Well, the Free Press article by Ashley Rindsborg below argues that yes, Wikipedia definitely leans towards the Left, favoring Left-wing over Right-wing sources as more reliable, and giving more favorable coverage to Democrats than Republicans (see the figures in the article). Click to read:
You’ve probably noticed some bias in some articles, and it gets worse if you go to the “talk” page on Wikipedia articles and see the editors fight out the contents of a given article. The debates and biases mentioned in the Free Piece press piece involve whether Kamala Harris was really the “border czar”, whether the Hunter Biden laptop issue was a Russian fabrication, whether the idea that Covid might have resulted from a Wuhan lab leak was a “conspiracy theory”, and, as you see below, the material on Zionism.
I won’t go into those controversies, as you can read the article yourself, but I do want to highlight several assertions in the piece. The crux of the matter is that what goes into Wikipedia depends on whether there are not only sources for assertions, but reliable sources. It turns out that the list of “reliable” sources seems biased and, to my mind, dubious, and the policy on what’s reliable was in fact confected by a single man, the anonymous “MrX”. An excerpt:
Wikipedia articles present their subject matter with a casually authoritative, almost stolid tone. But beneath the surface lies endless argumentation played out in rounds of procedural maneuvering that would shame the most deft legislative hand. User bans, discretionary sanctions, requests for comment, arbitration cases, topic bans, page bans, deprecated sources—all encoded in a shorthand jargon—lie behind the “consensus” displayed in an article’s seemingly ripple-free surface. In a way, this arcana of behind-the-scenes conceptual machinery is Wikipedia’s most impressive feature. It’s what keeps it from grinding to a halt on infighting and intransigence.
The problem is—like with the Harris border czar reference, which is still omitted from the czar article (and will almost certainly stay that way)—the consensus it achieves often lines up with the prerogatives of the Democratic Party and the media establishment that supports it.
One of the reasons for this cuts to the very heart of how Wikipedia works. The encyclopedia is governed by a raft of policies like Wikipedia:Notability (subjects of articles should meet a threshold of notability), Wikipedia:Recentism (overdue emphasis must not be placed on recent events), and Wikipedia:Neutral Point of View (self-explanatory). None, however, play even close to the outsize role that Wikipedia:Verifiability plays, with its insistence that claims “must be attributable to reliable, published sources.” The obvious question this standard raises is which sources are considered reliable. While some Wikipedia policies invite ambiguity, on this the site is clear. The Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Perennial sources page filters media sources into categories of “Generally reliable,” coded in a green-filled cell on the page’s table, yellow for those on which there is “No consensus,” and red for “Generally unreliable.”
The breakdown of sites filtered into each respective category is telling. The cadre of news outlets that collectively make up the mainstream media—ABC, CBS, and NBC News, Associated Press, Vanity Fair, Vogue, The Atlantic, Axios, BBC, The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, Wired, CNN, AFP—are classified green for reliable. Strongly left-leaning outlets like Vox, Mother Jones, The Guardian, HuffPost, and The Intercept are as well. But so are outright leftist or socialist outlets, including Jacobin, The Nation, and The Independent, as is civil rights advocacy NGO Southern Poverty Law Center.
Conservative outlets like Fox News (on politics and science), The Federalist, The Post Millennial, and The Washington Free Beacon are red for generally unreliable. A lower ring of “deprecated sources,” whose use is outright prohibited, includes the Daily Mail, The Daily Caller, The Sun, NewsMax, and The Epoch Times. The Weekly Standard and The Wall Street Journal (the latter of whose news pages are known for tilting more leftward than its right-of-center opinion page) are the only American conservative outlets with a green rating. Right-leaning tabloid New York Post is red; left-leaning tabloid New York Daily News is green.
While conservative American media is almost uniformly red, the same cannot be said of foreign outlets with dubious agendas. State-owned networks China Daily and Xinhua—whose purpose is to spread Chinese government propaganda to the English-speaking world—get a yellow for “no consensus.” Al Jazeera, owned by Qatar, an authoritarian state, is blessed with a green reliability rating.
The Post is red and the Daily News is green? And, seriously, the Southern Poverty Law Center is green?–the center that was sued by Maajid Nawaz for classifying him as an anti-Muslim extremist (he’s a Muslim, for crying out loud!), and had to fork over $3 million to Nawaz for defamation. The SPLC is well known as unreliable, but it’s still green. You can judge the list above. The NYT, for example, is certainly biased towards the progressive Left in both its news and op-ed sections.
