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After 25 years, Wikipedia has proved that news doesn't need to look like news

giuliomagnifico 192 points niemanlab.org
akst
I think a lot people underestimate how arbitrary some editorial decisions on wikipedia can be. Yeah perfect is the enemy of the good but imperfect is still imperfect. Can’t say I’m a fan of jj mccullough‘s opinions on some stuff but his video on wikipedia is good https://youtu.be/-vmSFO1Zfo8?si=0mS24EVODwLrPJ3T

I don’t feel as strongly as he does but ever since watching I just don’t see much value in starting with Wikipedia when researching something. He also points out how a lot content creators default to referencing it. After realising how much of history or geography YouTube is just regurgitating Wikipedia articles, it kind of ruined those kinds of videos for me, and this was before AI. So now I try spend more time reading books or listening to audiobooks on a topics I’m interested instead.

Like I still use Wikipedia for unserious stuff or checking if a book I was recommended was widely criticised or something but that’s it really.

It’s also just not a good learning resource, like if you ever wanted to study a mathematics topic, wikipedia might be one of the worst resources. Like Wikipedia doesn’t profess to be a learning resource and more a overview resource but even the examples they use sometimes are just kind of unhelpful. Here’s an example on the Fourier Transform https://youtu.be/33y9FMIvcWY?si=ys8BwDu_4qa01jso

palata
I think a lot people underestimate how arbitrary some editorial decisions on wikipedia can be.

I think it is true for all information we consume. One of the very important skills to learn in life is to think critically. Who wrote this? When? What would be their bias?

Text is written by humans (or now sometimes LLMs), and humans are imperfect (and LLMs are worth what they are worth).

Many times Wikipedia is more than enough, sometimes it is not. Nothing is perfect, and it is very important to understand it.

akst
My point was mostly, people just aren’t as aware of issues with it compared to other forms of media. Issues in other forms of media don’t change that or make it less of an issue.

At the end of the day you’re gonna to consume information from somewhere, it’ll have shortcomings but you’re still better off knowing that going in.

On bias’ of authors: I actually think people fixate a bit too much on bias of an author to the point it’s a solely used as a speculative reason to dismiss something asuntrue. If the claims made by the author are consistent with other information and others trusted sources it’s just irrelevant. I feel people online to readily get hung up motivations and it’s sometimes a crotch for a readers inability to engage with ideas they find uncomfortable.

Like if a private company sponsors a study with a finding that aligns with their business interests, that actually doesn’t mean it’s false. It’s false if no one can reproduce their results. I mean you’d definitely want to verify other sources knowing this, but also researches have their own reputation to preserve as well. In reality the truth ends up being more boring than people anticipate.

But obviously it matters when claims can’t be verified or tested but I find online there’s an overemphasis of this online.

palata
Critical thinking does not mean that you dismiss the information. It just means that you take the potential bias into account.

The media are often pretty bad at doing this: they will often make some kind of average on what is being said, like "the scientific consensus says that cigarettes are killing you, but a study sponsored by Philip Morris says that they are not, so... well we don't know". Where actually it should be pretty obvious that Philip Morris is extremely biased on that, and the scientific consensus is not.

Not every voice is worth the same. During covid, there was a tendency to relay all kinds of opinions, without making the difference between actual experts and non-experts. Sometimes even saying "this person is a doctor, so they know", which is wrong: being a doctor doesn't make you an expert on coronaviruses or epidemiology.

Whenever we get information, we should think about how much trust we can put into it, how biased the authors maybe (consciously or not), etc. Elon Musk saying that going to Mars can help humanity is not worth much. Because he is rich and successful does not make him right. Yet many people relay "Musk predicts that [...]", as some kind of truth.

akst
I guess I had public discourse in mind when I was saying people to readily invoke claims of bias. Also alternative media which tends to be on the other extreme of being overly cynical.

If PM appeared on the news obviously no one would believe them.

That said in Australia we in the last few years we’ve increased the cigarette tax, smoking hasn’t really decreased, but treasury has reported decreased revenue. It clearly looks like the tax has been increased too high if sellers are illegally selling untaxed cigarettes.

It would be very dumb of a cigarette company like PM to come out and point this out (as it would just be a springboard for proponents of the tax to play attack others pointing it out the issue atm), but if they did, it wouldn’t mean it’s not happening. Even if they have a bias it would be irrelevant.

Speculation around bias is just treated too much of smoking gun, and claims of it are more often motivated reasoning not critical thinking.

dijit
I couldn't agree more with this.

Small typo though: I believe you meant "crutch" not "crotch" in:

feel people online to readily get hung up motivations and it’s sometimes a crotch for a readers inability to engage with ideas they find uncomfortable.
kelnos
people just aren’t as aware of issues with it compared to other forms of media.

Really? I'd think it would be the opposite. Wikipedia has always been decried by academics (and primary school teachers) as "not a real encyclopedia", without giving anywhere near as much of a critical eye toward other sources of information.

Sure, I think Wikipedia's reputation and public image has gotten better over the years, but that stigma of it being created and written by "unprofessional anonymous people" is still there to some extent.

And regardless, the kind of person who is going to watch Fox News or CNN without applying any critical thought to what they hear there... well, probably is going to do the same for Wikipedia pages, or any other source of information.

akst
I think academics are too critical for a source of general surface level knowledge. But it’s no substitute for primary sources

I don’t think the problem is anyone can jump on and edit Wikipedia, they have process, but it’s the processes, informal institution’s, where the issues I’m referring arise. The average person hears there a process and assume this means it’s legitimate and flawless and are over confident in its quality.

It’s a great resource but I tin it’s helpful to be realistic about its limitations.

wasabi991011
One issue with Wikipedia is that the "who when what bias" can change drastically between articles or fields, making it hard to actually answer.

