[phyphy]

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.

[avarun]

> 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.

[berkes]

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)

[AlbertRosen]

You can find most scientific papers on Sci-hub.

[carschno]

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.

[AnthonyMouse]

> Wikipedia's general level of trustworthiness exceeds that of most other internet resources by far.

This can be true of technical articles, especially covering popular subjects which are likely to be reviewed by enough people that errors get removed.

Anything even tangentially related to politics is hopeless.

[jl6]

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.

[AnthonyMouse]

It's worse than that. It affects the entire site. Here's an example:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Three_(automobile_manufact...

> "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.

[avar]

You're only reading that as a political jab because you're too entranced in American partisan politics.

Americans are a minority among the portion of the world's population that can read English easily enough to consult the English language Wikipedia.

When doing so, the rest us can use a brief reminder of what's ultimately a rather quaint aspect of the US: The fact that healthcare costs are a significant concern of employers.

The source cited for the paragraph you're picking apart is an article that's contrasting US automakers and their international competition.

[canarypilot]

Removing context to make a selective argument is intellectually dishonest.

The article contrasts the operating environment of “Big Three” auto-manufacturers across countries. It compares manufacture costs in Germany and Japan with those in the US, and the paragraph you cite links through to a (2004) article in which it is estimated that pensions and health insurance combined add $1,784 to the cost of a car in the US.

You need to subtract some contradictory numbers in the article to come to a number you can ascribe to health insurance, but somewhere between $400 and $800 fits a quoted “$900 will flow to [pension] funds”.

Given this context it is reasonable to argue that General Motors is (or at least was in 2004) at a competitive disadvantage to manufacturers in Japan or Germany as a result of the US having no universal healthcare system.

Lamentably for your position, just because there are political decisions involved that bring about consequences, factual discussion of those consequences is not itself necessarily political.

[aierou]

Moreover, Wikipedia relies heavily on news articles as sources. It goes without saying that news outlets are not well known for holding neutral positions.

[adlpz]

> And the best part is that I can trust this information to be neutral and factually correct.

Excuse me, what?

Wikipedia is great. But assuming it's neutral and factually correct is delusional.

Like with every single organization made up of human beings, power dynamics and censorship are part of Wikipedia.

It's still the less bad one, but no one should trust it that blindly.

[carschno]

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.

[somenameforme]

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!'

[bazoom42]

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?

[somenameforme]

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.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encyclop%C3%A6dia_Britannica#P...

[bazoom42]

Perhaps you misunderstand what “encyclopedia” means? Britannica itself classify Wikipedia as an encyclopedia (https://www.britannica.com/topic/encyclopaedia/The-kinds-of-...)

[jstummbillig]

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.

[curtisblaine]

Is it even "the less bad one"? I guess it's not if you're on the wrong side of censorship.