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I loved Wikipedia.
If you ask me the greatest achievement of humankind, something to give to aliens as an example of the best we could be, Wikipedia would be my pick. It's a reasonable approximation of the sum total of human knowledge, available to all for free. It's a Wonder of the Modern World.
...which means that when I call what's happened to it "sacrilege", I'm not exaggerating. It always had a bit of a bias issue, but early on that seemed fixable, the mere result of not enough conservatives being there and/or some of their ideas being objectively false. No longer. Rightists are actively purged*, adding conservative-media sources gets you auto-reverted**, and right-coded ideas get lumped into "misinformation" articles. This shining beacon is smothered and perverted by its use as a club in the culture wars.
I don't know what to do about this. @The_Nybbler talks a lot about how the long march through the institutions won't work a second time; I might disagree with him in the general case, but in this specific instance I agree that Wikipedia's bureaucratic setup and independence from government make it extremely hard to change things from either below or above, and as noted it has gone to the extreme of having an outright ideological banning policy* which makes any form of organic change even harder. All I've done myself is quit making edits - something something, not perpetuating a corrupt system - and taken it off my homepage. But it's something I've been very upset about for a long time now, and I thought I'd share.
*Yes, I know it's not an official policy. I also know it's been cited by admins as cause for permabans, which makes that ring rather hollow.
**NB: I've seen someone refuse to include something on the grounds of (paraphrasing) "only conservatives thought this was newsworthy, and therefore there are no Reliable Sources to support the content".
I don't remember when I first started to suffer Gell-Mann amnesia with regard to Wikipedia. It must have been some years ago, but at some point I remember reading articles, even articles that Wikipedia itself touts as 'Good Articles', on subjects I have real expertise on and being shocked by just how much they distort and misrepresent.
In some cases there might be an excuse. Wikipedia itself reminds us that Wikipedia is not a guide to what is true. Wikipedia is a guide to what Reliable Sources say. Thus on any matter on which Reliable Sources are unreliable, Wikipedia is likely to be unreliable. Add in that Wikipedia's collective judgement as to which sources are Reliable and which are not can be badly skewed, and there are indeed Wikipedia articles that, while consistent with wiki policy, are collections of half-truths.
I still use Wikipedia a lot because it's convenient, but as a first heuristic, I find it's worth first asking whether there's any present controversy over a particular subject that's likely to be reflected in the sources that Wikipedia uses. If I have a question that has a clear, well-known answer about which there is no controversy, then I expect Wikipedia to be quite reliable. If I want to look up, say, some detail of mineralogy, I expect Wikipedia will be pretty good - as far as I'm aware there is no culture war around mineralogy. The page on, say, quartz looks quite solid. However, any matter of interpretation or controversy is likely to be much more tendentious. To take an example here, if I search for gender ideology on wiki I'll get redirected to a page that is substantially just a furious argument as to why it's wrong and doesn't exist. This is not particularly helpful to anyone who is sincerely curious as to what gender ideology is and whether or not it's true.
Another heuristic I tend to use is just looking at the sources themselves - Wikipedia uses Reliable Sources but often goes for low-hanging fruit in terms of what's accessible, rather than making good-faith surveys of information. This is most obvious when dealing with anything outside of the West (if you have any expertise in, say, pre-modern Chinese history or Indian history, Wikipedia is truly dire on those subjects), but also when dealing with any issue outside of the cultural understanding of most Wikipedia editors. I have been dismayed to read wiki articles on a religious topic (my academic specialty) and find footnotes pointing to Vice articles, or to sociological articles on some unrelated matter that merely mention the topic in passing. But unfortunately there isn't always a 'cheat' like this - sometimes there's no one thing to point to, but I read an article and it's simply... bad. It relies heavily on a small handful of unrepresentative sources, it takes highly tendentious claims at face value, and it's parochial to the point of being deeply misleading.
To take one example - if you read the wiki article on Quranism, you will probably get the impression that this is a real, semi-organised movement in Islamic countries with a healthy degree of support. None of this is true. 'Quranism' in practice is a pejorative term - people are accused of being Quranists, and almost never identify with it. Disputes over hadith and sunnah are very common in the Islamic world, and it's always easy to accuse a rival who has a different view of correct hadith of not believing in the hadith at all. What few people there are who do fit the label tend to be a tiny fringe with no real support. There is no real 'movement' or 'doctrine'. Indeed, Quranism is to a large extent a Western confection, an imaginary movement for a better, reformed Islam more amenable to Western values.
That's just one that I picked because it seems relatively obvious. If you read, say, the articles on different theories of the Atonement in Christianity, there is similarly a lot of very misleading information, but it's harder to explain if you're not already familiar with the terrain.
And that's where the Gell-Mann amnesia comes in - I can only assume that it's also misleading on matters that I'm not familiar with, but I can't tell. But perhaps even potentially distorted information is better than no information, at least if I try to exercise skepticism?
I remember when I started.
It was when I read about Percy Schmeiser (and Monsanto Canada Inc v Schmeiser). Oddly enough, you don't even need outside knowledge to notice the slant and deception. For a very-high level overview, the article goes "Schmeiser claimed A. We are directly stating that B, C, and D happened. The court found that A, B, C, and D did not happen." Did they highlight that dichotomy? (no, they simply carried on) Did they think the court wasn't a sufficient source? (no, they cited it for the rejected claims) As far as I can tell, they simply cited half of a source and ignored that the defendant in a court trial might be biased.
Things that Schmeiser says "are", despite not convincing the authorities, and claims for which "Monsanto was able to present evidence sufficient to persuade the Court..." get sentence-long disclaimers.
Could you be more specific about what what exactly is claimed by A–D?
Ahh, I'd read only the article about the court cases. The article about Schmeister does read rather more like a hagiography.
It is interesting to realise that I have higher expectations for internal consistency if Wikipedia articles than I do for inter-article consistency.
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