For traditional news media, editorial boards and author bias are much more consistent over time and across articles.

alkonaut
Also, I think for 99% of Wikipedia, there isn't much need to worry about Biases. It's about an uncontroversial chemical compound, a tiny village, a family of bacteria and so on. Knowledge isn't all subjective and prone to bias.
graemep
Reading (the right) books is definitely the best way to learn about a topic, but its not great for quickly looking up random stuff. Books can spread misinformation too, from Malleus Maleficarum to Erich von Däniken.

It is useful for quickly looking up simple facts, and provides a list of sources.

The video makes some interesting criticisms. The lack of diversity is not surprising. Dominated by white, male, American's with time on their hands! how would have thought that? Its very obviously American dominated (at least the English version).

loloquwowndueo
Spanish Wikipedia is dominated by folks from Spain, despite Spain being a minority of Spanish speakers.
nephihaha
The Scottish Gaelic Wikipedia is dominated by a German. As was the Greenlandic one before he decided to dismantle it.
kiba
I once partly cross verify a virologist's lecture. He confused a brother of an important scientist who made an important discovery. I have no doubt that he knows what he's talking about when it comes to viruses.

All in all, checking other sources to see if they lines up is a pain and labor intensive, never mind actually checking to see if the references are actually sound evidence.

preommr
I think people underestimate how arbitrary editorial decisions are for any media.

Things like PBS and Wikipedia might have biases, but idk if it's realistic to expect better.

nephihaha
I very rarely watch PBS (I don't live stateside), but it is extremely biased. I lasted one and a half documentaries on the free trial.

I've seen plenty of their other content elsewhere. Maybe it doesn't resonate with non-Americans.

Larrikin
Can you provide concrete examples? Like what was the documentary about and why did you feel it was biased?
fellowniusmonk
It's funny how the more accurate a source gets the more it draws in people desiring accuracy.

Then this rather small cohort of high precision people express frustrations without providing the context of accuracy against the masses preferred methods (TikTok, cable news, broadcast, truth social)

So now the water is muddled and people and Ais are mistrained because an "absolute scale" is not used when discussing accuracy.

akst
Idk if this how it came off but just tbc my point also wasn’t indirectly promoting traditional media.

I think a lot if ppl are rightly sceptical of traditional media, but I feel I see more people giving Wikipedia a pass or placing it on a higher pedestal as a resource than it should be at times.

Admittedly I think I would prefer Wikipedia to traditional media in most cases. Although that wasn’t really what I was getting at

nialv7
jj mccullough‘s opinions

holy heck there is so much wrong about this video. i can't believe "internet influencers" can just turn on their cameras and spew so much untruth without a care in the world...

comparatively wikipedia is imperfect, but much better than this kind of slop.

akst
Feel free to actually articulate the actual issues you’re referring to.

It’s been a while since I watched it but the thing I remember taking away was you can do a lot better than Wikipedia, and he encouraged people to spend more time looking at primary sources for deeper research, and points out how it’s the basis of a lot of slop on YouTube.

ericjmorey
Seems like he's recommending secondary sources over Wikipedia as a tertiary source.
akst
That’s probably more correct actually, I guess primary source would be talking to witnesses or the subjects themselves.
antisthenes
This just reads like out-of-touch elitism, sorry.

Most people don't even have the reading level for full comprehension of a wiki article, let alone being able to discern the nuance of some aspects of the topic.

Yeah perfect is the enemy of the good but imperfect is still imperfect.

This assumes perfection is attainable. I'd like to see your idea of a "perfect" book or article on some topic.

akst
I think you’re assuming I’m calling for perfection and suggesting people abstain from something less than perfect, we live in reality most things aren’t perfect.

Even if Wikipedia was the least worse resource people would still do themselves a disservice in ignoring issues with it. Acknowledging issues isn’t the same as dismissing it entirely.

How is this elitist? These other resources are more accessible than ever, no gate keepers are keeping anyone from looking at them. I’m also not making any judgments about anyone who uses Wikipedia either.

tim333
JJ McCullough‘s gripe seems to be that wikipedia is kind of a mediocre summary of the information on a topic. But I'm not sure you should expect much more. You can always go to individual sources if you want that.
akst
I think that’s fair. Though I think the sources sometimes also aren’t at great times.
burnt-resistor
I've seen proudly uneducated people with no understanding take sledgehammers to history and real knowledge, and so I have no illusions about how Wikipedia is horrible, unfair, unprofessional, mercurial, and vulnerable to manipulation.

I would've gladly paid more in taxes to make Encyclopædia Britannica an international non-profit public service delivered in web form to all so long as each area were managed and curated with subject matter expert input.

kelnos
I think a lot people underestimate how arbitrary some editorial decisions on wikipedia can be.

You can say that about Encyclopedia Brittanica or any of the old-school encyclopedias too. You can say that about the news desks at ABC, CBS, CNN, etc. You can say that about the New York Times, Washington Post, Guardian, etc.

I don't think people tend to blindly trust Wikipedia any more than they do for other sources of information. YouTube is full of garbage Wikipedia-regurgitating articles because Wikipedia is an easy, centralized source to scrape, not because of any level of trust they put in it.

I find this type of snap negative reaction boring, tiring, and unhelpful. It's disappointing that they often end up as top comments here. (Human psychology at work.)

My take: I expect that Wikipedia is more unbiased and a better reflection of reality then most -- maybe even all -- other sources of information on the Internet. On average! There are certainly crap articles, just like anywhere else.

pibaker
If you look at the news in a democratic country vs an authoritarian one, you may easily walk away with the impression that the former is in a state of perpetual chaos, because of all the scandals, protests, resignations and snap elections. The authoritarian country will look like a paragon of stability in contrast. New infrastructure projects, record economic growth, seditious officials swiftly trialed and imprisoned. There is barely any conflict and the ones that do exist get solved quickly.

