7 ms·

In the 2000s, in the tech world, the open source successes that were being talked about was always Apache and Linux. When Wikipedia started gaining a bit of tr

In the 2000s, in the tech world, the open source successes that were being talked about was always Apache and Linux. When Wikipedia started gaining a bit of traction, everyone made fun of it. It was the butt of jokes in all the prime time comedy shows. And I always felt like telling the critics - "Don't you see what is happening? People all over the world are adding their own bits of knowledge and creating this huge thing way beyond what we've seen till now. It's cooperation on an international scale! By regular people! This is what the internet is all about. People, by the thousands, are contributing without asking for anything else in return. This is incredible! " A few years later, Encyclopedia Britannica, stopped their print edition. A few years after that I read that Wikipedia had surpassed even that. The amount of value Wikipedia brings to the world is incalculable. And I'm very fortunate to be alive at a time where I can witness something at this scale. Something that transcends borders and boundaries. Something that goes beyond our daily vices of politics and religion. Something that tries to bring a lot of balance and objectivity in today's polarized world. Thank you, Wikipedia.

duozerk 10mo ago
> Something that goes beyond our daily vices of politics and religion Religion maybe, and Wikipedia is indeed pretty awesome for many topics, but politics is THE bad example here. Much of the political - especially geopolitical - content on Wikipedia has a tremendous atlanticist bias.
- wwweston 10mo ago
  “atlanticist” - the culture of the enlightenment and the good that’s come from it. Wikipedia does hold ideals, that access to knowledge is a net good, that people can cooperate both in contribution and review without a dominating magisterial authority. That rational dialogue and qualification and refinement is possible, and that it’s possible to correct for bias, and see the difference between bias and agenda. Like those whose anti-enlightenment agenda is revealed when they use “atlanticist” as a slur.
  - sophacles 10mo ago
    No. One can beleive in the enlightenment ideals without placing north america, europe, and the relations between them as the most important thing. For example - one could argue (quite successfully) that the US and Europe propping up dictators in south america and middle east to secure easy access to oil against the wishes and election results of those nations is opposed to many enlightenment ideals, but it is still atlanticism by prioritizing north american and european relations and preservation of values within their little bubble. Also, just because there was much good resulting from enlightenment thinking, we also got things like the slave trade, the belgian congo, various genocides and so on from it... all of which are pretty bad. The very notion that the enlightenment had all the answers and that there is nothing more to improve or learn is itself anti-enlightenment. (I know there were abolitionists in the enlightnement,and examples of people opposed to all the other bad ideas i mentioned, but there are plenty of people who "rationally" argued for them too)
    - ultrablack 10mo ago
      Slave trade was not a product of the enlightenment. That idea is 1000s of years old.
      - wizzwizz4 10mo ago
        "The slave trade" refers to the transatlantic slave trade, not slavery in general. (Though I would question whether that really qualifies as a "product of the enlightenment": post hoc ergo propter hoc, and all that.)
- philipkglass 10mo ago
  Is there another public source for encyclopedia-type articles that is better for geopolitical content? For example, if I have a philosophy question I'll often consult the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy instead of Wikipedia. If there isn't a more neutral public source -- if there are only sources with different biases, or if the better sources are behind paywalls -- then I think that Wikipedia is still doing pretty well even for contentious geopolitical topics. Usually disputes are visible on the Talk page, regardless of whatever viewpoint may prevail in the main article. It can also be useful to jump back to years-old revisions of articles, if there are recent world events that put the subject of the article in the news. Apart from Wikipedia, speaking more generally, I think that articles with a strong editorial bias still provide useful information to an alert reader. I can read articles from Mother Jones, Newsmax, Russia Today, the BBC, Times of India, etc. and find different political and/or geopolitical slants to what is written about and how it is reported. I can also learn a lot even when I strongly disagree with the narrative thrust of what is reported. The key thing is to take any particular article or publication as only circumstantial evidence for an underlying reality, and to avoid falling into complacency even when (or especially when) the information you're reading aligns with what you already believe to be true.
- MarsIronPI 10mo ago
  In general my impression is that the longer the article title is, the more slanted the article itself is.
- defjm 10mo ago
