Wikipedia is bad even for topics that aren't particularly political, not even because the editor was trying to be misleading but rather was being lazy and wrote up their own misconception and either made up a source or pulled a source without bothering to actually read it. These kind of errors can stay in place for years.
I have one example that I check periodically just to see if anybody else has noticed. I've been checking it for several years and it's still there; the SDI page claims that Brilliant Pebbles was designed to use "watermelon sized" tungsten projectiles. This is completely made up; whoever wrote it up was probably confusing "rods from god" proposals that commonly use tungsten and synthesizing that confusion with "pebbles". The sentence is cited but the sources don't back it up. It's been up like this for years. This error has been repeated on many websites now, all post-dating the change on wikipedia.
If you're reading this and are the sort to edit wikipedia.. Don't fix it. That would be cheating.
> If you're reading this and are the sort to edit wikipedia.. Don't fix it. That would be cheating.
Imagine if this was the ethos regarding open source software projects. Imaging Microsoft saying 20 years ago, "Linux has this and that bug, but you're not allowed to go fix it because that detracts from our criticism of open source." (Actually, I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft or similar detractors literally said this.)
Of course Wikipedia has wrong information. Most open source software projects, even the best, have buggy, shite code. But these things are better understood not as products, but as processes, and in many (but not all) contexts the product at any point in time has generally proven, in a broad sense, to outperform their cathedral alternatives. But the process breaks down when pervasive cynicism and nihilism reduce the number of well-intentioned people who positively engage and contribute, rather than complain from the sidelines. Then we land right back to square 0. And maybe you're too young to remember what the world was like at square 0, but it sucked in terms of knowledge accessibility, notwithstanding the small number of outstanding resources--but which were often inaccessible because of cost or other barriers.
I have one example that I check periodically just to see if anybody else has noticed. I've been checking it for several years and it's still there; the SDI page claims that Brilliant Pebbles was designed to use "watermelon sized" tungsten projectiles. This is completely made up; whoever wrote it up was probably confusing "rods from god" proposals that commonly use tungsten and synthesizing that confusion with "pebbles". The sentence is cited but the sources don't back it up. It's been up like this for years. This error has been repeated on many websites now, all post-dating the change on wikipedia.
If you're reading this and are the sort to edit wikipedia.. Don't fix it. That would be cheating.