From Paul Furber at Brainstorm:
Wikipedia lost at least 300 million views in 2015, dropping it from the fifth most viewed website on the planet down to the tenth. This is a good thing for a number of reasons. It started as a good idea in 2001 — an encyclopaedia that anyone could edit. Unfortunately, it’s now a quagmire of bureaucracy, infighting, corruption and agenda-pushing.
Try to edit any article that an established editor regards as their pet project and you’ll find your edits reverted in double quick time, regardless of whether you have reliable sources for your edit. Complain about this and you’ll get banned. You personally may be a reliable source, but that won’t matter: Wikipedia doesn’t even allow people to correct information about themselves unless it comes from a third party.
Some editors are untouchable no matter how many rules they break. And the number of arbitrary rules behind the scenes is staggering, all of them tagged with strange acronyms like WP:BLP and WP:NPOV. More.
The moral of the story is, creative disorganization is fun but it is still disorganization, and that matters.
Co-ordinated smoke signals would be a big improvement.
See also: How Wikipedia can turn fiction into fact (Sourced enough times, the fiction becomes “troo”)
Wikipedia hacked by elite sources now (The main problem is that the people who use Wikipedia do not care whether it is false or true. “Wikipedia is my library” is the new diagnostic for irresponsible laziness.)
and
Mathematician complains Wikipedia is promoting “pseudo-science” of multiverse (Then there were the minor revelations that core articles “don’t earn even Wikipedia’s own middle-ranking quality scores” and that some “editors” are paid by outside sources.)
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