Wikipedia is okay for some topics, particularly if they're completely uncontroversial and lots of people edit the article (note: both conditions are necessary, just one is insufficient).
However, for anything even remotely controversial, Wikipedia is a real crapshoot. A lot of subjects are controlled by motivated cabals of editors. They may list sources, but there's no guarantee that those sources are representative, chosen in an unbiased way, etc.
If you know how the sausage is made, your trust in Wikipedia will plummet.
generally i find the opposite: controversial articles are rigorously pruned of anything even slightly dubious, while errors in uncontroversial articles remain for many years
this is because the motivated cabal includes people on opposing sides of the controversy, watching like a hawk for their opponents to make errors they can correct
I have rarely seen a balanced pair of opposing cabals. One side usually wins out, at least on individual articles.
> watching like a hawk for their opponents to make errors they can correct
This is a very idealistic view of how these battles are actually fought. Just settling for correcting the opposing side's errors would be very magnanimous. In reality, cabals usually try to get the opposing cabal's editors banned. The types of errors they look out for are violations of editing rules. Usually, both cabals are in violation of the rules, so it's really a question of which side is more effective at gaming the system. It's very common for both sides to try to bait their opponents into violating the 3-revert rule, for example.
Once one side wins, they can do pretty much anything with the article. Most articles about controversial subjects end up under the control of one side or another.
There are a lot of cases where a small minority is heavily invested in a topic at the individual level, while the majority (who have an opposing view) are not. The small minority has the incentive, the energy, and the time to keep fighting for their narrative, while nobody in the majority makes the same effort as none of them individually have as much skin in the game. This dynamic plays out all the time on Wikipedia.
Thanks for this. My biggest pet peeve is "Wikipedia is just some random dudes" given that it's so trivially easy to see where Wikipedia sources their info.
Where Wikipedia _says_ it gets its references from. You still have to double check that the links work, the content hasn't changed, and that the actual reference is referring to statements that actually agree with the argument or context ( to say nothing of the facts) in the corresponding wiki text.
If there's ever a good use for an AI in Wikipedia it would be vetting citations for at least a first order correspondence with text indexing the citation and flagging things that seem to diverge beyond some threshold.
1. Wikipedia articles are generally not single author
2. they list sources for their important claims
Such as in this case - The top 30 claim comes from the Financial Stability Board, which they linked to [1]
[1] https://www.fsb.org/wp-content/uploads/P211122.pdf