UK gov has a guy Phillip Cross that edits pages every day 365, 24/7
Even on Christmas day he edits articles of British left wingers and inserts rumour and lies into their pages
Perhaps hes a right winger that really, really hates everyone left of Thatcher
More likely "he" is likely a department of a British troll farm
Robert Conquest, a 'historian' that worked in an AntiCommunist British propaganda department, is still taken seriously on articles like the faked 'holodomor' and articles on the Soviet Union
Anne Applebaum, who opens her discredited book on the Ukrainian famine with a bad-faith mistranslation of Ukrainian words, is the author of the holodomor article on Britannica.com
Everybody talking down here is only talking about politics but for real im glad an online encyclopedia exists at all, otherwise people would have to rely on those horrible school notes websites for anything ew
yeah turns out i dont give a shit about what libertarians think of physics and chemistry.
Yeah, it's straight up invaluable to my work as a mathematician. Sure, you can find all the info elsewhere and the Wikipedia articles are sometimes bad or just very poorly laid out, but if I need to quickly look up what the metric is in the Poincare model of hyperbolic geometry or something, Wikipedia is where I go.
anything opinion based wiki is going to be biased, even with history wikipedia has bias which isn't very fair
It's a battleground. Internet leftists who see a battleground and conclude that we need to abandon it because it's not already won have their heads screwed on backwards.
It has a bad habit of using non-peer-reviewed sources where they should not be appropriate and giving those sources the last word. A lot of articles end with "This dude says in [non-peer-reviewed book] that [false thing]".
in theory yes, in practice no.
power users and bad sources being upheld are a major issue, as stated in other comments, and those issues are baked into how wikipedia is built
Parts of it are good, but the social dynamics, politics, and obsessions among certain power-users make some parts of it really bad.
Its ok so long as its not anything political or to do with big corporations.
You should watch this if you have time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDPrpKDjQ5U
https://thegrayzone.com/2020/06/11/meet-wikipedias-ayn-rand-loving-founder-and-wikimedia-foundations-regime-change-operative-ceo/
Wikipedia has become a bulletin board for corporate and imperial interests under the watch of its Randian founder, Jimmy Wales, and the veteran US regime-change operative who heads the Wikimedia Foundation, Katherine Maher.
https://twitter.com/jnmedina8989/status/1289270943995461632?s=19
The primary editor of Wikipedia is a fascist named Steven Pruitt. Steven currently works for the Dept. of Customs and Border Protection, where he's been for four years, and the 8 years before that he worked for TSA and ICE. For a little bit, he also worked in the Federal Judiciary and counseled on "federal ethics" (...Cute). He has active secret-level clearance with the DHS. He was literally a LEAD TRAINER with ICE, developing and implementing training strategies for kidnapping immigrants; he managed and coached teams on immigration detention methods (on "handl[ing] increases in workflow") at field offices NATIONALLY. Before that he was a "travel coordinator" for ICE, making sure agents could hunt, hurt, and kill people more easily and smoothly. His primary passion outside of editing Wikipedia seems to be tracking down "illegal aliens" and other "violators" of the nationalist American way of life.
He is fucking gestapo. He is a nazi. People will argue a lot of what he's done previously and does now is data/IT management and analysis... Ok, well, even if that's true, what exactly IS the "data" tracking???
This isn't a secret; it's on his fucking LinkedIn. And if I see one more article praising him for the work he does to fix the "gender imbalance" on Wikipedia I'm going to LOST MY MIND. Why do you think that's the narrative everywhere about him? Because HE CONTROLS A LOT OF INFORMATION PEOPLE INHERENTLY TRUST ONLINE. But he is the goddamn poster child of the "HIRE 👏 MORE 👏 WOMEN 👏 GUARDS 👏" meme.
Wikipedia can be a good source to start from, but you gotta know who writes & edits what you read. And you gotta take everything from the site with grain of salt. Especially the political stuff. Especially because Pruitt is openly anti-Communist, and creates explicit narratives against socialism and against the USSR and socialist governments, citing his mother being from the USSR... He's actually been pretty open about the fact that he cares so much about his voluntary Wikipedia work BECAUSE he's opposed to Communism, and does the work in support of "democracy" and "freedom of information"... But yeah, all this guy wants is to give people free access to knowledge and support women, right? What other agenda could there possibly be?
This is a very decent article on that subject: https://caityjohnstone.medium.com/wikipedia-is-an-establishment-psyop-c352c0d2faf