  Could you provide an example article from Wikipedia for such bias? PS: I had to look up „atlanticist“, did this on Wikipedia. (giggle!)
  - hbn 10mo ago
    I know sometime around Trump's first presidency, in Bill Clinton's Wikipedia entry, under the Impeachment section they added in a picture of Trump and Clinton shaking hands, apropos of nothing in the surrounding text. I just checked and it's still there.
    - Cyphase 10mo ago
      Here's the change, which happened on December 5, 2016, a few weeks after Trump was elected the first time. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bill_Clinton&diff=prev&oldid=753109277 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bill_Clinton&diff... Link to the section in question: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bill_Clinton&diff=prev&oldid=753109277#Impeachment_and_acquittal https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bill_Clinton&diff... Still there as of now: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bill_Clinton&oldid=1331626499#Impeachment_and_acquittal https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bill_Clinton&oldi...
    - guelo 10mo ago
      So what?
- woodpanel 10mo ago
  Wikipedia has been the proto-Reddit for a long time, that is, it was relatively easy for ideological bubbles to manufacture the Chomskyian Consent, just by being early adopters. As such it rapidly developed into heavily biased page, as Wikipedia‘s co-founder Larry Sanger keeps pointing out. It helps if you are proficient in multiple languages so you can at least „hop“ between the (some) bubbles. But the gatekeeping is always there.
  - bawolff 10mo ago
    Larry Sanger is not the most convincing on this topic due to how he keeps using conspiracy theories as examples of things Wikipedia is biased against. Like if the complaint is that Wikipedia is biased against pseudoscience like naturopathy, i consider that a good thing.
    - woodpanel 10mo ago
      [flagged]
- _moof 10mo ago
  Are you talking about English Wikipedia, or all of the Wikipedia sites?
20k 10mo ago
If I want to look something up, I always check out wikipedia first. Its not always accurate, but its invariably a lot more accurate on most topics than random information across the web. Its also pretty easy to spot bad quality wiki articles once you get the gist of the site Its amazing that wikipedia exists - there've been multiple hardcore attempts to kill it over the years for profit, but its still managing to go
- jbki 10mo ago
  Wikipedia is often the last on my goto resources to consult. The information is huge, but writing quality or style often irks me more than I can stand. I I always check Britannica first. If it's not there, then I move on.
  - lostlogin 10mo ago
    Does this relate to a particular domain or field? I find it so good, and on the rare occasion I’ve found something wrong, I’ve fixed it.
    - jbki 10mo ago
      [dead]
      - johnisgood 10mo ago
        What about https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamond https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamond?
        jbki 10mo ago
        I in fact sometimes do switch to simple english
        layer8 10mo ago
        The introductory paragraph in Simple English is: 'A diamond (from the ancient Greek αδάμας – adámas "unbreakable") is a re-arrangement of carbon atoms (those are called allotropes).' Seriously? Compare with the Britannica one: 'diamond, a mineral composed of pure carbon. It is the hardest naturally occurring substance known; it is also the most popular gemstone. Because of their extreme hardness, diamonds have a number of important industrial applications.' Britannica concisely summarizes the basic knowledge about diamonds in an easy-to-read short paragraph.
seawsurf 10mo ago
Wikipedia is surely a formidable source of knowledge, but > Something that goes beyond our daily vices of politics and religion. You are romanticizing. Wikipedia is a corporation, just like Work or University, and I personally assume anything corporate is being manipulated by the owners or the ruling oligarchy because they are structurally unreliable. This is especially veritable for Wikipedia. Create an account there and try to go deeper into the articles about politics, literature and war.
- shevy-java 10mo ago
  > Wikipedia is a corporation, and I personally assume anything corporate is being manipulated by the owners or the ruling oligarchy because they are structurally unreliable. Many articles are fine. I don't think you can equate this to all of Wikipedia automatically.
- tb_technical 10mo ago
  The remote viewing article keeps being reverted as pseudoscientific when original research conducted by the CIA is cited. Such citations are removed swiftly. Any changes are denied or rolled back. The rationale is that, even though the documents themselves are a primary source from an organization that poured significant resources into researching the phenomenon of remote viewing, the individual posting the declassified document isn't an authority on the subject. Apparently if youre not a doctor, you can't read primary sources? Many such cases. Wikipedia is absolutely a powerful resource, but it it's clearly controlled by moderators with a bias, and there's no incentive to challenge said bias or consider alternative worldviews.
  - gcanyon 10mo ago
