Posted by leotravis10 9/4/2025
Something happened, a war started, someone did X, someone else did Y... you open wikipedia, see all the "current situation" bias, open the history tab and look at the article from before <the thing> happened.
Unlike most user contributed sites it's happy to throw stuff away. It does grow but it doesn't care about growing fast. That's great but it's a hard formula to replicate.
One important piece of even trying to replicate that is its nature as a nonprofit. Any profit-seeking organization trying to grow a user-contribution based site will prefer content and moderation pipelines that drive engagement over quality.
Certainly that's not a great way to make money. Not if you're depending on people to spend a lot of time seeking new content (and be shown ads).
It really doesn't. Granted, it could be a lot worse.
Now, I can visit pages for certain medical conditions that contain completely unsourced claims with no "citation needed" nor any warnings. When I try to search for it, I often trace it back to alternative medicine or pseudoscience influencers.
The sad part is that when I've tried to remove obviously flimsy information, someone will immediately come along and add it back. Unless you're ready to spend months in a Wikipedia edit war with someone who obsesses over a page, there's no point in even trying. These people know the rules and processes and will use every one of them against you. When that fails, they'll try to pull rank. If that fails, they'll just quietly continue editing and rewriting (possibly from alt accounts) until you get too tired to fight the battle any more.
The trick is to write about your proposed edit on the talk page and wait a few days. If nobody has complained, you make the edit and write "see talk" in the edit summary. The notion that you should push an edit first and wait for someone to revert you just doesn't work in practice except for trivial typo fixes. Discuss your edit in depth, then push it once you have a presumed near-consensus for it.
- https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Blog/2024-10-17/Path_Depende...
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40655989
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Weierstrass_function#Accu...
And my personal favourite is recently when the most ridiculous thing was added to Bukele's Gang Crackdown: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Salvadoran_gang_c...
If you still have the desire to have some of these fixed, post here and I'll put it in my queue and get to it at some point. If you don't want the resulting interaction from other commenters here, send it to my email (in profile).
Wikipedia is ultimately a consensus summarizer frequently mistaken for a truth-seeker. So you have to make the case for something being true somewhere where the experts live, and then Wikipedia can express the experts' opinion. But crucially, it is not truth-seeking on its own.
Any controversial topic should never be read on Wikipedia, it will not be accurate.
People are paid whole-ass salaries to edit Wikipedia (and to become mods on Reddit.) They masquerade as (a dozen different) obsessed weirdos, but they are just normal middle-class people who are being paid to lie.
See also Canceling Disputes: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/law-and-social-inqui...
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Donald_J._Harris&...
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Kamala_Harris&old...
Even the titles are a place of political warfare. For example, note carefully which incidents are labelled as "riots" and which as "unrest", and try to find any objective, politically neutral principle that could explain those results.
You're focusing on when the word "Marxist" was removed in 2024, but you might want to consider when it was added to the article (in August 2020, about two weeks after Harris was selected to be the vice presidential nominee): https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Donald_J._Harris&...
Not much of an indictment that additional information was added sometime shortly after the article was created.
[] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Donald_J._Harris&...
Edit: at least ~4 years
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Donald_J._Harris&...
>Any controversial topic should never be read on Wikipedia, it will not be accurate.
to
>A controversial topic will become important enough to merit editorial discussion
Is an interesting point. I think I will vouch you just for the genius of flipping it.
https://web.archive.org/web/20140519194937/http://en.wikiped...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Marxism_conspiracy_th...
https://help.kagi.com/kagi/plans/plan-types.html#how-searche...
After probably 15 years of using DDG the bangs are just part of my muscle memory. Why bother changing things?
Today in Firefox : right click on a search field, add search engine. Pretty sure that this evolved from that separate search field that browsers used to have in addition to the URL field ?
Ad driven sites broke the internet; they might have broken society to some degree as well.
The political model doesn't work at all. If you just count the votes of the people who show up to vote, the Party will hire buses and empty the retirement homes and homeless shelters. Maybe you can fight this irl if everyone knows there's an election, but nobody knows when there's a war on a talk page.
If I just want to know some dry facts about Podunk, BFE, it'll probably have them right. But maybe not, if the mayor of Podunk wrote the page and is trying to promote the town, or if it was last edited by someone who used to live there and hates the place. And very few people are going to check the talk or history pages to see whether there's been an edit war or other hints that the page might be sketchy.
They don't even have to go that far; consider the "consensus is not a vote" policy.
Although CBPP shares a lot with general User-generated content (UGC) and the open source model, maybe mechanisms that make it work is a little different.
The article points out system-side elements like "Talk page" and human-side elements like policies and guidelines.
I wonder if there are any studies on this subject.
I have an email, old enough to vote, that I received from an engineer. They wrote "Wikipedia is a good site for learning how our new RAID array works. People need to change their mind about Wikipedia. Just because anyone can make a page doesn't mean the information is wrong."
If they had sent me any other link, all this info would be behind a paywall, login, or would simply 404 today.