But unless you are a total mark, you should know that the stability is just a facade. That infrastructure project only went through because locals who opposed got beaten up by the cops, the economics data was cooked up by statisticians who fear the consequence of telling the truth and the seditious officials are only at the receiving end of justice because they lost the power struggle within the party. But of course you don’t know any of that, because why would the state let you?

Wikipedia, like democracies, run on transparency. This is why you get to read the editing history and talk page of any Wikipedia page and walk away with the impression that Wikipedia is uniquely full of drama. You never feel the same about the New York Times or the BBC because they run more like autocracies and keep everything inside. If we get a chance to read the internal emails of establishment media we will walk away with a very different impression.

akst
I’ve said to a few other replies, but tbc I wasn’t promoting other mediums as alternatives.

I don't think people tend to blindly trust Wikipedia any more than they do for other sources of information

I actually disagree or at least I think the extent to which people do is higher than it warrants. Especially to the degree people invoke it’s contents online

I find this type of snap negative reaction boring, tiring, and unhelpful.

I didn’t ask for this to be the top comment, nor did I make you read it. I also don’t think it’s useless, just less useful than its proponents claim it is. And I think people do themselves a disservice in not looking beyond it when looking into a topic

imachine1980_
I disagree, I know the opinion of WSJ, WP, FT or national like france24,DW, BBC, RT,AJ Or at least know is always opinion Base, the facts are selected in a subjecive way.

Is way harder to know how opinionated Wikipedia is, and everything make them sound like their opinion is only base on facts but isn't.

brap
Wikipedia has long been hijacked to serve agendas. The “truth” is whatever the highest bidder wants it to be.

Most recently hijacked by the Qatar dictatorship: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jan/16/pr-firm-p...

News, influencers, Wikipedia, almost all information we consume nowadays is intentional. And not even getting into billions poured into American colleges by the same people.

dataviz1000
When I was working in the heart of conservative online media in West Palm Beach—nestled between Rush Limbaugh’s studio, Mar-a-Lago, and Newsmax—targeting Evangelical Christians in the Bible Belt, my salary (and the direction things eventually went) was being paid for by the Saudis. At the time, the propaganda was mostly “pro-oil” and “climate change is a hoax.” Around that same period, those same Saudis bought a 10% stake in Fox News and helped shape the narrative for millions of Christians who tune in and treat it like their main source of news.

So yeah, if you were ever curious where the profits go every time you fill up your car with gas… there.

I thought I was just building media websites. I didn’t even see the content until after six months. I put in my one month notice, finished what I was working on, and left. The amount of money they offered me to stay was ridiculous. I don’t blame people at Fox News for bending the knee and taking that Saudi money -- I just couldn’t make myself do it.

“Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.” A lot of people are going to spend eternity in hell for propaganda and lies.

somenameforme
Saudis are invested in a huge range of things in America. It has historical roots in the petrodollar. The basic deal of it that that they would only sell their oil in USD, which gave the USD a de facto backing after we defaulted in Bretton Woods (which was a de jure gold backing). That gave the USD a huge chunk of stability and in exchange we agreed to sell them weapons and broadly support them, while in exchange they were also asked to purchase US treasuries and assets with surplus revenues.

Over time this led to Saudis being involved in just about everything. For instance the biggest owner of 'old Twitter' under Dorsey was Alwaleed bin Talal Al Saud. Needless to say the zeitgeist on old Twitter and Saudi Arabia have basically nothing in common, so you're probably seeing ideological motivation where the real motivation is generally just monetary. Not every country is conspiring to subvert other countries to their ideology.

Basically Saudia Arabia is filthy rich because of oil, but they fully understand that even if we continue burning oil until we run out, we will run out, within the lifetime of some people living today. So they have to migrate their economy away from oil and, on the timeline for such a revolutionary shift, they have very little time left. This is likely what MBS sees as what will define his legacy.

dataviz1000
Saudis controlled media by assassinating of Jamal Khashoggi. Yes, that is proof the Saudis kill to control media.
cujo
I don’t blame people at Fox News for bending the knee and taking that Saudi money

i do, and i judge people who take money to push harmful things. i don't see why this is bad.

dataviz1000
Because I believe in understanding, forgiveness, and redemption.

I have a responsibility not to lie and kill, as commanded in the Bible. I also have a responsibility to tell people not to lie and kill, as commanded in the Bible.

At the same time, our understanding of the science of the mind, as described by Carol Dweck in "Mindset", is that people are not fixed and can change. That is why understanding, forgiveness, and redemption matter. They are essential for helping other people through the process of repentance -- the changing of a mindset.

komali2
Can you not understand, forgive, and believe in redemption, but also judge?

I understand why you took oil money from the royal family famous for murdering journalists; money is nice to have. However, I judge you for it and will not associate with you until you redeem yourself through seeking forgiveness and changing your behavior.
dataviz1000
I was introduced to Maslow's hierarchy of needs 25 years ago around the same time I read about Pavlov's dogs.

The need to belong is extraordinarily motivating. It became obvious that the cults leveraged the need in the individual to belong to a group by accepting the person without judgement first rather than attacking the person they are trying bring into their group pushing them away.

The leaders who understand that are winning.

komali2
I get told this a lot by liberals, that it's wrong that I shouted in a cop's face that he's a fascist pig and a traitor to the people, now he'll never support my cause, but I'm not really sure I agree. The cop, and the nazis he's protecting from me, will never join "my group" in ten million years, no matter how nice I am to them. Do you believe otherwise?
dataviz1000
Yeah I get what you mean, but it’s not really about converting the cop into “your group.”

It’s about what your actions do to everyone watching, and what it does to you.

Plato makes the point that you don’t make a dog better by beating it. You just make it worse. Same with people. You’re not persuading, you’re escalating.

