Wikipedia is the best thing ever. Anyone in the world can write anything they want about any subject, so you know you are getting the best possible information.
My statement was that the quality of Wikipedia overall is high, and that one of the reasons for that is because they set and enforce standards for contributions.
Certainly many people are put off by the process and will not have time to deal with it, but my belief would be that such cases are more likely on more controversial topics, and less likely for less controversial topics. Inherently, collaborating on difficult topics will be a difficult process, which also means that there are likely no easy answers for how to make this process not discourage anyone.
Is it clear what they should rather be - and are there any examples of mechanisms that have worked better at a scale like this? How are you judging that they are not what they are supposed to be?
If the resulting body of work, which is the totality of Wikipedia, is able to be a curated and high signal collection of knowledge as a result of these mechanisms, how can it be said that they are not working? Having forcing factors, even if they are not ideally aligned or executed, which pushes contributors to increase the quality of their edits to pass, seems overall like a good thing. I'm not saying that its processes and mechanisms cannot be improved, I'm saying I believe it is incorrect to say that they are not working as a whole.
> "Credible" sources and citations are exclusively up to the article moderators personal tastes which are very rarely objective.
Overall I believe Wikipedia to be curated by a large group of people which coordinate through various rules and consensus mechanisms, where I don't believe it is correct to state that sources and citations are exclusively up to any specific article moderators, as they need to be able to build consensus and co-exist with other moderation.
Exactly because Wikipedia is such a large body of work it seems more resistant to corruption to have a large number of curators with different tastes and motivations. How would you determine that their selection of sources and citations is very rarely objective - especially when objectiveness itself seems quite hard to agree upon for many of the topics covered?
From my perspective it seems far more important to consider the quality and value of the totality of Wikipedia, which is massive and signs that many things are working, rather than insisting that it is not working, especially in times where knowledge is being broadly attacked, and where Wikipedia is one of the targets.
An example though is that several historically relevant facts are edited out to favor some narrative.
E.g. Crimea, the Ukrainian autonomous republic that seceded/was annexed by Russia, tried to split 3 times from Ukraine, once even during the Soviet Union, but those events have been edited out on multiple pages to favor some western-centric narratives.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic_of_Crimea_(1992%E2%80...
That's in 1992, there was another occurrence in the previous decade.
Source: the Wikipedia founder himself..
https://www.dailysignal.com/2025/10/12/wikipedia-co-founder-...
And the real reason that editing Wikipedia is difficult, is because of the ideological bias of the moderators so they support only the editors to conform to their ideology and reject any edits that go against their ideology even if those edit are literal proven truths.
Source: I am an editor on Wikipedia and my own informative useful edits to some important topics on my country have been rejected, while the misinformative and even malicious edits by agents of the enemy nation on those same topics were allowed and continue to persist and mislead whoever reads those articles.
Wikipedia has become a weapon of misinformative propaganda, and it's not a tool or repository of useful accurate information. This is why Wikipedia is banned in schools and universities, because its information may not be credible and Wikipedia has long ago lost the integrity that any worldwide free information repository should have had.
This sounds really interesting, can you provide an example?
Ironically, the supposedly-censored Wikipedia has a lengthy article covering all of it including Sanger's accusations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Sanger
They can turn content disputes into conduct disputes and conduct disputes into social contests which are either shown on ANI or quietly adjudicated with an administrator block.
The content of Wikipedia is great. Its culture, not so much.
What did get reverted was a trivial [citation needed] fix, for a musician's page, for a sentence stating they were involved in scoring a film. I found a relevant citation and this was promptly reverted, for reasons that were explained but, at least for me, utterly incomprehensible
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Contentious_topics#L...
The entire world's knowledge has some controversial topics? Oh my! Burn it! Burn it all!!
The librarians of Alexandria would have killed for Wikipedia. It's easily our greatest digital achievement.
This is a hill on which I would happily fight to my metaphorical death, here and now. If you disagree, let's discuss please.
Wikipedia is so open, that they even have their own "controversial" section! Is that not the coolest thing ever?
The chip on my shoulder is that there is a concerted effort to destroy and discredit Wikipedia.
The accomplishment of Wikipedia is not just beating the Library of Alexandria by many orders of magnitude, but doing so while keeping moderation logs in the open as well.
Ask @dang, or anyone that has ever had anything to do with forum moderation, if they would be cool with their moderation logs being completely open. Almost everyone with experience would say 100% no. They likely tried that and saw how much nutso drama it creates. Wikipedia actually does that, at the largest possible scale!
[0] Of course that exists, apparently it's called Baidu Baike
It takes a certain mentality. That's rare but I think it makes for much better communities on the whole.
However I think most participants, not just moderators, don't like the environment that sort of mentality results in. When anything and everything, including the moderation itself, is up for civilized debate that tends to foster an environment in which it's acceptable to question core parts of people's worldviews. There's little shared doctrine beyond "argue any position you'd like" which most people seem to find intensely uncomfortable.
There is at least one exception to that rule. Users who attract the ArbCom's attention may get a general block. If they ask what they're blocked for, the ArbCom rep will tell them to read their email. These moderation decisions are not public, not even in a form with PII redacted.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Oversight
There are also "office actions", where essentially the Wikimedia Foundation and/or its legal counsel have been required to do something. In most cases, the office actions are visible and logged, unless they've been required to use Oversight as well. But the main thing is that the office actions will generally not be explained to anyone, as it usually stems from some legal threat to Wikipedia.
Currently ROFL, given grokpedia or whatever objectively dumb shit to which we are now exposed. I should not have bitten my tongue. Self-censorship is the worst kind.
"In May 2024, it was announced that Yasuke would be a major character in an upcoming video game (Assassin's Creed Shadows). While onwiki disagreement about Yasuke's status as a samurai predates this announcement, the historical figure's Samurai status became part of a culture war around video games (J2UDY7r00CRjH evidence) that media sources have described as a continuation of or successor to Gamergate, leading to an increase in attention to the article. (Symphony Regalia evidence)"
* There aren't that many real historical accounts about him so people can argue all day about stuff like "Was Yasuke a real samurai?" without clear evidence about who's right.
But in the intervening years, Ubisoft and/or the entire AAA games industry is now seemingly driven by a need to conspicuously showcase diversity and inclusion (from some gamers' viewpoints). You could also view it as the gaming industry trying to broaden its audience and get out of the pigeonhole of catering to the base desires of sweaty manchildren, but either way, it's upsetting a certain type of game consumer.
So, when Ubisoft finally got around to setting Assassin's Creed in Japan, and they picked pretty much the only person around that time period who wasn't Japanese as the main protagonist, seemingly to meet diversity goals, capital-G Gamers went bananas over it, like it was a personal affront to them.
All making sense so far. But then:
Article title capitalization.
Somehow this is peak wikipedia.
* A claim on "Fisting" that "seasoned fisters can insert their arm up to the shoulder into the anus", "supported" by a deleted PornHub video.
* Fighting on a Production Car top ten list when Tesla announced that Ludicrous Mode was coming the next year and "expected" to have certain performance stats, where multiple editors fell over each other to make sure it stayed at the top of the list, even when they eventually had to add a column just for Tesla where every other result had "Actual Results" and the Tesla had "Projected/Expected Results".
* A collation of John Deere tractors that described multiple models as "light years ahead of the competition".
* An article on an Australian drug smuggler where exhibits from court case were being removed as "biased".