One more thing before I move on. Who made the decisions about sources? Yep, one anonymous guy:
Given all this, you might think Reliable sources/Perennial sources is a foundational aspect of the site, ratified early on by some vote or community procedure. But you’d be wrong. While the policy of using reliable sources originated in 2005, the Reliable sources/Perennial sources list was created as recently as 2018. Its originator was neither a panel nor a commission of Wikipedia editors. The list was never formally adopted by the community. Rather, it was the creation of a single influential editor who, until his departure from the site in 2020, went by the handle MrX.
MrX created the list during the heady days of Trump-related political controversies when Wikipedia’s Talk pages were marked by as much tumult as the political discourse in the broader culture. His first iteration of the list included only a single source green-coded as generally reliable: The New York Times. The Daily Mail was, already from the list’s inception, classed as red. At the same time, MrX—who, by the time he left the site, was in the top 99.998 percentile of users by number of edits—was engaging in fraught debates on the site, sometimes devolving into what’s known as edit wars, on topics of extreme political sensitivity. He was highly influential in the editing of the article on Donald Trump, which (perhaps unsurprisingly) remains the first result on a Google search for Trump’s name. Between 2015 and 2020, MrX made nearly 600 edits to the Donald Trump article alone, not including edits to Trump-related articles.
I believe Greg Mayer also has his own issues with Wikipedia, but I’ll let him weigh in below, either on this post or in the comments.
At any rate, this article from United With Israel (click below) reports similar distortions of the term “Zionism”:
An excerpt from the article above. You can of course check the changes on the “Talk” page for “Zionism.”
A heated debate has erupted on social media over recent changes made to the Wikipedia entry for Zionism, sparking accusations of historical revisionism.
Users on social media have over the past several 24 hours posted a comparison between the 2023 and 2024 versions of the Wikipedia page, with one user, Liv Lovisa, claiming that “history is being rewritten.”
Blake Flayton, a vocal commentator on Jewish and Israeli issues, responded to the post, calling the changes “egregious” and urging someone with expertise to edit the page to reflect what he considers to be a more accurate portrayal.
At the center of the debate are key changes in the language used to describe Zionism, the movement that called for the establishment of a Jewish homeland in what is now Israel.
The 2023 version of the page framed Zionism as a nationalist movement born in the 19th century that sought to secure Jewish self-determination. In contrast, the 2024 version of the entry introduces more charged terminology, describing Zionism as an “ethno-cultural nationalist” movement that engaged in “colonization of a land outside of Europe,” with a heightened focus on the resulting conflicts with Palestinian Arabs.
“Zionists wanted to create a Jewish state in Palestine with as much land, as many Jews, and as few Palestinian Arabs as possible,” it reads.
. . . . Critics, including Flayton, argue that the new language in the Zionism entry distorts the historical narrative, positioning Zionism in a more negative light by drawing parallels to colonialism and downplaying the movement’s core goal of creating a safe homeland for Jewish people.
The use of the term “colonization,” in particular, has been a flashpoint, as it evokes a political context that some feel misrepresents the motivations behind the establishment of Israel and overlooks the historical persecution faced by Jews that led to the Zionist movement.
Another Twitter pro-Israel voice, Hen Mazzig, wrote: “The new Wikipedia entry on Zionism isn’t just inaccurate, it’s downright antisemitic. It asserts that the origin of Ashkenazi Jews is ‘highly debated and enigmatic,’ echoing Khazar theory, the dangerous lie that Ashkenazi Jews are converts and not descendants of the Jews exiled from the Land of Israel.”
Call me a biased Jew, but to me Zionism is simply the 2023 definition: the view that there should be a Jewish state to serve as a refuge for those subject to the Holocaust, pogroms, or bigotry. But as the war proceeds, the idea that Zionism (which of course created the UN-approved state of Israel) is a nefarious plot has strengthened. This goes along with the current tendency to call Jews “Zionists” (yes, most of them are), but to also say, falsely, that anti-Zionism is NOT anti-Semitism.
To counteract that last trope, here’s Natasha Hausdorff in the Munk debate debating and defending the view that anti-Zionism is indeed anti-Semitism; see especially the bit starting at 3:10, making an analogy which is sheer genius. Hausdorff and her debate partner, Douglas Murray, won that debate. (By the way, i think that Hausdorff, a British barrister who an expert in international law and an officer in the UK Lawyers for Israael, deserves her own Wikipedia page!).