If the goal is change, you don’t have to be nice, but you do have to be effective!

komali2
Well, let's explore the topic then, because for example aforementioned cults will use protest or other uncomfortable situations to solidify indoctrination. See: Mormons and Jehovah's witnesses sending people door to door to proselytize knowing full well the majority of people will be annoyed by this, which will Other the proselytizers and make them feel like the church members are the only people who they're safe around. Or the "God Hates F*s" Church doing their protests. Taken to the extreme: the Cultural Revolution's struggle sessions, designed explicitly to make as many people as possible feel that they were culpable alongside the Party. So, maybe not great for the opponents or the observers, but very good at solidifying the base itself.

Personally I'm not interested in running a cult, but I'm very interested in anything that empowers people.

In the case of an anti ICE protest where we shout mean things at the gestapo, a couple side effects include the empowerment of participants and locals. See for example how the dynamic shifts for the woman sheltering a door dash driver from ICE once more neighbors start showing up: https://www.reddit.com/r/minnesota/comments/1q8vvwa/st_paul_...

In the case of the various anti Nazi protests I've been to (proud boy rallies) it's also been good for generating images of just how many people are in opposition to racists.

It's not necessarily always about persuading, sometimes it's more about, well I suppose "circling the wagons?" Solidifying community support, demonstrating capabilities, empowering people and communities, and disempowering, defanging, or scaring racists and fascists. Finally, it's great for recruitment: fed up liberals turn up to their first protest, get one hell of an adrenaline rush screaming at cops and running away from tear gas, and then may later ask the person pouring milk onto their face how they can help outside of protesting. In that sense the cop's escalations, while barbaric and inexcusable, are the unconvincing escalation you mentioned that in fact helps us.

But for you then, I'm not sure your opinions on ICE as gestapo but perhaps humor my position on their danger, how would you instruct anti-fascists to operate in the USA right now in the face of ICE raids? The original idea is, what, applying Christian values? Jesus threw out the merchants and moneychangers, did he not? For certain people, he decided he wasn't in the business of forgiveness.

amanaplanacanal
If they don't repent, does this still work?
hgomersall
What level of moral compromise is acceptable in this world to take whatever money is offered? Presumably the job of hitman is unacceptable? Where's the line drawn?

Personally I'd say that lying to perpetuate a system that is leading to various populous parts of the world becoming uninhabitable is on the wrong side of that line.

cujo
unquestionably. i'm not sure when we all decided to be hush-hush about people doing ethically dubious work.

i'm allowed to judge you based on who you take money from.

rsanek
Looks like Prince Alwaleed bin Talal's ownership of Fox was between 5.5% to 7% during the two-decade period of 1997 ~ 2017. He divested during an anti-corruption purge.
pavlov
They hate Muslims, but they love money and theocracy more, and Saudis are top of the world in both.
gsky
No wonder Terrorism is supported by oil money.
falcor84
There are agendas there, just like in every human endeavor, but it definitely hasn't been "hijacked", it's still by far the best single repository of human knowledge out there. If I had to choose one website to take with me to a desert island, it's an obvious choice.

We should keep talking about the issues and improving things, but don't throw out the baby with bathwater.

plastic-enjoyer
We should keep talking about the issues and improving things, but don't throw out the baby with bathwater.

Yeah, I wonder what solution people propose that claim that Wikipedia is 'hijacked' or 'compromised' and pushing agendas? While Wikipedia is not perfect, it is the best encyclopedia we currently have, mostly due to collective efforts and maintainers that care about the state of Wikipedia. I would even say that it is a good thing that there is this transparency, that states and capital are trying to influence Wikipedia because then you know that you may take some articles with a grain of salt or can actively push against it. Every alternative to Wikipedia that I have seen so far is one that claims to be more truthful than the original, but in the end these are platforms that push agendas without the transparency and attempt to further obscure power relations under the pretext of truth.

Every alternative to Wikipedia will have to solve the problems that Wikipedia already has to be a better alternative. However, I do think these are fundamental unsolvable problems and everyone who claims to have solved this is part of a power struggle over who defines what is considered true.

whatox
More transparency around the admins and the hierarchy above it would be a good start, as would some kind of countervailing pressure to the ballooning of meta rules (bylaws). For instance:

- Oppose the "Super Mario" effect: if admins do something ordinary users would get banned for, they get banned too, they don't just lose their admin title.

- Implement restrictions on Arb Com to make it worthy of its "supreme court" moniker. Provide prior notice, allow representation, access to evidence ahead of the case, and require the Arb Com to disclose the logic of any automated scripts they use for mass judging (e.g. counting proportion of edits being reverts, or that counts every change to a reference as "reference vandalism"). Grant defendants the ability to force the Committee's judgment to be disclosed to the public, with PII redacted if necessary.

- Require that precedent be recorded for unclear meta rules: what counts as a violation of e.g. canvassing? When do reversions become evidence or proof of "ownership"?

- Create an independent appeals body for Arb Com decisions. Like the Arb Com itself, the logic or source code for any scripts they use to aid their decisions, should be public. Ideally, choose the independent appeals body by different means than the Arb Com itself is chosen, e.g. by random selection of users with a certain activity level, independent of the ordinary admin track.

- Grant all users the right to be forgotten (courtesy vanishing), not just users in good standing, so that users bullied off the platform can remove their proverbial stockade.

- Create a mechanism that forces rules to be refactored or reduced in scope. Just spitballing, one possible way might be to limit the growth of any given WP: page per unit time, require negative growth for some of them, or in some way reward editors who reduce their extent.

There may be fundamental unsolvable problems, but that doesn't mean the current system can't be improved.

flir
Every discussion about wikipedia, everywhere, now attracts comments from accounts with a poor history claiming it's biased. I assume bad faith.
philistine
It is a great example of the shaping of opinions the OP claims Wikipedia suffers from. It is a textbook example of the way the detractors of Wikipedia comport themselves.

Accuse the site of of exactly what you’re doing at this exact moment.

brap
Do I have poor history?
flir
Probably no worse than mine. But you've got to admit, it's a heuristic that saves time.
b65e8bee43c2ed0
it absolutely has been. like every online community, Wikipedia is extremely vulnerable to the terminally online and/or the mentally ill, to whom everything is political. like clockwork, every remotely political article cites opinions only from a certain perspective, often quoting glorified nobodies to assert the narrative the '''editors''' want to present. dissenting opinions, no matter how overwhelmingly common among the real people, are mentioned in passing at best and often derisively.
philistine
mentally ill

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. That Wikipedia has been co-opted by mentally ill people is an extraordinary claim. You should provide more than feelings.

nephihaha
Wikipedia's model does favour autistic* people and those with a lot of time on their hands. You can see this in the sheer volume of some contributions, their focuses and the invention of obscure rules and Wikipedia specific jargon e.g. peacock terms etc.

* ASD is not a mental illness but it can produce quirky and obsessive behaviour.

tim333
I went to Wikimania in London and the community who turned up were pretty middle of the road types. Mostly retired males doing after it they'd finished with their prior job in a variety of fields.
dataflow
Links to examples would go a long way.
breppp
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/epdf/10.1080/25785648.2023.2...

For example, this article goes over disinformation by polish nationalists on Holocaust related articles. There's a chart with 10 editors accounting for 50% of the edits and another chart that shows disproportionately citing authors that in reality are not academically are under-cited

pydry
I think for anything controversial we need a completely different model.

Officially wikipedia is NPOV but an especially contentious and murky political mudfight decides what counts as a "citeable" source and what doesnt and what counts as notable and what doesnt.

It also has an incredibly strong western bias.

Every government, corporation and billionaire pays somebody to participate in that fight as well, using every dirty trick they can.

Until we have a model that can sidestep these politics (which Wikipedia seemingly has no real desire to do) and aggregate sources objectively I think it will continue to suck.

falcor84
I agree with the issues, but it definitely doesn't suck if compared to every single other massive endeavor out there. As I see it, it's like that quote about democracy - it's the worst way to attempt to catalogue human knowledge, except for all those other forms that have been tried.

It also has an incredibly strong western bias.

What's the issue with that? Why shouldn't English Wikipedia have a strong Western bias? I've explored and participated in several other Wikipedias and other collaborative projects, and each is biased towards the worldviews common to the culture that its main editors come from. I don't think there's a way to have an encyclopedic project without any cultural bias at all (if such a platonic ideal could even be properly defined), and seeing how Western values include a significant focus on pluralism, freedom of expression and scientific inquiry, I think this situation is much better than the alternatives.

pydry
I agree with the issues, but it definitely doesn't suck if compared to every single other massive endeavor out there.

Compared to what? I dont really see much aggregation being done at all on Wikipedia's scale.

What's the issue with that?

It's supposed to be impartial and objective and it sells itself as such but if you see how the sausage is made it is patently the exact opposite.

I don't think there's a way to have an encyclopedic project without any cultural bias at all

I think it's perfectly possible to have an encyclopedia which is more liberal about allowing more sources to be used and which provides tools and metadata about those sources and gives tools to the user allowing them to filter accordingly.

Whereas "Blessing" one group of sources and condemning another will inevitably turn it into a propaganda outlet for whomever controls it. You might think that this is the only way but that represents more of a failure of imagination than a lack of options.

nephihaha
The way some billionaires are described on Wikipedia you'd think they were saints. Even though most of their philanthropy is a tax write-off and goal-orientated (producing good publicity for them or pushing society in a direction they want).
slfreference
But by claiming one thing and doing the exact opposite (on a statistical quantitative basis), Wikipedia and all other western outlets have become just a front for propaganda which is also the reason why I don't believe in "Persecution of Uyghurs in China"

German Scholars Reveal Shocking TRUTH About China’s Xinjiang Province

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Fp-MZsRhKM

maxglute
Also let's not forget "Persecution of Uyghurs in China" use to be titled "Uyghur Genocide" or some variation thereof for years. Never mind plurality of UN countries has recognized PRC actions in XJ as counter extremist/terrorists, or even among western bloc most countries did not label it as "genocide", bu somehow wiki and captured editors went with the genocide framing, aka, fucking we lie, we cheat, we steal Mike Pompeo serving as secretary of state for US geopolitical interest designation during sino-us coldwar. Because Wiki NPOV isn't based on reality but "reliable sources" which just happen to be western aligned that parrot each other to manufacture consensus / propaganda. Even "persecution of Uyghurs" still biased considering plurality of world still considers PRC actions in XJ as de-deradicalization / counterterrorism, and the numbers have only swung more in PRC favour over time - geopolitical reality is "Chinese War on Terrorism" whose causalities paled in comparison to wiki's "(Global) War on Terrorism" that would otherwise be characterized as "genocide/persecution of Iraqis/Afghans" which killed and displaced millions. Wonder if Obama would have gotten a Nobel Peace prize if that article title existed.
tim333
That video's main gripe seems to be that western media gloss over things being kicked off by islamic terrorists but from the Wikipedia:

...Uyghur terrorists killed dozens of Han Chinese in coordinated attacks from 2009 to 2016. These included the September 2009 Xinjiang unrest, the 2011 Hotan attack, the 2014 Kunming attack, the April 2014 Ürümqi attack, and the May 2014 Ürümqi attack. The attacks were conducted by Uyghur separatists, with some orchestrated by the Turkistan Islamic Party (a UN-designated terrorist organization)...
nephihaha
The Scottish Gaelic Wikipedia was very much hijacked. As was the Lowland Scots one, except in the second case the individual made the news. The Gaelic one has a German guy running it who has several vanity articles and has chased most other users off apart from some government employees.
komali2
If you can download the Talk pages and edit history, you probably have enough information to, on average, mostly be dealing with objective fact.
alex1138
You need only to look at how many actual well credentialed doctors get their Wiki pages smeared with words like "misinformation spreader" for dissenting against covid narratives
jahnu
Can you provide an example?
brigandish
You can simply do a Wikipedia search for "misinformation doctor" and get plenty of results, even with its search system, let alone if you use a search engine to power the search.

