But this takes significant effort (like, a half-day of research to sort out one claim), and then sometimes back and forth with other Wikipedians to convince people that you actually chased down the real story.
The problem is that for every mistake someone is willing to put effort into fixing, there are another 100 that nobody ever notices.
So much criticism of wikipedia seems to come down to: wikipedia did X. I think X is wrong. Other people don't see it that way. I don't want to spend the time proving my point. How dare wikipedia not just take me, a random internet stranger, at my word.
All i want to know is how do y'all think it could possibly work differently? Everybody thinks they are right. Nobody intentionally is wrong. Obviously if you just show up, unwilling to explain why you are right or unwilling to accept compelling counter arguments to your point, its not going to go your way. Why would anybody think it would?
Activists are willing to invest orders of magnitude more time, energy, and discomfort into winning. They are willing to break most social norms to have their narrative become the default. They're willing to suppress facts that would support alternate narratives. They're willing to put their thumb on the scale when inconvenient facts are unavoidable. Et cetera.
Non-activists are not willing to do any of those things.
It's not about right or wrong, it's about activism: who engages in it and how much.
But sure, let's let the activists win—or force everyone to become activists to "compete". I'm sure that'll make the world a better place.
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Or we could ban activism since it is fundamentally anti-social bullying behavior. Maybe make a "code of conduct" that prohibits it. Just spitballing here…
It's pretty simple to identify activists mechanically (and at scale): they are in the fat part of the power law for contributions. Simply limit people's ability to contribute and et voilà !, the activism problem has been vastly reduced, if not eliminated. Non-activists now have a chance.
For example, in Australia there is a body that does sport participation statistics, Ausplay. They do this every year. It's a great source for sport statistics on Australia.
Two wikipedians decided that these statistics were not permissible in the sport in Australia article. They won :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Sport_in_Australia#RFC_on...
This is sport in Australia, which is not that controversial. Now things that are controversial like IQ or the role of heritability in ability are surely going to be problematic.
And an end result of No Consensus.
Framing this as if 2 Wikipedians exercising outsized power to produce this ruling seems disingenuous at best. And their basic objection (I only bothered skimming) of bias and ambiguity in the source/data/methodology seems fairly reasonable on its face; whether it’s correct I have no idea but it’d be a reasonable objection
As a policy, this whole thing seems like good behavior; the only gap is in the lack of voting participants. I suppose it is a real problem if the vote can’t be recast when more people are willing, but otherwise
FYI this kind of "wrong think" is already being removed in many articles. The way it's removed is applying the existing deep and numerous rules more strictly to information which cuts against the current dominant cultural narratives. For one of the best examples I can provide, have a look at how the "Feminism" and "Men's Rights" pages are written. Completely different standards for evidence, commentary, style, and even sections. Criticism of men's rights is evident in the heading, while of course, there is no criticism of feminism in Feminism's heading.
Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger has described Wikipedia as "badly biased." He's 100% correct.
Sometimes the discussion will have the same correction listed but overruled by partisan Wikipedians.
You could equally well say “I find obvious errors in textbooks / lecture videos / journal articles / paper encyclopedias / ... all the time but it’s too hard to contact the author so I don’t do anything about it”.
The main difference is that in Wikipedia you can do something about it with some extra effort. So it’s actually a much better situation than most kinds of resources.
The pages that are “locked” are usually locked because they are spam magnets. Not allowing IP edits is unfortunate (and does discourage simple corrections to articles), but in the highest traffic parts of the site the work saved from not having to revert dozens of low-effort vandal posts is (at least arguably) worth the downside.
> overruled by partisan
You wouldn’t believe the amount of abject nonsense and spam that gets cleaned up by those “partisans”. But Wikipedia is an open project, the “partisans” here are just other (slightly more experienced) volunteers not in any way fundamentally different from yourself, and if you can convincingly prove your case via polite conversation you will win the argument (if there is a local dispute it’s generally possible to get more eyeballs on it by escalating to a broader group of volunteers).
* * *
P.S. someone named Slartibartfast turning down a chance to work on the real-life Hitchhiker’s Guide?
For former encourages the behaviour of finding other sources that are reliable. The latter encourages quoting Wikipedia without citing it.
