Yes and also there are many that never use the address bar, they just google names. With this mindset, any text input with a lens icon is a way to reach pages... or sites... apps, stuff, whatever.
I do it. I don't know how to explain why but these pages sometimes contain more information than people think. Like the critics, key-people, government involvement, controversies, etc. And the best part is that I can trust this information to be neutral and factually correct.
> And the best part is that I can trust this information to be neutral and factually correct.
Relatively compared to other sources, sure, but not absolutely. Wikipedia supereditors have their own biases that are obvious when reading articles on topics one has expert knowledge on.
What other accessible resources are there that would give a higher neutrality, and factual correctness?
(I include "accessible" deliberate, because while I like reading scientific papers, they are hard to read and often difficult to get or impossible to find)
Obviously, Wikipedia editors are human too. As opposed to most other resources, however, Wikipedia has the primary goal to provide high quality information. The contributors are not perfect, but they come astonishingly close to achieving that goal.
Of course, you should never blindly trust any source, but in spite of the simple fact that every author has their own "biases", Wikipedia's general level of trustworthiness exceeds that of most other internet resources by far.
Not completely true. There are two different types of political articles: 1) Those where two opposing edit-warring factions have battled each other into a compromise/stalemate, resulting in a passably neutral article, and 2) Those where a single aligned group of edit-warriors have gained supremacy and have come to gatekeep the article against any opposing perspectives.
> "GM, for instance, at one time picked up the entire cost of funding health insurance premiums of its employees, their survivors and GM retirees, as the US did not have a universal health care system."
This is an article about automakers. The reason they picked up future healthcare costs is because they're future healthcare costs, which lets the bosses pay themselves bonuses from current profits and then the company can go bankrupt from unfunded future obligations after they've moved on to another company. The reason isn't that the US doesn't have a universal healthcare system, and even if it did, they could have provided supplemental insurance etc., and would still have wanted to because that too is a future cost instead of a present day one.
The reason that qualifier is there is as a dig against the US healthcare system, in a way that aligns with particular partisans. The opposing partisan might have inserted something like "as the US has high healthcare costs as a result of regulatory dysfunction" though of course neutrality would have been to say neither of them because it's an article about automakers rather than healthcare systems.
And yet it's there, and that kind of thing is all over the place.
Moreover, Wikipedia relies heavily on news articles as sources. It goes without saying that news outlets are not well known for holding neutral positions.
You might have an absolutist view on the meaning of neutrality. Of course, you can argue philosophically that absolute neutrality does not exist in theory. What Wikipedia does achieve in practice, though, is a very successful attempt to provide balanced and well researched information on an incredible number of topics.
The inevitable occasional mistake does not bring it down to the level of arbitrary internet resources.
Wikipedia, unlike more classical encyclopedias such as e.g. Britannica, is not a primary source, by design. On anything tangentially related to topics like politics it's obligated to rely on sources like the US media which make no effort to even feign neutrality or balance. And of course these sources are then cited by editors who, similarly, have little interest in even feigning balance, beyond some minimal pretext.
The ideal of checks and balances keeping the system relatively neutral would only work if there was a relative balance of ideological views among overactive editors. And on that, I'm reminded of that line from the Blues Brothers, 'We have all types of music here - country and western!'
Brittanica is not a primary source either. Encyclopedias are considered tertiary sources. Encyclopedias are not supposed to perform original research but to aggregate and condense information from secondary sources.
What sources do you think Britannica can use which are not available to Wikipedia?
Among Britannica's authors are Einstein, Trotsky, Asimov, Milton Friedman, and many such others. [1] In Wikipedia, Trotsky himself could not opine on e.g. communism. By contrast, the words of a random junior journalist in an opinion piece published on a newspaper website are perfectly legitimate for publication in an article on communism. Wikipedia is simply a very different sort of project than an encyclopedia.
Trust is a concept around personal choice and not facts. The feeling that you can trust something is what trust is.
For different people to get to that feeling means different things. A lot of people place trust in certain figures of authority, in politics or on social media. The reasons for which they do so differ wildly and very often have very little to do with ground truth (although I suspect most people would find that hard to admit).
When somebody says they can trust Wikipedia to be factually correct that mostly is a reflection of choices and what they believe helps them to navigate the world, in
a way that is manageable and reasonable to them. Given that time is always a constraint to a varying degree, I think you could do a lot worse if being less wrong is your goal.
given the position of "sex" and "xxx" on the list, it seems like it's either misclicks, or just the worldwide population of teenage boys searching for things and ending up on wikipedia, probably because the site they're actually trying to get to is blocked.
People may be looking up details about these sites.
Also, not for these specifically, but if someone tells me about a website I haven't heard of, and not sure if safe / SFW etc I'll usually checkout it's Wikipedia page first.
They may be, but are this many people really looking up details about 2017's XXX: Return of Xander Cage? "XXX" makes a couple other appearances on the list, so I'm inclined to believe there really is a good amount of traffic being directed to Wikipedia by accident from search users.
So that if you write "youtube" without the .com the browser will direct you to wikipedia instead.