The trouble with Wikipedia is that it's an inch deep. For any given topic, especially history, there's a trove of information in scholarly books from good publishers, but the corresponding Wikipedia article is like three pages long.
My favorite example of this is the debate between a faction that believes Lithobates is the proper genus of a certain set of frogs, and another faction that believes the correct genus is Rana. The Lithobates side is essentially one person along with his sock and/or meat puppets, so in the end, after many rounds of moderation, most of the species in question are listed under both genuses.
It's not a fair criticism of Wikipedia, but it is a fair criticism of using Wikipedia as a single-source.
With that said I've seen two areas where contributing to wikipedia falls short:
The first is things involving what I'd call editorialization (I'm sure there's some wikipedia term for it). Any article that's about an unsettled or somewhat contentious issue seems to give outsized weight to the non-consensus view. Even if 85% of a field thinks that one thing is more likely than the other the wikipedia article will often split its coverage of the views 50/50 and then maybe tack a sentence on at the end saying that the majority of people in the field favor xyz view.
Contributing to or changing those pages is often a hassle because you have to argue with people and that's generally not worth your time (unless you're of the minority opinion and you want to give legitimacy to your side - in which case you are motivated to argue).
The second are the stub articles. The ones that say "This article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it." Often I could help wikipedia by expanding it but it's so much work to write a full encyclopedia entry. Like it might take me 4 hours to summarize what I know, look up references, etc. It's easier to just not do it.
Where I find contributing useful is when I'm fixing a small factual error, updating based on a recent discovery, fixing a citation, etc.
I'm not sure if they do it but it would be good for Wikipedia to pay someone to go through and fill out the basics of a bunch of pages on a topic so that there's a scaffolding to work with and then the occasional volunteers could come through and add on facts and fix problems.
Yes, but Wikipedia is also frequently conceived and marketed as "the sum of all human knowledge," which that shows is a lie by definition.
By which definition? In math, the sum of a set necessarily implies a loss of information about that set, for sets larger than 1. But they're using "sum" not in the purely mathematical sense, more like "the summary of all human knowledge". But the same principle applies axiomatically, because summaries are lossy compression: you cannot have a summary that contains all the information of the source it is summarizing.
> By which definition?
That's pretty easy: definition 2 "the whole amount : aggregate" (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/sum). That it's interpreted that way is shown by the frequency of people saying stuff like "I loaded Wikipedia onto this battery powered Raspberry Pi in a Pelican case, now I'm ready to rebuild civilization if it collapses," and seemingly believing it.
But you do correctly point to another issue: sum has a meaning of "a summary of the chief points or thoughts," which I feel is a less common usage. So the marketing phrase may not be so much a lie, but rather an extremely misleading statement that invites misinterpretation that usually goes unchallenged. IMHO, those are actually even more pernicious than outright lies.
The least delusional part of this is the sparseness of information contained within Wikipedia. If that scenario came to be, they wouldn't be short on information. They'd be short on time, resources, and skills.
As someone who inched closer into the doomsday prepper scene before swerving far away from it, I assure you that people in that subculture have a lot of unrealistic beliefs about their own capacities and resources. I don't think it's Wikipedia's fault that they (and you) are taking a quote about Wikipedia's never-ending goal and interpreting it as if it is their description of what they are.
An even worse example of deceptive marketing would be a compact folding multitool marketed as "the only tool you'll ever need." Even with that, I'd say that if you actually believe that you can rebuild civilization with that tool solely on the basis of that marketing slogan, then that's your fault as much as it is the marketers.
And a minor nitpick: the standard prepper info archives also include collections of various survival guides and resources that are specifically written for these kinds of purposes.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Prime_objective
You seem to have an issue with some person or persons who has been advising others that the only work they need to consult is Wikipedia. Who are they? Specifically.
A paper encyclopedia might not have time or space for individual entries about many hundreds of pokemon, episodes of the simpsons, or characters from star wars.
Case in point : elder of zions protocol french article contained outdated knowledge (it said we knew who the author was, propagating an old hypothesis that had been debunked in the last 10 years, eventhough the other wikipedia articles were fixed). Historians were heard repeating that same boggus claim on radio. Until i convinced an historian friend of mine to fix the french article, and all of the sudden historians started fixing their speech. Meaning not only did they not update their knowledge from scholarly books, but they needed wikipedia to help them get up to date.
For example, from about 1960-2010, anthropologists universally held a "pots, not people" view of prehistory: they asserted, with great confidence, that styles of pottery and metalworking changed over time due to voluntary exchange of ideas among peaceful, cooperating peoples. These anthropologists asserted that pre-1960 theories that pottery styles changed because population groups violently replaced each other were not only wrong, but immoral and barbaric. To them, it was modernity that made humans violent.
Now due to ancient DNA, we know that the pre-1960s anthropologists were right and the post-1960 consensus was wrong: prehistory was violent and populations violently replaced each other with regularity.
You're more informed reading, say, Gordon Child book from 1920 than a serious book on prehistoric archaeology from 2000.
So it goes in many fields. Imagine how much longer it would take for science's self correction mechanism to operate if our knowledge were encoded solely in a "living" information system aligned with only currently fashionable ideas.
In those areas the fact isn't the base fact, but claims of fact. We don't know who explored which bit of the great pyramid in which order, and may never, but we know of many specific claims.
The fact check wouldn't be "The great pyramid X" but "Herodotus said X about the great pyramid".
> in general, they're not the place to hash out the "right" interpretation of events.
Once you scope the problem correctly it's not a problem. The point isn't to solve historical riddles, it's to document what evidence we have.
Sometimes that evidence is broadly accepted measurements (land area of Australia) and other times it's not.
Of course, you can't really say that distrusting experts is unique to encyclopedias.
An encyclopedia is always the starting point, never the end of serious research. (It's ok however to stick to Wikipedia if a superficial acquaintance with the topic is enough!).
The trouble with Wikipedia is that it's an inch deep.
That's not its biggest problem. Wikipedia is biased.
Of course there's political bias in the American fashion. But that's not all. There is bias about History depending on what country is telling the story. And there is a strong bias even in scientific topics (maybe specially in them) when there are commercial interests involved.
That's not specific to Wikipedia.
But when you research some topic, reading multiple books, you'll notice there are different opinions, you learn to discount bias looking at the procedence. Wikipedia tries to adopt a neutral tone and cite different sources, but sometimes it does a terrible job at it.
A funny example of this is fan death [1]. Comparing English to southeast Asian languages show that Asian languages pages suggest that it's real (at least last few times I translated it).
An, in a bit of relevancy, the Japanese page has been overwritten with "I love you" and "I'm sorry".
Its not a direct translation, its an entirely different encyclopedia and can be far more robust.
(Maybe an LLM could harmonize all the wikipedias across languages)
The amount of disagreement between researchers over time and changing consensus requires an external arbiter of individual facts at the very least.
Add some AI to take the footnotes and get to the sources and train on that.