Dan, I cannot applaud you enough for writing this. You give eloquent expression to my own gratitude for Wikipedia and its *daily* presence in my life. As a writer, and simply a citizen of the world interested in learning, I turn to it constantly to learn and be informed. It’s why I’ve also chosen for years to be one of its many financial contributors. I contribute because Wikipedia gives me hope for mankind. It gives me heart. Thank you again, Dan.
I am not a prolific Wikipedia editor, but I have enough experience that it informs some of the big issues. First, if you want to teach a young adult to read and write, Wikipedia is a great exercise. I wish this had been available to me when I was young. The policies enforce a discipline which are a necessary condition for every kind of writing: faithfully read the text and rewrite the content in your own words. I hope I am not confessing to stupidity here, but this was hard for me to learn.
The strength of Wikipedia has little to do with trust and truth. Reliability is the highest achievable standard given the plethora of volunteer and often anonymous content creators. The credibility of the editor is irrelevant, as it should be. Every valid Wikipedia edit is merely a rewording from a reliable source. When editing does not meet that standard, it's junk. So an enormous reform effort is incremental; that is, it consists of editors citing sources and re-writing content to make it consistent with a reliable source. That does not make it true, but it does direct readers to sources so that they are in a better position to evaluate its truthfulness.
I’m a retired librarian and wiki user since the 1990’s. It is and always has been a gift which overlaps with the credo of public librarianship. I’m proud to support them. These days I often reflect that of all the techbros, Wikipedia is the only one that didn’t be(come) evil.
Thought provoking piece, Dan. All I do with Wikipedia is read it a lot, and make occasional financial contributions - and I feel better about both, having read your post.
Disclaimer, I'm a long-time critic of Wikipedia. I hope I'm a "thoughtful" one, but never mind. And I don't want to spend all day writing a critique which will have no effect, so grant me some charity to hit some high points, and be blunt.
If you have never tried to edit a controversial Wikipedia article, you have no idea of the insanity behind the facade. Sorry, it's disqualifying in my view. It's something that needs to be experienced directly and personally. And of course, to some Wikipedia-boosters, that then invalidates the critic - which is part of the point of the criticism.
"However energetic this one editor is, however bad his efforts may be, he is the equivalent of a vandal spray-painting graffiti on the side of a battleship." - NO! THIS IS FALSE! He was not an aberration, but a very high-ranking, extremely well-protected and senior member. He regularly abused his position to harass people, and got away with it. The relevant analogy is much more akin to the corrupt officials in Trump's administration, not "one bad apple".
"Let's make Wikipedia better.". That can't be done. The entire structure of it is designed to reward petty power-tripping and worse. Again, are you going to try to make the Trump administration better?
Moreover, you're making what I call the "cockroach" argument. That is, if you dine at a restaurant, and you find a big cockroach in your food, it's not a good defense for the owner to say: "But that's only one cockroach - you don't see any other cockroaches, do you? In fact, let's not blow this out of proportion. We have to keep it in perspective. The rest of these meals, without cockroachs that you can see, are pretty good, aren't they?". To be clear, the idea is if you see one big cockroach in your food, there's probably a horde of others around somewhere.
Eh, this is long enough. You may mean well, but you're still working too much from the PR of Wikipedia, and not enough from the analysis that the serious critics have done (which I'll grant is sometimes lost in the culture war).
Thanks for referring to Wales as "co-founder" here though. It's the right thing to do.
On editing: I've spoken to lots and lots and lots of people who have edited, including going out of my way to find people frustrated by the process. In other words, I did journalism the way journalism is always done. If you think that's disqualifying, your beef is with journalism, not me. (And I think you're wrong.)
As to much that follows, even if I grant you all you say is perfect reflection of reality, why does that lead it "it can't be improved?" I don't get it.
On cockroaches: Public health regulations typically allow some level of contamination or whatever because perfection is impossible in human affairs. And if that were the standard, not only would all the restaurants be closed, so would all the food production. And we'd be dead. I'm pro staying alive. Controversial, I know, but there it is.
Re: the "co-founder" thing. I thought about including something about that little controversy but forgot. I know people love to obsess over such things. Writing historian, particularly technology history, I encounter heaps of that sort of "controversy." I think it's silly, in general, and it's particularly silly here -- because Wikipedia wasn't created by Jimmy Wales and/or Larry Sanger, it was created by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger and dozens and dozens of others who were in at the beginning. And even more to the point: the beginning was just the beginning. The real answer to the question, "who founded Wikipedia" is "millions of people." So, sorry, I just don't care about that label one way or the other.
