I could give examples but I won't, because that would link my HN and Wikipedia accounts.

> So "garbage puffed up beyond all belief" and "full of terrible and fake citations that lead to nowhere" sounds a bit hyperbolic, tbh.

People unironically describe it as the "sum of all human knowledge," so it's definitely puffed up beyond belief. In reality, much of it is a slow battle of tendentious agenda-pushing, by people with weird personalities, played according to an arcane rule book (the first unstated rule of which is to never, ever acknowledge that you're pushing an agenda). That doesn't taint all of it, but it taints far more than you'd think.

The last Wikipedia page I visited ( Elder_Mother ) someone had, years ago, removed all of the citations for the article. These were websites that contained much more and higher quality content than the Wiki page itself, and had been cited with the original page creation. I only found the citations by chance, because I decided to look at the page's history. This poor curation isn't just bad for the usefulness of Wikipedia, it's borderline plagiarism since the entire article was composited from paraphrasing.

Before that I saw a Wikipedia page ( The Voyage of Life ) that admitted its own plagiarism. The page had a big disclaimer at the top: "This page might contain plagiarism" but more delicately worded. So somebody noticed the verbatim plagiarism, added a flag, and then nothing.

Another issue is the lack of expertise, which leads to misleading wishy-washy statements. The page for slugs, talking about control, says crushed eggshells, "are generally ineffective on a large scale, but can be somewhat useful in small gardens." This is false, eggshells are ineffective in all gardens. But to avoid edit wars the language has to pussyfoot around sensitive topics like gardening advice.

Stemming from the lack of expertise, Wikipedia itself becomes out of date without curation. The problem is while it claims to be more up-to-date than printed media, there's no easy way to identify how significant the information on a page is. If I go to an article am I reading things that were written 20 years ago or 2 years ago? Is the material presented relevant in 2023? Was it ever significant to begin with, or did the author happen to have knowledge and interest in something obsolete?

Most pages are also, I think, poorly organized ( Partial differential equation ). I believe a single voice and more effort to write articles for a well defined audience would help immensely, specifically with math and science pages. Wikipedia keeps trying to condense complex material from a textbook into an encyclopedia article format, and it's not working out.

Let's take for example the article about Patrisse Cullors (of BLM fame). A video surfaced of her saying "I am a trained Marxist". If you look at the archives[1], many people wanted to include this. But it was rejected with such ridiculous arguments as: "it is entirely unclear what a 'trained Marxist' actually means [...] She doesn't say anything like 'I am a Marxist' "

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Patrisse_Cullors/Archive_...

Someone gave an example above where a person calling herself a trained Marxist was not accepted as evidence that she is a Marxist. Do you seriously think that editing the article to include the reference would be allowed?

Furthermore, the point is that Wikipedia has a systematic problem. Individual instances that people point out are examples. It would be impossible to fix the whole problem yourself and saying "that example doesn't count because you can fix it yourself" is just a way of ignoring examples, not dealing with the problem.

https://www.wired.com/story/guerrilla-wikipedia-editors-who-...