    I haven’t looked at the article in question, but is there enough material to make an article specifically about the CIA research programs?
    - tb_technical 10mo ago
      There already is a separate wikipedia article about the specific program. It is an extensive article. If you look up "Stargate CIA" in any search engine you'll find it easily. There is a large amount of data on this topic. Literally hundreds of pages of reports and summaries of experiments written over decades of effort (if memory serves). The CIA was trying to use the phenomenon to view distant targets with mediums. It was deemed ineffective, and discontinued in the 90s. Even today there are people attempting to replicate remote viewing and prove it as a phenomenon. For the record, I do not believe this phenomenon is as effective as is claimed. Regardless there is a chance that remote viewing (also known as astral projection) is just something the human brain commonly imagines in some populations. It might be an emergent property of human brains reacting to certain input stimulus, like ASMR. Regardless, the article written about remote viewing as a concept should be allowed to cite documents about how the Stargate program defined and tested remote viewing (their methodologies, etc). But editors, like all humans, have bias. There was a similar kerfuffle that happened about a decade and a half ago about homeopathy. It lead to an edit thread where one of the founders of Wikipedia was cursing about how fake something was. The only objection I have to this, is that primary sources relevant to an article should be allowed to be cited. If a study, whitepaper, or report is widely discredited - include that too. The sum of human knowledge needs to include what we know to be false as well.
ilhanomar 10mo ago
[dead]
drysine 10mo ago
>Something that tries to bring a lot of balance and objectivity in today's polarized world. And fails spectacularly.
behringer 10mo ago
Wikipedia is one of the greatest projects people have indeavored on. It has certainly surpassed the pyramids as one of the great wonders of the world, in usefulness, size and scope and human hours.
JKCalhoun 10mo ago
"By regular people!" I'm not sure about that. I think people who are experts in specific areas (and/or are obsessed with those topics) are the ones contributing to Wikipedia. Wikipedia is amazing.
vee-kay 10mo ago
Wikipedia is extremely biased and has a lot of deliberate misinformation, so I wouldn't trust it for anything except as a basic starting point for information gathering alongside a web search. Wikipedia's founder itself has denounced it for its bias.
- nephihaha 10mo ago
  There are so many issues with Wikipedia which most people do not discuss here. I have witnessed dozens of articles deleted by people who had no understanding of the subject in question. In one case, someone went around deleting articles on rugby union, because the teams were not professional (most of them aren't to this day and weren't officially into the 1990s.)
andruby 10mo ago
I fondly remember visiting Wikipedia HQ in Jan 2012. It was amazing to see how small their "operation" was :) Back then they had 474M monthly unique visitors, 83,444 active contributors and a staff of less than 100. I'm still blown away by the collaboration. To me, that was the promise of "Web 2.0". On the kitchen door they hung xkcd 903, 906 and another webcomic mentioning that only 13% of updates to Wikipedia are from women (can't find the source). The wifi password back then was "knowledgeshouldbefree" (maybe it still is?) https://xkcd.com/903/ https://xkcd.com/903/ https://xkcd.com/906/ https://xkcd.com/906/
- nephihaha 10mo ago
  Because they don't pay 99.9% of the people who effectively work for them.
  - andruby 10mo ago
    What's your point? I think it's amazing that people are contributing to a shared knowledge base without needing payment.
    - nephihaha 10mo ago
      If no one gets paid, no one can pay for anything. What are they supposed to live off? Thin air, welfare/benefits or inherited money. At least the people who write Britannica get to make a living. I edited Wikipedia for many years and have seen how it has (d)evolved into an oligarchy. I have absolutely nothing to show for it, and now I see companies using it to build products which they do make money off. They are making money off my work (and others). I am glad that I did get to make sure Wikipedia covered certain subjects, but it was not a rewarding experience otherwise. I've sold fanzines and published stuff in hard copy, and they made a little money. Not enough to live off but far more rewarding than my Wikipedia interactions.
nephihaha 10mo ago
"People, by the thousands, are contributing without asking for anything else in return. This is incredible!" It's unpaid labour, and has created a precedent elsewhere. It seems to be okay in our society to have lots of unpaid labour but not unpaid bills. A lot of Wikipedia's content is monetised elsewhere as is IMDB's. Then there is Wikipedia's odd circular relationship with Google. Articles are "verified" (sic) by Google but Wikipedia is where most Google searches now lead. "Something that tries to bring a lot of balance and objectivity in today's polarized world." That view is extremely optimistic. There are still umpteen gaps and biases on Wikipedia, some of which have been created by the administrators themselves.

