While simple articles are no brainer, Wikipedia has to deal with articles that are at the intersections of different interest groups who both are trying to control the presentation of facts. It is these articles where partisans are rampant and most engaged.
You'll never be able to make everyone happy on those articles at the intersections of different partisans.
Take something as innocuous as calculus. Who discovered it? British say newton did. The germans credit leibniz. What should the editors do? Flip a coin. Credit both? Credit neither since neither discovered the concept of 'the limit'.
It's like this but far worse for many topics.
Everything seems simple because we lived in our own national propaganda ecosystem. But with the internet, wikipedia must try to pick 'truths' out of many 'truths'.
>developed in the late 17th century by Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz independently of each other
But yeah other things are trickier. I follow the covid lab origin stuff and that's a bit of a mess.
My comment already addressed that: '... Credit both? Credit neither since neither discovered the concept of 'the limit'.'
Neither newton nor leibniz discovered what we call calculus. If we are going to credit them for discovering calculus, we might as well credit the ancient greeks who developed similar 'calculus' and from whom both were 'inspired'.
> But yeah other things are trickier.
No. Even the simplest is tricky. As you just proved.
We've started the solution with ScrollSets (https://breckyunits.com/scrollsets.html), which power PLDB.io, among others.
Orders of magnitude smaller than Wikipedia and Mediawiki, but the thing about compounding...