Unpopular Science 231121 Wikipedia
How much can you trust Wikipedia
Over the next few weeks, you’ll be getting impassioned pleas to support Wikipedia, which as a non-profit entity relies on donations to keep it going.
Please don’t give them money.
Who could possibly disparage Wikipedia? It’s a non-profit organization that prides itself on its neutral point of view? The encyclopedia that anyone can edit. If you find a mistake, just fix it!
A personal scientist is open-minded but skeptical. We’re happy to read Wikipedia, and of course no information source is perfect all the time. But there are many reasons to believe that Wikipedia is no longer a source of unbiased information. Read it as skeptically, perhaps more so, than other sources.
Why you shouldn’t trust Wikipedia
First, it’s a myth that “anyone can edit”. Try to apply an edit to anything, even something innocuous and you’ll soon find an editor looking over your shoulder. Despite its claim to decentralized knowledge, there are only about 500 admins who control all content.
Wikipedia requires citations for any claims, but you can’t just cite any old source. Only the centralized admin team can decide what counts as “reliable”. For example, its list of perennial reliable sources rates India’s most widely-read newspaper, Times of India, a “yellow”, less reliable than Mother Jones (green). Whatever you think about Mother Jones, even its own editors don’t claim to be neutral. Wikipedia’s discussion board about bias doesn’t pretend to be neutral either on anything related to political or cultural issues. (e.g. see the discussion about Daily Wire)
For a good summary, look to Larry Sanger (co-founder of Wikipedia): “Wikipedia Is More One-Sided Than Ever”, who explains how the “neutral point of view” should work and why editors no longer hold to that standard in discussions about left-wing shibboleths.
There are many, more egregious examples, including on topics you’d think really ought to allow for multiple, neutral points of view, such as COVID-19 policy or other science-related topics.
Here are some more: