It's a Very Bad Thing™ that Wikipedia has become such a centralized funnel for information: (a) it's governed by gatekeepers with agendas, for better or worse; (b) an article's quality is often inversely proportional to its talk page archive length—i.e. articles on controversial topics are basically worthless if you're trying to get a balanced viewpoint; (c) Wikipedia has become a bureaucratic behemoth sucking up donations; (d) it implicitly kills other competition (Wikipedia universally ranks above all other pages); (e) in many cases, sources are either fabricated outright or the source does not support the article or the source is itself more nuanced than the article (editors rarely check sources, let alone that sources themselves may be biased); (f) Wikipedia rules are enforced arbitrarily and in an ad-hoc manner (some Wiki editor communities are more hard-line than others); etc. I think Wikipedia is going to end up being a net-negative in the long run.
In the 90s, Wade would've started a website/wiki called "Female Scientists" and she would've ranked just fine on search engines. But these days, Wikipedia itself has become a cultural battleground.
The problem isn't Wikipedia though, it's Google's inability to filter all of the modern SEO crap from search results.
If Wade made a website/wiki today, it's not going to be stifled in Google results by Wikipedia. It's going to be stifled by all of the meaningless, useless content-farm or even AI-generated junk, plus ads, that Google puts at the top.
I'm not saying that filtering that stuff is easy or even achievable for Google. But the problem is not the fact that Wikipedia exists, it's the absolutely overwhelming amount of junk that is not really operating in good faith but that is really good at getting ranked in searches.
Totally agree. Google/Bing/etc. are offloading the hard work of sifting through garbage to Wikipedia. That's why the top result is always Wikipedia followed by about 3 pages of listicles and clickbait.
Heck, YouTube is linking to Wikipedia for fact-checking purposes. Is that not absolutely insane to anyone else?
(b) is something that needs to be taught in media literacy courses: for any controversial subject, always read the talk page as well as the article. Easier said than done when there are 300+ pages of archives, but there are often FAQs present to cover the biggest issues, and at any rate, who said understanding controversial topics would be easy?
But for controversial battleground subjects, I think (e) is actually not so common, because the opposing sides of edit wars do actually ruthlessly check each others’ sources, looking for any excuse to disqualify them.
Make sure to check the talk page history for large deletions. Sometimes editor disputes get swept under the rug by somebody pruning the discussion page later.
If everyone read the talk page, then edit battles would happen on the talk page itself, with people removing comments that 'weren't in the right spirit'.
This totally already happens. Well, it does for off-topic trash and personal attacks. If you go in with suggestions for improving the article (even misguided ones), your comment won’t get deleted.
> In the 90s, Wade would've started a website/wiki called "Female Scientists" and she would've ranked just fine on search engines.
Agreed - and it isn't helped by the schisms between the Mediawiki community and Wikimedia. The priorities Wikimedia have for the Mediawiki software are so focused on Wikipedia and Wikidata that any potential it had as a platform capable of forking subject areas into domain-specific sites and merging those updates back into Wikipedia has long since passed. You can see the possibility of that still floating around in old import/export features that haven't been deprecated or removed yet.
This comment is just as part of this “cultural battleground” you speak of.
No links to research that strengthens your point. We need more that just a knee jerk emotional response to articles than this.
For me this effort of Jesica Wade is noteworthy in the sense that it seems that women scientists don’t seem to get the credit they deserve. That there seems to be a need for this work.
In the 90s, Wade would've started a website/wiki called "Female Scientists" and she would've ranked just fine on search engines. But these days, Wikipedia itself has become a cultural battleground.