If you have comments on biases or the lack thereof in Wikipedia, please put them in the comments section.
This has been noticeable at Wikipedia for awhile actually, maybe 3 years or so? Still good for scientific stuff I think, but MANY articles have gone down the woke toilet re politics/culture.
Wasn’t there a controversy about the woman in charge (who came from/went to PBS?) lately? She’s bonkers.
Love Al Jazeera’s take being green. Hilarious!
D.A.
NYC
There was an article about in June.
https://manhattan.institute/article/is-wikipedia-politically-biased
Are the math entries biased?
Like this one :
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elliptic_integral
In which, buried way down, it is claimed, and I quote:
“If k2 = λ(i√r) and r ∈ Q + r in Q} ^{+}} (where λ is the modular lambda function), then K(k) is expressible in closed form in terms of the gamma function.[2]”
Ref. 2 :
Borwein, Jonathan M.; Borwein, Peter B. (1987). Pi and the AGM: A Study in Analytic Number Theory and Computational Complexity (First ed.). Wiley-Interscience. ISBN 0-471-83138-7. p. 296
… I mean, 1987? And isn’t there more to it than that?
I’ll wait.
/attempted humor
>I’ll wait.
Hope you’re not double-parked.
Ah ha – the double parking theorem!
(JK but that’d have been great if there was one)
Thanks — much needed!
“Is Wikipedia distorted by ideology and propaganda?”
Yes.
And the scary thing is that it is a major source of information for A.I. applications.
The guilty flee where no man pursueth.
Yes, Wikipedia is nowadays biased on any issue relevant to politics or woke issues. The reason, as with so many other institutions, is “entryism”: left-wing activists work their way into influential positions and then use that position to subvert the institution and to oust anyone who doesn’t go along with their agenda. This first happened to Rationalwiki, now it has happened to Wikipedia.
The left-wing activists prevail by being way more dedicated to the task; they see themselves as on a mission to save society, and some of them will spend all of their free time editing Wikipedia, making tens of thousands of edits.
The tactic of allowing only left-leaning sources as “reliable” and deprecating all others is the primary weapon they use.
Yeah, RationalWiki quickly sided with the Pharyngula goons, and it went downhill.
Still to this day, RW makes no reference to the rape allegations made against PZ Myers, even though they are very eager to document them for everybody else, no matter how verifiable the claims. Further, RW is also very quiet on Rebecca Watson’s war crime and rape denial.
This makes me angry at right-wing intellectuals. I have noticed long ago that if you are seeking information sources, most of what you can access freely is left-leaning, while right-of-center sites are typically behind a paywall. Then the same people who refuse to sacrifice a little time and money for their cause will complain that it is marginalized.
For many years, ideology has been the main focus of Wikipedia. More women, more diversity, BLM, giving money to various non-profits for fashionable causes…
Meanwhile, it remains inferior as a collaborative platform to version control systems that are 20 years old. Allowing to edit its pages on GitHub would be an enormous improvement! Instead, users override each other’s changes based on whims, and expertise counts for little compared to seniority.
Unfortunately, this is just the tip of the iceberg.
Just this morning I read a summary of an interview with Dr. Avior Byron, who is the CEO of a translation company. He describes how Wikipedia in Arabic (pages related to the current war, but I’m guessing to the conflict in general) distorts reality and hides the truth.
I’ll link it below (I hope this is OK according to Da Roolz). It’s in Hebrew, but I did check that Google translate generates an accurate English translation (albeit grammatically awkward at times).
https://www.maariv.co.il/economy/tech/article-1133464
What I’ve noticed is a growing right-wing bias on WEIT, with far more negative attention against left-wing topics and people. Even the comments section has moved to the right. For a long time I’ve counted on WEIT for the support of my left-wing views, but it appears I’ll need to move on.
That’s too bad. Wouldn’t you want those views challenged? WEIT may have a commentariat whose opinions you don’t like, but this is among the most civil places on the intertubes to have your ideas challenged.
Which “left wing topics and people” are you referring to?
Or you can read this and other sources.
To the extent that you are criticizing WEIT, I think the criticism is vacuous.
WEIT is a private website run by an individual. It contains information and personal opinions. The selection of topics is mostly determined by the person who runs the site. I don’t expect any source to be unbiased.
Were you expecting a ‘left-wing’ bias?
