[taxyz]

I am not commenting on anything to do with the discussion at hand, purely just commenting on Wikipedia and the idea of "primary sources."

Wikipedia articles are not really vetted by any authority nor are the sources. Anyone can simply add citations to claims; there are no standards for what constitutes a valid source other than a URL exists to some resource.

You can even take a benign article about something that is not political and start clicking through the sources and realize a lot of them don't support the claim they were cited to support on Wikipedia. In my experience, its less than half the sources I've clicked on are credible and support the claim but this is anecdotal. A lot of Wikipedia is editing by people with ulterior motives now that its so often presented and received as fact.

[WorldMaker]

So? That's how research/research culture works. People mock the [Citation Needed] culture on Wikipedia but it is still far better than "no sources presented". Wikipedia knows that it can't be "objective" so long as it is edited by people with "ulterior motives" and the usual other biasing faults of being merely human. The tools that Wikipedia has to counter that are requiring sources to be cited so that future editors have tools to dispute the claims and by doing that in large aggregate policy they hope to "trend better" over time.

I point out the primary sources part of Wikipedia especially because I very much understand Wikipedia is edited by humans with all their quirks and faults and it is worth not just starting at Wikipedia, but also all that "boring footnotes part" at the bottom of almost every Wikipedia page. Even if it has the same problems as the rest of the data in Wikipedia, it's still so much more information beyond the top-paragraph summary which is all many people ever read of Wikipedia. But critically, that's the part of Wikipedia that most embodies the "Reading Rainbow spirit" of "but you don't have to take my word for it". That's where Wikipedia itself reminds you that it isn't the final word on a subject, but the first word, the summarizing word on it, and points you to other places to explore.

Even if "less than half the sources are credible", a .490 can be a startlingly good batting average, depending on if you are talking Baseball or Cricket. In this specific case 50% of 107 is still a chance at maybe 54 good and worthwhile and credible supporting claims. That's still 54 different places more to start your own research with than you had before you got to the Wikipedia page. Even though anyone can add citations to claims, it's still far more organized than "let me google that for you" because it's still likely human curated and not just whatever SEO has made the machine algorithms happy this day. It's still a good suggestion to start there with those sources. If you are arguing that you maybe shouldn't stop there, then absolutely, I agree, but the above poster was asking where to start, and the poster above that gave them one place to start with 107 leads of further places to start. I thought that was a useful reminder, regardless of what you think the overall batting average of Wikipedia is.