If I told you that there is a website where anyone can create any username and edit the content. Subject matter experts, industry consensus, or research is actually ignored. What they do rely upon are secondary sources and only if they project a certain bias. And if these users do this long enough, they gain enough browny points to become credible editors. Would you refer to such a website for information? I should hope not. But, that is exactly what happens on Wikipedia. And that is also the reason why page visits to Wikipedia has declined tremendously.
So, a couple of days ago, my friend asked me about my surname and wanted to know where it came from and why it sounds "funny". I pointed him to a wikipedia link that explains the whole thing. Or at least that's what the page did a few years ago. This friend came back to me and said there's nothing relevant on that page, just a couple of lines.
I took a look at it. A similar thing happened with another friend of mine who wanted to know something about someone's history. So, I just pointed them to a wiki link and said read on your own. Amazingly, that page had been vandalized too. Now, vandalism is normal on wikipedia. But, vandalism from "vigilante" editors is just as common.
Being a history buff, I tried to correct the historical page, but a really angry editor reverted my changes and gave me a warning. So, I supplied
tens of citations including books, websites, and so on. But, he clearly didn't want the page changed. He seemed really obsessed. This person was a westerner and he seemed hell bent on removing any mention of anything historical happening before the birth of Christ. So, he kept reverting any changes to this page. By the way, pages on wikipedia can be protected, so he could have done that instead of being angry.
Now, the problem with wikipedia is that there is really no escape from this kind of a thing. Anyone can create a username, use the anonymity to make changes, and then run away. Some of these vandals have become editors and then they really let their darkside on to wikipedia. In fact, wikipedia's content is highly biased and that has not gone unnoticed as can be seen on this
Bloomberg Article. Also, subject matter experts are generally ignored as can be understood from this
article on NPR.
On top of that, you'd think that wikipedia could simply hire or request subject matter experts to clean content up every few months. Instead, they have allowed this free for all where just because someone doesn't "believe" something, they can project their insecurities on to a site that was meant to supply knowledge. Editors have their own biases as has been admitted by one on
reddit.
So essentially, wikipedia supplies incomplete information written and edited by non-experts. Needless to say, Wikipedia has lost all of its credibility. And it will continue to do so even within the US where most of its views come from because it has made no efforts to fix any of its issues. And if Wikipedia was meant to be a democratized forum for knowledge sharing, it no longer holds that distinction.
