Combining the current-ness and expansiveness of current research and journalism with the connectedness and cohesiveness of an encyclopedia is, without a questio

Combining the current-ness and expansiveness of current research and journalism with the connectedness and cohesiveness of an encyclopedia is, without a question, a revolutionary product. But I think when people say that Wikipedia is "accurate" and "reliable", they mean nothing more or less than that it's a faithful rendition of what you'd get if you grind up a certain set of secondary sources into a slop and bake it into a homogeneous pie. Within any given article, the mistakes in Wikipedia are nothing more or less than you would see slip through in a random mainstream newpaper or academic journal. Wikipedia feels like a grand unified "view from nowhere". In a scientific journal, you can speak with a neutral point of view, representing the consensus of experts in that field. But when your scope is "everything", who are the domain experts? Is it the domain experts for the specific page (who may have fringe views about adjacent topics), or is it the editors who have a shallow consensus about everything, despite not being experts on the page in question? ...and ultimately, why do we take it as a given that this question can be meaningfully resolved?