duozerk 10mo ago

> Something that goes beyond our daily vices of politics and religion Religion maybe, and Wikipedia is indeed pretty awesome for many topics, but politics is THE bad example here. Much of the political - especially geopolitical - content on Wikipedia has a tremendous atlanticist bias.

wwweston 10mo ago
“atlanticist” - the culture of the enlightenment and the good that’s come from it. Wikipedia does hold ideals, that access to knowledge is a net good, that people can cooperate both in contribution and review without a dominating magisterial authority. That rational dialogue and qualification and refinement is possible, and that it’s possible to correct for bias, and see the difference between bias and agenda. Like those whose anti-enlightenment agenda is revealed when they use “atlanticist” as a slur.
- sophacles 10mo ago
  No. One can beleive in the enlightenment ideals without placing north america, europe, and the relations between them as the most important thing. For example - one could argue (quite successfully) that the US and Europe propping up dictators in south america and middle east to secure easy access to oil against the wishes and election results of those nations is opposed to many enlightenment ideals, but it is still atlanticism by prioritizing north american and european relations and preservation of values within their little bubble. Also, just because there was much good resulting from enlightenment thinking, we also got things like the slave trade, the belgian congo, various genocides and so on from it... all of which are pretty bad. The very notion that the enlightenment had all the answers and that there is nothing more to improve or learn is itself anti-enlightenment. (I know there were abolitionists in the enlightnement,and examples of people opposed to all the other bad ideas i mentioned, but there are plenty of people who "rationally" argued for them too)
  - ultrablack 10mo ago
    Slave trade was not a product of the enlightenment. That idea is 1000s of years old.
    - wizzwizz4 10mo ago
      "The slave trade" refers to the transatlantic slave trade, not slavery in general. (Though I would question whether that really qualifies as a "product of the enlightenment": post hoc ergo propter hoc, and all that.)
philipkglass 10mo ago
Is there another public source for encyclopedia-type articles that is better for geopolitical content? For example, if I have a philosophy question I'll often consult the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy instead of Wikipedia. If there isn't a more neutral public source -- if there are only sources with different biases, or if the better sources are behind paywalls -- then I think that Wikipedia is still doing pretty well even for contentious geopolitical topics. Usually disputes are visible on the Talk page, regardless of whatever viewpoint may prevail in the main article. It can also be useful to jump back to years-old revisions of articles, if there are recent world events that put the subject of the article in the news. Apart from Wikipedia, speaking more generally, I think that articles with a strong editorial bias still provide useful information to an alert reader. I can read articles from Mother Jones, Newsmax, Russia Today, the BBC, Times of India, etc. and find different political and/or geopolitical slants to what is written about and how it is reported. I can also learn a lot even when I strongly disagree with the narrative thrust of what is reported. The key thing is to take any particular article or publication as only circumstantial evidence for an underlying reality, and to avoid falling into complacency even when (or especially when) the information you're reading aligns with what you already believe to be true.
MarsIronPI 10mo ago
In general my impression is that the longer the article title is, the more slanted the article itself is.
defjm 10mo ago
Could you provide an example article from Wikipedia for such bias? PS: I had to look up „atlanticist“, did this on Wikipedia. (giggle!)
- hbn 10mo ago
  I know sometime around Trump's first presidency, in Bill Clinton's Wikipedia entry, under the Impeachment section they added in a picture of Trump and Clinton shaking hands, apropos of nothing in the surrounding text. I just checked and it's still there.
  - Cyphase 10mo ago
    Here's the change, which happened on December 5, 2016, a few weeks after Trump was elected the first time. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bill_Clinton&diff=prev&oldid=753109277 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bill_Clinton&diff... Link to the section in question: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bill_Clinton&diff=prev&oldid=753109277#Impeachment_and_acquittal https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bill_Clinton&diff... Still there as of now: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bill_Clinton&oldid=1331626499#Impeachment_and_acquittal https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bill_Clinton&oldi...
  - guelo 10mo ago
    So what?
woodpanel 10mo ago
Wikipedia has been the proto-Reddit for a long time, that is, it was relatively easy for ideological bubbles to manufacture the Chomskyian Consent, just by being early adopters. As such it rapidly developed into heavily biased page, as Wikipedia‘s co-founder Larry Sanger keeps pointing out. It helps if you are proficient in multiple languages so you can at least „hop“ between the (some) bubbles. But the gatekeeping is always there.
- bawolff 10mo ago
  Larry Sanger is not the most convincing on this topic due to how he keeps using conspiracy theories as examples of things Wikipedia is biased against. Like if the complaint is that Wikipedia is biased against pseudoscience like naturopathy, i consider that a good thing.
  - woodpanel 10mo ago
    [flagged]
_moof 10mo ago
Are you talking about English Wikipedia, or all of the Wikipedia sites?