Feel free to add pro-left-wing comments in the comment section.
(I, for one, don’t think there’s a right-wing bias here, indeed there is very little right-wing opinion; what there is — perhaps — is a centrist bias, a disillusioned-with-wokeism bias.)
I am reminded of the poll that Jerry conducted this summer in which he asked readers “Who do you plan to vote for?” The results skewed 59 points for Harris over Trump. Even if we assume that half of those who claimed to be undecided or who didn’t want to answer were duplicitous Trump voters, then Harris still won by 52 points. This would match the 2020 margin in Dane County, Wisconsin, that well known bastion of right-wingers and the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Now, if a person happens to live close to campus in Madison, where one can enjoy margins of 85%+ in favor of the Democrat, then perhaps Jerry’s readers seem a bit right wing. Perspective can work that way. Indeed, several of his readers at the time of the poll remarked that they were shocked at the skew toward Harris, as they believed that Trump fans had taken over Jerry’s site. Perhaps. But maybe there is such a thing as in-house criticism of a political party; perhaps there are people who have retained both the objectivity and the grace to acknowledge when the “enemy” party has done anything worth praising. Too many now seem to believe that dissent should reinforce one’s priors, should be addressed only toward the “wrong-thinking” people. It seems to such people most important that we get on board with the team, stay comfortable having our opinions handed to us, sheepishly adhere to demands that we vote for whomever we are told. “Why quibble or disagree when we can join the joyful Hallelujah choir and lift up our Party in political praise?” No thank you.
The irony of ostensibly freethinkers demanding loyalty to political party, dogma, and messaging will never cease to amuse. Then again, one needn’t have a religion to love preaching to the choir, one only need a preference for the pulpit or the pew.
Cheers to Jerry for following his own path and allowing civil, informed discussion whatever one’s party or views.
You might consider that at least my own views have not changed: I am a left centrist who considers my brief here to police the Left. As I have explained a gazillion times, there are a million places to find criticisms of Trump and Republicans, but not many places where a liberal criticizes the Left.
If you want 24/7 criticism of Trump (who, as I have explained a gazillion times, is a narcissist who should never be President) I suggest you move on to Pharyngula, where you can join the howling mob of Progressives who never disagree with each other.
I find it very odd that one would read only sites that support their own political views. Why on earth would one do that? How would you ever learn of the argument opposing your own views?
Before you move on to Pharyngula, which I guess you should given the reasons you adduce for reading websites, I suggest you read John Stuart Mill On Liberty.
I began reading this website daily shortly after its inception and soon noticed that Jerry’s and most of the comments were well to the left of my political views. BUT
1) There’s a whole lot of interesting non-political stuff on the site, so skip the Harris vs Trump stuff if you like;
2) Many of the recent postings address central issues for anyone, right or left, concerned about democracy, knowledge, and what it is to be modern.
2) Some well informed and well argued comments have forced me to think again and look at non-conservative sources in both the US and also in my own country where I now make a point of reading news and opinion likely to be inconsistent with my beliefs. Sometimes, you learn stuff.
Ron, on which issues does WEIT (and its commenters) lean Right, and how, specifically, are its/their views Right? I find it difficult to address your comment unless you clarify. I for one find this site to be liberal in orientation, i.e.mostly anti-Left AND anti-Right. That’s why I like it so much.
Ron Schoenberg / I am so sorry you’ve been exposed to topics and comments here that don’t support your left-wing beliefs and that you need to move on.
Know that there are websites out there that will validate your correct views and help you heal. Good luck on your search!
It appears you haven’t moved on yet. . .
I forgot that I had this article, “How the Regime Captured Wikipedia”, banging around in my bookmarks. It look in detail at how Wikipedia became policed content.
Thanks for the link.
I don’t trust Wikipedia on any controversial topic.
One of the two right-wing sources with a green rating no longer exists (The Weekly Standard). It ceased publication in 2018.
Furthermore the other one, the WSJ has two distinct sections: opinion (which is conservative) and news (regular leftist tilt).
Thanks for the link! Very illuminating. And depressing.
“anti-Zionism is indeed anti-Semitism; see especially the bit starting at 3:10, making an analogy which is sheer genius.”
