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Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks

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598 points leotravis10 | 1 comments | 04 Sep 25 15:30 UTC | HN request time: 0.204s | source
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bawolff ◴[04 Sep 25 16:49 UTC] No.45129304[source]▶
There has been this trend recently of calling Wikipedia the last good thing on the internet.

And i agree its great, i spend an inordinate amount of my time on Wikimedia related things.

But i think there is a danger here with all these articles putting Wikipedia too much on a pedestal. It isn't perfect. It isn't perfectly neutral or perfectly reliable. It has flaws.

The true best part of Wikipedia is that its a work in progress and people are working to make it a little better everyday. We shouldn't lose sight of the fact we aren't there yet. We'll never be "there". But hopefully we'll continue to be a little bit closer every day. And that is what makes Wikipedia great.

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fngjdflmdflg ◴[05 Sep 25 14:49 UTC] No.45139242[source]▶
This doesn't make sense because Wikipedia is a collection of sources, most of which are on the internet. If would be surprising if Wikipedia was a good thing but the online sources it uses are bad.
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1. phantomathkg ◴[05 Sep 25 15:03 UTC] No.45139398[source]▶
Wikipedia can be bad because it is edited by human. And because it is edited by human, the side that has more people will win.

For example, Wikipedia has a Chinese issue. [1]

Because both Traditional Chinese and Simplified Chinese both live under the Chinese language in Wiki (And we have a dropdown within Chinese wiki to choose what regional variants we want to read). There's a constant wiki edit war. This is not only happened to the political topic, but also how something should be phased. Even though Chinese officially ban access to Wikipedia by the Great Firewall, enough people VPN and manage to edit wiki pages by pages, and more annoyingly, there are more wiki admin coming from PRC than Taiwan/Hong Kong/Macau etc.

So you cannot assume Wikipedia is neutral.

[1]: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-59081611