20k 10mo ago

If I want to look something up, I always check out wikipedia first. Its not always accurate, but its invariably a lot more accurate on most topics than random information across the web. Its also pretty easy to spot bad quality wiki articles once you get the gist of the site Its amazing that wikipedia exists - there've been multiple hardcore attempts to kill it over the years for profit, but its still managing to go

jbki 10mo ago
Wikipedia is often the last on my goto resources to consult. The information is huge, but writing quality or style often irks me more than I can stand. I I always check Britannica first. If it's not there, then I move on.
- lostlogin 10mo ago
  Does this relate to a particular domain or field? I find it so good, and on the rare occasion I’ve found something wrong, I’ve fixed it.
  - jbki 10mo ago
    [dead]
    - johnisgood 10mo ago
      What about https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamond https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamond?
      - jbki 10mo ago
        I in fact sometimes do switch to simple english
      - layer8 10mo ago
        The introductory paragraph in Simple English is: 'A diamond (from the ancient Greek αδάμας – adámas "unbreakable") is a re-arrangement of carbon atoms (those are called allotropes).' Seriously? Compare with the Britannica one: 'diamond, a mineral composed of pure carbon. It is the hardest naturally occurring substance known; it is also the most popular gemstone. Because of their extreme hardness, diamonds have a number of important industrial applications.' Britannica concisely summarizes the basic knowledge about diamonds in an easy-to-read short paragraph.

seawsurf 10mo ago

Wikipedia is surely a formidable source of knowledge, but > Something that goes beyond our daily vices of politics and religion. You are romanticizing. Wikipedia is a corporation, just like Work or University, and I personally assume anything corporate is being manipulated by the owners or the ruling oligarchy because they are structurally unreliable. This is especially veritable for Wikipedia. Create an account there and try to go deeper into the articles about politics, literature and war.

shevy-java 10mo ago
> Wikipedia is a corporation, and I personally assume anything corporate is being manipulated by the owners or the ruling oligarchy because they are structurally unreliable. Many articles are fine. I don't think you can equate this to all of Wikipedia automatically.
tb_technical 10mo ago
The remote viewing article keeps being reverted as pseudoscientific when original research conducted by the CIA is cited. Such citations are removed swiftly. Any changes are denied or rolled back. The rationale is that, even though the documents themselves are a primary source from an organization that poured significant resources into researching the phenomenon of remote viewing, the individual posting the declassified document isn't an authority on the subject. Apparently if youre not a doctor, you can't read primary sources? Many such cases. Wikipedia is absolutely a powerful resource, but it it's clearly controlled by moderators with a bias, and there's no incentive to challenge said bias or consider alternative worldviews.
- gcanyon 10mo ago
  I haven’t looked at the article in question, but is there enough material to make an article specifically about the CIA research programs?
  - tb_technical 10mo ago
    There already is a separate wikipedia article about the specific program. It is an extensive article. If you look up "Stargate CIA" in any search engine you'll find it easily. There is a large amount of data on this topic. Literally hundreds of pages of reports and summaries of experiments written over decades of effort (if memory serves). The CIA was trying to use the phenomenon to view distant targets with mediums. It was deemed ineffective, and discontinued in the 90s. Even today there are people attempting to replicate remote viewing and prove it as a phenomenon. For the record, I do not believe this phenomenon is as effective as is claimed. Regardless there is a chance that remote viewing (also known as astral projection) is just something the human brain commonly imagines in some populations. It might be an emergent property of human brains reacting to certain input stimulus, like ASMR. Regardless, the article written about remote viewing as a concept should be allowed to cite documents about how the Stargate program defined and tested remote viewing (their methodologies, etc). But editors, like all humans, have bias. There was a similar kerfuffle that happened about a decade and a half ago about homeopathy. It lead to an edit thread where one of the founders of Wikipedia was cursing about how fake something was. The only objection I have to this, is that primary sources relevant to an article should be allowed to be cited. If a study, whitepaper, or report is widely discredited - include that too. The sum of human knowledge needs to include what we know to be false as well.