Yes, very nice analogy indeed. But you can extend it further and imagine that the parents discussing having a baby, already had one baby and only a one bedroom house. If they decided to have that second baby, they would probably not take the other one and send it to sleep at their grandparents, neither would they likely say “you now need to sleep in that corner of the room because you new sibling needs your bed”. They might just get two beds and have them share the room. What I am saying is that I feel that one can have serious misgivings about the way Israel was created and how it has evolved through the last 70 plus years without being anti-Semitic. The question is not, “are we going to get rid of the child” but “what is each one of the two children going to have to concede/give up so that can share their room” (note: note the same as one state solution).
Keep in mind though, the entire dispute is NOT about land. The Pals have been offered land five times, once before 1948 (Peel). Turned it down every time.
The entirety of the evidence not in the MSM in the west…. is that the project of “Palestine” is an Islamist elimination project to destroy and replace the Jewish state.
And institute an Islamic Republic, ever expanding.
There’s a slight of hand here. In the 60s and 70s there was a pretense of it being about land and.. more secular. This faded into an Islamic madness, a true Jihad, in the 80s.
For more, see my column:
https://democracychronicles.org/author/david-anderson/
variously syndicated.
D.A.
NYC
You have really put your finger on the gist of the most pervasive confusion/untruth about the history of the conflict. It’s a real shame, too. I have always been of the opinion (feel free to correct me if you think I’ve misread things), that the Palestinians turned their destiny over to opportunistic “saviors” from the outside who never had their best interests at heart. Mr. Ineffectual himself, Yassir Arafat — whom I don’t need to tell you was an Egyptian — was nothing but an egotistical, opportunist who sold them right down the river. The deal he turned down was so much greater than anything they could even dream of today.
Analogies aren’t arguments. By definition there is always something missing from the analogy that causes it not to capture the true situation. (The best that an analogy can do is illustrate for the slow-witted an argument already made on its merits, as Ms. Hausdorff did.) What your attempt to extend the analogy omits is that only one of the children was voluntarily produced from the parents. The other, the foster child born with fetal alcohol syndrome if you like, wants incorrigibly to murder the natural child no matter how diligently and patiently the parents try to accommodate it. In that circumstance then yes the foster child would be banished not just to a corner of the tent but to some “place without the camp” (Deuteronomy) where it could be supervised and restrained to protect not only the family but the entire community.
Rather like now.
I’m not sure Ms. Hausdorff made an argument on its own merit. She omitted a crucial aspect of Zionism:
The Jewish state needs to be around Jerusalem.
Is an Arabic NIMBY antisemitic who approves of a Jewish state in some underpopulated corner of the world?
NIMBY: I had to look that up 🙂
To me, “approval” of an imaginary Jewish state in a deserted land at the expense of the existing one is definitely anti-Semitic.
This is not related to bias but merely an anecdote about my experience with the powers that be at Wikipedia.
I have written and edited many articles in Wikipedia over the last decade or so – related to topics I enjoy, mostly local history. I even worked with the Guerilla Skeptics for awhile – they worked to edit pages related to scientists and skeptics to make sure they were accurate and complete. All fine work.
They pissed me off earlier this year. A new museum opened in my nearby town of birth, so I took the time to create an article describing the museum and the exhibits contained. The museum is dedicated to documenting the history of a significant branch of the US Government. Submitted the article and NO!, that sounds like an advertisement! It is not noteworthy, they said, even though a state governor and a US Senator attending the grand opening. (Meanwhile, there exists an article in Wikipedia about the National Bobble-head Hall of Fame Museum in Wisconsin). No amount of effort could be submitted to change their minds. A ruling was submitted from on high! It cannot be changed.
Look, I do not claim to be the most clear and precise writer who ever lived, but I think I do OK. No matter.
So screw ’em.
Here’s an example why Fox News is unreliable. They posted an article about a Democrat who has abandoned the Party over the Donors who have taken the Party over. Fox was willing to admit the Republicans have the same problem. However, they failed to mention to overriding issue. PACS taking over politics can be traced to Reagan and the SCOTUS Citizens United decision. They never mentioned that. Nor did they tell us that only the Democrats want to overrule Citizens United.
This is the problem with Newsmax, NY Post, and Fox News. Their posts are unreliable because the leave out what is needed to understand what is going on, because it favors their political ends.
I think your comments about Fox News etc are entirely true. Your last paragraph is spot on — but this exact same reason is why the NYT, NPR, CNN, BBC, Guardian, etc, are also unreliable.