I would think that posting any particular person would descend in to a pointless argument over whether those claims are merited. Do you have some better reason to want a particular name?

qudade
If there is misinformation on Wikipedia it can be corrected. Unless you are claiming that all hits for "misinformation doctor" are incorrect, a few examples to verify and correct would be helpful.
hagbard_c
Some 'misinformation' is hard to correct because the corrections are reversed by those who are intent on spreading the 'misinformation'. This is especially prevalent around contentious and/or politically sensitive subjects like the mentioned SARS2-related cases. This is what makes it hard to trust articles on such subjects on Wikipedia.
komali2
If this is quite widespread, it should be fairly straightforward to point to an example of a page that's being defaced with misinformation, which would include an edit history and perhaps a Talk page documenting whatever sides to the debate there is that's preventing consensus.

I don't disagree that weird bullshit occasionally happens on Wikipedia, but I have noticed that as soon as light is cast on it, it usually evaporates and a return to factual normality is established.

brigandish
My go-to example is the "Constitution" of Medina[1]

It is widely considered to be one of the first written constitutions of mankind.

Now go to the page on constitutions in history[2] and see how far down the list that one is.

Now go back to the Constitution of Medina (itself an example of misinformation, since it should be charter or even more precisely, treaty, but those protecting the page have meddled with the title too) and look at the reference it uses[3] and what it says to get a feel for the kind of "reference" that is being used there, and then try and update said Wikipedia page by removing the parts about its being the first.

The talk pages of both show that invested groups have been trying to force their views, and they've done it quite successfully.

Let us all know how you get on with that, and then I'll point you to the next example, and the next example…

Some other notable things to check are co-founder Larry Sanger's 9 theses[4], and the news that broke yesterday about a PR firm doing "Wikilaundering"[5].

That's just the tip of the iceberg.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_Medina

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution#History_and_devel...

[3] https://journalijcar.org/issues/first-written-constitution-w...

[4] https://larrysanger.org/nine-theses/#1-end-decision-making-b...

[5] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jan/16/pr-firm-p...

breppp
worse yet, you might read some topics and won't expect them to be poisoned with misinformation. Like the Holocaust history in Poland

https://digitalcommons.chapman.edu/history_news_articles/151... https://slate.com/technology/2023/04/how-wikipedia-covers-th...

brigandish
I can point you to several pages that are protected by groups of interested admins that will make changing even blatantly obvious misinformation impossible, let alone contentious stuff.

Have you ever tried changing something on Wikipedia regarding politics (which now includes several health issues) or religion?

Edit: also, I did write "I would think that posting any particular person would descend in to a pointless argument over whether those claims are merited." and yet you're suggesting I get into that argument. I quite clearly don't want to because it's pointless, and we had years of it anyway.

nephihaha
If there is misinformation on Wikipedia it can be corrected.

It depends on its nature.

whynotmaybe
Dr Raoult was very vocal in France about hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for covid 19. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Didier_Raoult

It seems today that he was just wrong and used to make "dubious" clinical trials.

As of 2025, 46 of Raoult's research publications have been retracted, and at least another 218 of his publications have received an expression of concern from their publishers, due to questions related to ethics approval for his studies.
agumonkey
Raoult's case is so strange.. he's not the usual fringe doctor, up until covid, he had a center seat in national health institution and everybody around him was listening. I still don't get why nobody was wary of him there..
thrance
In this case, he was actually spreading misinformation. Anyone with two braincells could see it at the time.
whynotmaybe
Anyone with two braincells could see it at the time. It seems a captain obvious now but it wasn't so at the time. (Or maybe my.braincells.count() < 2)

Many people listened because he wasn't some youtuber doing his research, he was the head of the "Infectious and Tropical Emergent Diseases Research Unit" ad the Faculty of Medicine of Marseille.

I've watched one of his interviews where he stated that people survived in his unit with hydroxychloroquine and that he had numbers to prove it.

When you look at his credentials, and my.braincells.count(), it was hard to identify it as misinformation.

thrance
I definitely exaggerated with my "two braincells". Even the french president said about the guy "we need more people like him" (although I wouldn't say he's that smart himself...).

But even without being knowledgeable about statistics, there were a lot of very serious people giving very good arguments against his results. You just had to see them. And seeing all the Facebook doctors lunatics instantly side with Raoult and defend him tooth and nail should definitely raise some red flags...

sigmoid10
They probably mean people like Robert Malone[1], who - despite being well accomplished in a related field - spread verifiably wrong information about vaccines on social media during the pandemic. There are many people like him who showed past accomplishments in a related field, but were totally out of their depth when interviewed about covid on the Joe Rogan podcast or similar.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_W._Malone

nephihaha
Yet in officialdom, that kind of thing was perfectly acceptable. In Scotland we had a dentist running Covid lockdown, which is ironic since public dental services were decimated by it and never recovered.
agumonkey
it's one crucial topic imo

internet altered the way society communicates and why, a lot of discussions now end up by "show me your sources" aka "what is the truth" and it's often centralized into some accepted source like wikipedia

where there simple single point of 'truth' like that before ?

my 2cents is that humans are not meant to live in one global absolute truth and we all lived in relative fuzzy reality before, it was slow and imperfect but not as easy to tamper with

whynotmaybe
Not so long ago, the "truth" was mainly given by the priest or the mayor.
ajsnigrutin
And now it's given by the mainstream media, which is mostly owned by a few very rich people and pushes the same type of propaganda as before (but now globally).
amanaplanacanal
There was a point where I would agree with that, but we seem to be moving past that. The "truth" seems to be coming more from social media influencers than mainstream media now.

It's kind of a shit show.

nephihaha
For priest or the mayor read "trusted or official sources" nowadays. I believe that is the current euphemism.
graemep
Showing sources is not a bad thing. The harm is not questioning sources. A lot of people rely on poor sources. Whatever what the first result in Google historically, and now LLM summaries.
agumonkey
maybe my viewpoint is weird but i think this distorted human interactions on multiple domains.

of course we all wanted to communicate faithful information, but now any discussion turns into a religious difference, and the escape is of course "who has the truest source". people don't necessarily understand the content, they just defer the validity to an official third party, so basically we're back to zero.. but we're all debating everything now.

and it makes me think that locally, we chatting, was never meant to exchange rigorous information, but mostly to share opinions lightly, more emotional than rigorous and scientific

pydry
We still live in that fuzzy reality. Not much has changed.

It doesnt really matter if the whole world has access to the same information if the whole world trusts completely different sources.

For better or worse we trust those sources exclusively because of tribal affinity.

I doubt many people in the US could be persuaded to trust Global Times over the New York Times even if you could prove it had a better prediction track record. Wrong tribe.

komali2
And not even getting into billions poured into American colleges by the same people.

What does this mean?

curtisblaine
Colleges are political, and donations are made to assure they keep on being political.
komali2
Colleges are political, and donations are made to assure they keep on being political.

Ok, to clarify:

> And not even getting into billions poured into American colleges by the same people.

Which American colleges, by what people, and what does "being political" mean? Maybe I'm very ignorant of the USA, are these just known things to Americans?

mch82
I’m continually impressed by Wikipedia’s quality controls. In my experience people underestimate them.
nephihaha
I don't underestimate them, I just don't think they are good. I've been on Wikipedia for at least twenty years.
jaccola
In the UK I would say most people are proud of the BBC^; many people I speak to are smug when comparing it to e.g. Fox News, CNBC, etc... I think this is a big mistake, and that the USA system is actually better.

It's impossible for one news source to be unbiased, and the delusion that it is unbiased is dangerous. If you truly believe a source is "the truth" and unbiased it allows you to switch off any critical thinking; the information bypasses any protections you have.

Much better to have many news sources where the bias is evident and the individual has to synthesise an opinion themselves (not claiming this is perfect by any means, but a perfect system does not exist).

It is obviously the case that Wikipedia is biased, and I think competition is a great thing. We would be better served by a market of options to use our own faculties than a false sense of comfort in a fake truth.

^though many are refusing to pay the (almost) legally mandatory "tv-license".

graemep
I agree we need multiple news sources, but the UK has multiple news sources. What the BBC adds is one with a different funding model so different biases. I do not think this works as well as it did historically.

As for unwillingness to pay the license fee, the biggest issue is the rise of streaming alternatives. It reduced the BBC from providing about half of available TV to being one among many providers so the license fee no longer feels like good value for money.

Its not mandatory. I have never owned a TV. If you do not watch broadcast TV or Iplayer you do not have to have a TV license.

I also think Capita's aggressive scare tactics in trying to get people to pay the license fee have created a lot of hostility towards the BBC.

reorder9695
I think a significant part of the pushback against the TV license is that it pays for the BBC, I believe many people are of the opinion that they'd be perfectly happy not having the BBC and not paying the licence fee. A significant portion of the people paying for the BBC have never watched anything on it.
have_faith
No one who regularly watches biased news sources does so while acknowledging the constant bias. And I don’t think most people think the BBC is unbiased, it’s constantly attacked as having bias to both sides of the aisle ironically. The BBC is far from perfect but it’s in a different league to Fox News to the point that it feels disingenuous to suggest you’d be better off watching Fox News while telling yourself that you’re filtering out the bias.
psychoslave
Some people seems to confuse, willingly or not, unbiased with targeting neutral point of view, free of any perspective.

We can step back from a debate and reports who's saying what, but this is still reporting ongoing debate. And still involving attention within its considerations, which do change our mental process as much as performative effects can go. That's as opposed to remain completely unaware the debate could be even be considered.

no one is going out of ontological constraints and brings absolute truth from transexistential considerations.

nephihaha
I am not proud of the BBC at all. I have boycotted their licence fee for almost as long as Wikipedia has been around.

If you want to know who the UK is going to war with next, watch the BBC.

Their news is horrendously biased when it comes to the British royal family. They have an institutional bias against Scottish independence since it would cut 10% of their licence fee. (Their provision to areas outside the Home Countries is a disgrace and patronising.)

gsky
BBC has very little credibility in the developing world
larodi
after 25 years wikipedia showed what it truly was created for, by selling the content for training. otherwise - okay, this was a cool project, perhaps we need better. like federated, crypto-signed articles that once collected together, @atproto style, produce the article with notable changes to it.
RestartKernel
Their enterprise offering is more for fresh retrieval than training. For training, you can just download the free database dump — one you would inadvertently end up recreating if you were to use their enterprise APIs in a (pre-)training pipeline.
armchairhacker
Context: https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/01/wikipedia-will-share-cont...

tl;dr: Wikipedia is CC and has public APIs, but AI companies have recently started paying for "enterprise" high-speed access.

Notably, the enterprise program started in 2021 and Google has been paying since 2022.

giuliomagnifico
You’re saying Wikipedia was created 25 years ago to sell its content to train LLMs that didn’t even exist?! I doubt it…
littlestymaar
Jimmy Wales is even more of a visionary than we thought
nomdep
Grokipedia (https://grokipedia.com/) represents the most promising attempt in ages to build a genuinely bias-free online encyclopedia.

Ironically, trying it fairly requires you to first suspend your own biases regarding its owner.

gitaarik
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/elon-musk/elon-musk-grokipedia-...

Unlike Wikipedia, Grokipedia centralizes its editing process. Users can submit suggested edits to Grokipedia, but instead of assigning a group of volunteer community editors to decide on the edits, xAI, Musk’s artificial intelligence company, controls whether or not a certain edit is approved and implemented on the website.

