipedia?

Thanks for reading. Tl;Dr: Wikipedia is predominantly edited by white men in western countries, and almost necessarily reflects the bias suffered by that demographic, which itself is partially inflicted on them by their access to predominantly western sources.

Edit: credit to BadEmpanada, I recall watching a video of his long ago on Wikipedia and the Holodomor, and that part of the info, particularly the links to Wikipedia's own articles on its bias and source selection, I found there.