this post was submitted on 24 Oct 2023
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It's literally a meme how you can't trust anything you see on there except for the most objective, undeniable facts, because you never know what page has been camped by an editor with an agenda or just a possessive streak. On anything even slightly subjective. I know there's good editors, I know it's a majority of them, but the problem is that the bad ones exist and so you can't trust any given page isn't poisoned.
Also, relatedly, the entire backend is an ever-growing morass of petty politics and tangled policies that serve mostly as a barrier to entry. They've been saying admin and power-editor retention is a huge problem for well over a decade, and yet they keep making it worse. At this point, the majority of their admins are from 2005, with only 10% from after 2010, because nobody bothers getting started when the prerequisites to making even a small edit can be learning the wikipedia legal system.
Just follow the sources then. Everything that should be credible is backed by sources, and if you can't believe that source then ignore it , or admit your trust issues.
What is, on a controversial issue, one side is presented with sources, and the other side is not mentioned at all or given just a brief overview?
This often happens on Wikipedia, even when the editors aren't trying to be biased. Suppose there was a dispute between the British Empire and a small tribe in South Africa. The British side of the story will have a lot of sources, most in English. The tribal side will most likely be known only to locals, with maybe some articles in Zulu and one in Dutch. How do you think the Wikipedia article will look?
To be fair, Wikipedia is trying to enact policies to address such biases, but there is still a lot of work to be done.
TIL: memes are a reliable source of information. As opposed to wikipedia