So you could as well call it "Muskipedia"

jakkos
I started reading the Grokipedia page on the "Russian invasion of Ukraine". Immediately after the abstract, it starts talking about the "9th century Kyivan Rus" which seems like irrelevant information to a conflict over a millenia later, but then you realize it's exact same thing that Putin started with in his interview with Tucker Carlson to push the 'Ukraine isn't a real country' narrative.
aeve890
Alternativa Estudiantil Alternativa Estudiantil is a Spanish patriotic student movement founded in September 2023 to counter perceived left-wing and woke dominance in universities, positioning itself as a conservative alternative emphasizing national identity and meritocracy.[1]

A random article in the "edit approved by Grok".

Genuinely bias-free my ass.

flexagoon
https://grokipedia.com/page/Elon_Musk

If this looks like a "genuinely bias-free" page to you, I don't know what to tell you.

nickthegreek
can you provide a few examples where grokipedia outshines wikipedia?
asacrowflies
Are you joking?
amai
I would love to see news sites copying at least some of the technology of wikipedia. First and foremost every article should be versioned and it should be easy to see diffs. Every version of a news article should have a permanent link to it. Why don‘t news agencies use git for example? Also news articles should be written using a markup language that is easy to parse and easy to read by AI agents. Instead most of them still write articles in word and convert it from docx into HTML or PDF. That usually generates terrible documents that break accessibility. And of course a common markup language for news articles would enable many applications. But I guess we will land on Mars before we can have something like that.
akst
More professional organisations definitely have some kind of CMS, with potentially their own version management (at least for what’s published). But I also don’t think we can fault people for preparing their piece in their preferred writing tool.

I just can’t see existing news agencies doing this of their own volition. As Generating stories themselves is what keeps news agencies in business.

Unless they had a new competitor who had who kept running rings around them with all three features. But it’s going to come back to having better stories or better long form pieces (depending on the publications niche), as that’s ultimately why someone visits their site.

I could however see some 3rd party doing this like an extension that overlays someone’s site or acts as alternative presentation of their content.

CrzyLngPwd
Oh goodness, if wiki is news, then it's the most biased and easily editable news outside of Winston Smith and the Ministry of Truth.
decimalenough
Really? News coverage on Wikipedia is a lot more reliable than (say) Fox News. Breaking news events in particular get a lot of eyeballs and while you obviously can't take everything as gospel, genuinely wrong info is usually purged pretty quickly.
nephihaha
Most news outlets get their news either from press releases or press agencies. It means you effectively get the same talking points across different outlets.

Fox is designed to promote Republican viewpoints and MSNBC to promote Democrat ones. They present little outside them and are usually telling the same small selection of stories from different angles.

whynotmaybe
the most biased

Is it biased because it doesn't reflect your opinion or are the facts also biased?

nialv7
Although, due to Wikipedia's own policy, that it must cite other reliable sources, it can never be a source of first-hand news.
nephihaha
Wikipedia's main form of academic critique is to "verify" content through a Google search.
endoblast
It's funny how every source of knowledge converges to the same thing: mass media. Telling you what to think and trying to influence your behaviour rather than trying to inform you.

Using facts, omitting facts or emphasising particular facts over others in order to mislead you. The scientific journals are now included with their anonymous editorials. Peer review is pretty much the same as fact-checking.

Contrast this with good fiction, which employs falsehoods to point towards the truth: truth which cannot easily be verified but which is our real bread and butter.

hulitu
will ensure everyone has access to trustworthy knowledge for everyone for generations to come.

Maybe to trustworthy propaganda, just like this website.

nephihaha
WikiMedia has agreed to promote the UN's SDGs. There was a discussion on it several years ago. It was more or less presented as a fait accompli.
mch82
This article is talking about Portal:Current Events on Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events). The current events articles are fantastic! Normal newspaper articles are status updates. Current events articles synthesize news to present the current, comprehensive understanding about an event. It’s cool to monitor how current events articles evolve over time.
Aardwolf
When there's some big ongoing thing in the news there'll be many articles on that same topic on news websites and sometimes you can't even find the original one that tells what actually happened. Wikipedia's article on it is usually a great summary
xtiansimon
I’m going to reject the premise—this is not “news”, but “recent events”.
horsh1
Comparing the same article in different languages sometimes gets very educational.
nephihaha
Yes, and sometimes they are very different. I was surprised to see the German Wikipedia had a couple of articles on Scottish history that were better than the English language one!
beardyw
It seems a shame Weeklypedia doesn't have an RSS feed.
phrotoma
Huh, TIL about https://weekly.hatnote.com/

This is fascinating, thanks for mentioning it!

flexagoon
The post you're commenting on literally starts with the description of this newsletter
GaryBluto
I suggest everybody here take a look at Matthew White's excellent WikiWatch. Despite the last entry being 2006, it is still a very valuable criticism of Wikipedia today.

http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/wikiwoo.htm

roomey
Is there an RSS version of the weekly newsletter about Wikipedia articles?
flexagoon
You can use https://kill-the-newsletter.com/ to turn it into RSS
gsky
I prefer subject experts over Wikipedia.
alex1138
Britannica's online format suits it very well
sennalen
Wikipedia is not a newspaper. Please stop trying to update it with information less than a week old.
efilife
Keep in mind that Wikipedia itself tells you that "Wikipedia is not a newspaper"

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:NOTNEWS...

While having an "In the news" section on the front page

hahahahhaah
Which is fine and not contradictory. It is not a newspaper (like HN) but it may overlap with some mainstream news (also like HN).
LudwigNagasena
It clarifies exactly what that means. It doesn’t say that the information have to pass the test of time. Only that it is not a place of original reporting, unsourced gossip, etc.
input_sh
Those two statements don't contradict each other.