Wikipedia has completely capitulated to gender ideology. Women’s orgs fighting GI are labelled “transphobic hate groups.” LGB history has been rewritten. Historical figures continue to be transed. GI is so deeply embedded in Wikipedia that removing it will be virtually impossible.
Fanatics have become full-time “editors,” changing articles to pass their ideological purity tests. I suppose these people don’t need to have jobs or anything…
Yes, you nailed it. And some criminals (some serial killers) who are known to be trans have no mention of this on their Wikipedia page. You might find it under the ‘talk’.
Yep. Trantifa has an army of ideologues who seem to have nothing else to do except altering WP entries.
You could always start using and contributing to justapedia.org, which is based on the wikipedia model, but trying to avoid the bias.
An example of wikipedia accuracy: there is a page about one of my grandfathers, who was a professional footballer. It said he died three decades earlier than he actually did, and in a city he had actually moved away from ten years after his supposed death. It took me several tries to get the facts straight, as the writer of the page kept reverting it to his, incorrect, version, and did so despite me explaining my relationship to the subject.
Good grief.
I suppose that Justapedia will eventually revert to Wikipedia once the woke discover it…
Comment by Greg Mayer
As longtime close readers of WEIT will know, I have long been critical of Wikipedia, and Jerry has long goaded me to finish my still unfinished critical post on the subject. I’ll weigh in here with a couple of quick thoughts. Wikipedia is good for some things, and bad for other things. Among the things it is good for is mathematics, engineering, and firearms technology. For each of these there is a relatively small group of interested yet competent people, and, crucially, no dedicated band of axe-grinders to distort, shade, or obfuscate the content. Firearm technology may seem surprising, given the strong feelings in the United States about guns, but articles on things like the mechanism of flintlocks or the caliber of machine gun ammunition don’t lend themselves to ideological disruption; I would not put much stock in articles on gun control or the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
For some controversial topics, there is a large and dedicated enough group of competent people so as to keep the axe-grinders in check. Although I have not looked at it lately, my impression over the years has been that the evolution article is pretty good, because the creationists are fought and defeated by a large and persistent band of competent editors. World War II, at least in broad outline, is another such topic.
The bad parts of Wikipedia are the history of anything that someone cares about deeply. When more than one such interested group exists, this leads to warring gangs of axe-grinders. Sometimes a particular gang wins, or wins for awhile. My paradigmatic example of this has always been Balkan history, where the existence of numerous ethnic and religious groups ramps up the possibilities of motivated reasoning. The Middle East, I suppose, would be another example.
A perhaps more insidious form of distortion is when there is a smaller or less visible axe to grind. In such cases, no one may bother to correct what is being done. A personal experience with this is someone who insisted that an independent state of Yucatan was a third belligerent country in the French intervention in Mexico in the 1860s. The war drew in a number of countries that sided either with the French and their conservative Mexican allies, or with the Mexican republicans that opposed them. The Mexicans were divided into factions, with various generals and other leaders taking up arms on one side or the other, including regional actions that are the basis of the claim that Yucatan was a separate country, but it wasn’t– no more than the Free State of Jones was a separate country during the American Civil War.
I tried fixing the list of belligerents in the article on the French intervention, but this editor kept putting it back in. But, at least at the start, it was me against him, and he cared very deeply, while I did not, and so Yucatan stayed in as a belligerent for awhile. Eventually, the article was righted– a quick glance now shows it to be basically sound with regard to who the belligerents were. I assume that people with real interests and expertise in Mexican history finally stepped in, but I have not gone back to the edit history from years ago to see how this happened.
If the axe-grinders distribute their efforts across many articles, it may be even more difficult to recognize and counteract the distortion, and this seems to be the most insidious effect of all.
Wikipedia is not a good general source of information. It is good for some things, but in my estimation it takes a lot of experience with Wikipedia, and a lot of pre- or non-Wikipedia knowledge, to be able to separate the wheat from the chaff.
GCM
Thank you, Greg. The chemistry articles are pretty good, but they’re not as well-referenced as they could be. No, I don’t have any time to do this myself. ☹️
As frequently for me, I am behind on my reading.
Wikipedia also has a problem with some women’s health issues. I will not link to the pages, but some are accompanied by photos that are appropriate for gynecologic texts, but I personally don’t think belong on a Wikipedia page. (e.g. some vulva shots that seem gratuitous).
I have to admit I don’t look up men’s health issues often so I don’t know how many “dick-pics” are on Wikipedia.
There are better web pages for health information anyway.