[GuB-42]

I didn't notice this, in fact, I still find Wikipedia to be remarkably neutral on controversial topics. It is very explicit about not being a news website, and yet, that's where I find the best coverage for hot topics like the war in Ukraine and Gaza, Black Lives Matter, protests in Hong-Kong, etc... For instance, most western media completely disregard the Russian side of the Ukraine war, not Wikipedia, where you have both points of views shown side by side, as well as international reactions, and most importantly, sources.

It is not perfect of course, small topics and non-English Wikipedias usually show more bias, and not just about controversial topics. Even on scientific articles, you may find some guy who considers himself the king of the Estonian Striped Beetle and will not tolerate any other ideas than his, driving away other contributors because they have better things to do than go to war to defend beetle truths.

[richardfeynman]

You are getting bad information. The Wikipedia pages on those specific topics (Ukraine, Gaza, BLM) is known to be have been manipulated by groups of editors acting in coordination to advance political narratives.

[GuB-42]

Is there a single source that is not manipulated on these topics? For example in Ukraine, it is very obvious that both western mainstream media and Russian mainstream media are little more than propaganda for their respective camps.

The good thing with Wikipedia (the English version in particular) is that both sides try to manipulate it, in addition to those who really want to say the truth, so in the end, it is relatively neutral. And if you want to go further, there are citations, which is maybe the most important aspect of Wikipedia compared to traditional media, including encyclopedias.

Wikipedia is not perfect, but it does its best to resist manipulation: citations, all activity is recorded and publicly available, etc...

Non-English Wikipedias have more bias, because they are smaller and also because unlike the English version that is used worldwide, even by non-English speakers, the non-English ones are often tied to specific countries. For example, I think I remember seeing the Arabic Wikipedia as being explicitly pro-Palestine, I guess the opposite is true for the Hebrew version.

[dlubarov]

Both sides try to manipulate it, but in certain topic areas, the numbers are highly skewed such that one side wins almost all disputes.

For example, Wikipedia's definition of Zionism was updated to include "as much land, as many Jews, and as few Palestinian Arabs as possible". There are absolutely no other dictionaries or encyclopedias with definitions resembling that; Wikipedia is uniquely biased there.

[GuB-42]

And there is an entire discussion about that, a vote and 17 citations!

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=1276887484#Langua...

When you can't eliminate bias completely, as I think it is the case here, the next best thing is transparency, and you can hardly get better than that! Maybe no other dictionaries or encyclopedias describe it like that, but no other dictionaries or encyclopedias give so much detail on why it is described the way they do.

In the end "Zionism" is just a word, the meaning of it is what people make it to be, not what dictionaries or encyclopedias say it is, and considering the current situation, it means different things if you ask different people, so bias is unavoidable. Of course, if it is etymology you are after, the Wikipedia article covers that too, with plenty of citations.

[dlubarov]

I think you would have a point if such biased statements had tags such as [1], directing readers to the relevant discussions. Attempts to add such tags are normally reverted by the usual anti-Israeli editors.

So we have theoretical transparency, but no hint to the reader that they may want to look into a dispute rather than accepting the content at face value. Readers could peruse the talk page, but it contains several hundred (mostly archived) discussions.

The main page history also contains thousands of smaller disputes, where communication was done via edit summaries. Realistically, readers aren't going to dig through talk page archives, let alone years of edit history.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:POV_statement

[richardfeynman]

Yes, of course there are sources that aren’t actively manipulated by groups of activist editors whose goals are to obscure the truth. Have you tried ChatGPT?