Have you actually tried editing wikipedia? It's extremely difficult to get anything approved. You have to provide multiple credible sources for things or else the mods just revert/delete your page.
Isn't is good that there are some forcing factors to help ensure the quality of the content? I get that there's plenty of drama and difficulties in building and moderating the content of Wikipedia, but it certainly does not appear to stagnate in terms of content if you are looking at e.g. the number of articles on English Wikipedia. The overall process appears to produce great outcomes and it is the greatest collection of knowledge created.
I took it as a statement that it is prohibitively difficult to contribute to Wikipedia, and wanted to point out that a large number of contributions are being made and the resulting quality being high, in part due to the difficulty of making contributions.
My comment was disputing the statement above that anyone can just stick junk in Wikipedia. While yes anyone can submit edits, it's pretty hard to get them accepted so the content on Wikipedia is more reliable than just a public notepad.
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.
The forcing factors aren't what they are supposed to be though. "Credible" sources and citations are exclusively up to the article moderators personal tastes which are very rarely objective.
> The forcing factors aren't what they are supposed to be though.
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.
In countless ways, there's endless wars among admins.
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.
I've seen people cite an english book on a German topic and intentionally mistranslate words to construct a connection that doesn't exist and was never intended by the authors of the english book.
And editing with an account can be very dangerous if you manage to upset somebody with clout.
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.
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.
Larry Sanger is famously mad at Wikipedia for a very long time now because they wouldn't allow his pseudoscience on it. Later on that also extended to his (increasingly far right) politics.