ilhanomar 10mo ago

[dead]

drysine 10mo ago

>Something that tries to bring a lot of balance and objectivity in today's polarized world. And fails spectacularly.

behringer 10mo ago

Wikipedia is one of the greatest projects people have indeavored on. It has certainly surpassed the pyramids as one of the great wonders of the world, in usefulness, size and scope and human hours.

JKCalhoun 10mo ago

"By regular people!" I'm not sure about that. I think people who are experts in specific areas (and/or are obsessed with those topics) are the ones contributing to Wikipedia. Wikipedia is amazing.

vee-kay 10mo ago

Wikipedia is extremely biased and has a lot of deliberate misinformation, so I wouldn't trust it for anything except as a basic starting point for information gathering alongside a web search. Wikipedia's founder itself has denounced it for its bias.

nephihaha 10mo ago
There are so many issues with Wikipedia which most people do not discuss here. I have witnessed dozens of articles deleted by people who had no understanding of the subject in question. In one case, someone went around deleting articles on rugby union, because the teams were not professional (most of them aren't to this day and weren't officially into the 1990s.)

andruby 10mo ago

I fondly remember visiting Wikipedia HQ in Jan 2012. It was amazing to see how small their "operation" was :) Back then they had 474M monthly unique visitors, 83,444 active contributors and a staff of less than 100. I'm still blown away by the collaboration. To me, that was the promise of "Web 2.0". On the kitchen door they hung xkcd 903, 906 and another webcomic mentioning that only 13% of updates to Wikipedia are from women (can't find the source). The wifi password back then was "knowledgeshouldbefree" (maybe it still is?) https://xkcd.com/903/ https://xkcd.com/903/ https://xkcd.com/906/ https://xkcd.com/906/

nephihaha 10mo ago
Because they don't pay 99.9% of the people who effectively work for them.
- andruby 10mo ago
  What's your point? I think it's amazing that people are contributing to a shared knowledge base without needing payment.
  - nephihaha 10mo ago
    If no one gets paid, no one can pay for anything. What are they supposed to live off? Thin air, welfare/benefits or inherited money. At least the people who write Britannica get to make a living. I edited Wikipedia for many years and have seen how it has (d)evolved into an oligarchy. I have absolutely nothing to show for it, and now I see companies using it to build products which they do make money off. They are making money off my work (and others). I am glad that I did get to make sure Wikipedia covered certain subjects, but it was not a rewarding experience otherwise. I've sold fanzines and published stuff in hard copy, and they made a little money. Not enough to live off but far more rewarding than my Wikipedia interactions.

nephihaha 10mo ago

"People, by the thousands, are contributing without asking for anything else in return. This is incredible!" It's unpaid labour, and has created a precedent elsewhere. It seems to be okay in our society to have lots of unpaid labour but not unpaid bills. A lot of Wikipedia's content is monetised elsewhere as is IMDB's. Then there is Wikipedia's odd circular relationship with Google. Articles are "verified" (sic) by Google but Wikipedia is where most Google searches now lead. "Something that tries to bring a lot of balance and objectivity in today's polarized world." That view is extremely optimistic. There are still umpteen gaps and biases on Wikipedia, some of which have been created by the administrators themselves.