| Since Wikipedia is getting a lot of unfounded criticism here, it may be good to raise some real issues: Wikipedia (even just the English Wikipedia) should not be considered as a unit. The fact is, a lot of articles are very good, better than in any other encyclopedia, but that can sadly lull people into dropping their guard/critical thinking when it comes to other articles/topics. The thing is, Wikipedia is very vulnerable not just to unconscious biases, but also to malicious involvement. Just a single malicious editor with a lot of time on their hands can be unexpectedly harmful, especially if they are targeting a topic where the malice will not be obvious to the majority of editors, or if there are not many editors there to contest the malicious edits for some other reason. Once that single editor gets support of like minded people, the situation is grim. The other ones don't even have to be naturally competent, a single "puppet master" can coordinate many "meat puppets" (people that follow orders or a common goal) or even plain-old "sock puppets" (abusing alternative accounts). Most good-faithed editors just avoid conflict with the malicious group, because * it is unpleasant
* it requires much time
* it may require knowledge (even though malice requires less knowledge, especially with off-wiki coordination)
* it (and other conflict) may look bad for them on Wikipedia in the future
* the admins and the arbitration committee tend to punish all sides of a conflict The "political" topics (including the parts of history that are "relevant" to nationalism) tend to be the worst. I suppose one reason for that is that politics is a viable common goal that can unify some meat puppets and competent malicious actors together. Another is that politics tends to scare a lot of editors that operate in good faith. Another issue is that the people in power on Wikipedia in case of conflict between other editors, admins and ARBCOM, very rarely (or never) want to invest enough time to really get to the bottom of the issue at hand (which can, admittedly, be very difficult, especially since the people in power often lack the specific knowledge regarding the possibly obscure topics at hand). In the end often both the pro-Wikipedia and the malicious side gets punished, because the admins or ARBCOM just want to "resolve" the conflict or content dispute and get it over and done with. Yet another issue is that in recent years the Wikimedia Foundation (owner of Wikipedia and other projects) has started to act against the volunteers (the case with Fram[0] is most notorious). [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:FRAM |