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.
It is an encyclopedia. It is not a place for subjective content. Just because you keep getting your opinion edits rolled back does not mean that that's a bad thing. A Wikipedia page SHOULD be filled only with objective facts. Again, it is an encyclopedia.
Also, you can trust that a given page is not poisoned by checking the sources yourself. They're all right there at the bottom. Anything without a citation can be ignored but most things of substance are going to have a citation, because an encyclopedia is a place in which to collect objective facts with sources to back them up.
I didn't say subjective content, I said content about something subjective. Wikipedia contains a wealth of "one proposed explanation for", or "a common theory is" on any event or phenomenon, (of which many are covered). Objective reports of subjective statements. And the choice of which to use, which perspectives to include, is a form of bias. The reporting of which proposed theories for causes of historical events or meanings for literature are included, and which are left out, is a form of bias. One that cannot be seen through simply by "checking the sources". An article written with a slant is going to include sources that agree with its viewpoint and not include sources that do not, and checking the sources is going to show you those viewpoints, and not the ones that were left out.
Also, again, there are absolutely editors who will just wordlessly revert objective, factual edits, with clear, proper citations from accepted primary sources, just because it's their page or it doesn't line up with how they want it to be seen. Checking the sources won't show you that, either.
That might be the misunderstanding. Primary sources are not directly allowed on wikipedia without very careful consideration that no analysis was done. Wikipedia article are, and should be, mostly derived from secondary sources to avoid bias. The Wikipedia page does a pretty good job of describing the guideline:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_research
Alright, you do actually make fair points here that I hadn't taken into consideration. I still stand by my statement but now I see that you aren't really necessarily disagreeing with me. Guess I'm going to have to start checking the edit history as well as the sources now...
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