[look out the window == try editing controversial articles]
It can't be improved because the very structure of Wikipedia denigrates expertise in a topic. That's directly what goes wrong in one of your proposals. The joking way of describing this is Wikipedia's unofficial motto is "experts are scum". That anti-expert aspect is intrinsic to how it works. This is a long-time critic point which doesn't seem to ever get through.
I most strongly disagree with your characterization about "silly". It's matter of someone much more powerful taking away deserved credit from someone much less powerful. Another part of journalism is "comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable." (not the reverse!)
On the old saying: There's only one weather outside. If you go and look, that's it. What you are describing is not that, which is perfectly obvious if you imagine me saying, "I tried editing and it was easy therefore the complaints are false." I cannot believe you are arguing that that is a serious diagnostic!
And I really, really don't want to engage the "founder" debate. Which, yes, I think is silly. Why? Because it's the title isn't defined and the criteria aren't defined so it's a completely subjective judgement. In other words, two perfectly reasonable, fair-minded people, may investigate the facts and come to opposite conclusions, and there's no way to decide who's right (provided neither has made factual errors). In other other words, there's a case to be made for co-founder, there's a case to be made for founder, and reasonable people can and will differ. And... it doesn't matter. Neither of them built Wikipedia. Millions did.
I have to agree with Seth on some of these points.
I've edited Wikipedia for 20 years. I continue to edit because of my belief in the optimistic points that you highlight, like the worldwide, communal effort to publish a multilingual encyclopedia. However, disturbing trends in narrative bias emerged that weren't around 20 years ago. It baffles me that people minimize this problem because it's grown into a quiet yet insidious disease of confidence and trust, which is the basis of your book with Wales.
Seth is not complaining that editing is too easy. My experience has been that the editorial process is too easily moderated towards narrative bias. Detecting this bias demands an enormous cognitive load in critical thinking and disposition on the part of editors like me.
Al-star examples of editorial bias are found in Gamergate, Twitter Files, and cultural Marxism articles. There's been a decent amount of coverage online about the history of these articles' revisions. Or just take a look at each articles' Talk discussions.
I rarely edit content on these because they're too controversial for me. But I've edited far less controversial articles and am baffled at the reasons that moderating editors revert my changes, yet allow other content through.
One revision I made cited a brief to the Supreme Court to balance out an article's sources. My source were lawyers arguing against a cited claim in the Wikipedia article. The article cited a journalist who claimed argument A, and the lawyers claimed argument B. I didn't redact argument A because I believe multiple perspectives demonstrate a neutral view, which is a part of Wikipedia guidelines. But the moderating editor redacted my addition of argument B. We might be able to dismiss this as an undecided case still in oral argument, which it was at the time that I made the edit. Yet fast-forward a few months and the Court sided with argument B. So I made my edit again, this time stating that SCOTUS itself had ruled for argument B -- against the journalist's argument. Now, this moderating editor has a choice: will they redact my edit despite it being legal precedence? It baffles me that I have to keep on top of these kinds of bias, where a journalist's argument is weighted more heavily than a lawyer filing briefs to the highest court in our country.
This isn't an isolated example of one bad moderator or lead editor. There is a reform needed, yes! for neutral editors who think critically. Of the controversial articles, I edited the Twitter Files. I'd followed that since the news broke, and 4 years of citing journalists' coverage and key figures opinions about the Twitter Files should have created a robust article. It didn't. My critical read noticed a glaring bias. Despite 7 printed pages of content in the Wiki article, only 1 sentence referred to the 17,000 page investigation by the bipartisan US House select committee, and only 1 sentence referred to 3 federal Courts who reviewed the evidence. Both government institution's conclusions were waft aside by editors as Big Nothing-burgers -- eerily similar to the original response by many people back in 2022. Time will tell if my edits that expanded the coverage of the government's conclusions about the controversial topic will hold against editorial reversions. The larger point in this example is the casual reader cannot notice the de-amplification of important, reliable sources because of the noise from a deluge of cited journalists.
Too often, controversial topics are bent towards a narrative bias in Wikipedia. Some are easier to detect, like sources citing one argument in a court case rather than the other argument. Other biases require close and critical reading to detect. The cognitive load to detect these biases fall on editors to correct. I've grown too tired to read Wikipedia articles closely and make a substantial edit based on reliable sources. It's just easier to let biased editors paraphrase CNN, the NYTs, the Guardian, or any journalist. This hyper-reliance on citing the coverage of journalists rather than experts, like lawyers and judges in my example above, has snowballed into an insidious problem of trust for the encyclopedia.
So when Seth said "very structure of Wikipedia denigrates expertise in a topic", I'd clarify that the guidelines, stylebooks, and governing mechanism appear OK on paper, but in actuality have not scaled to meet the shifts in politicized rhetoric that emerged since Wikipedia was born. You plugged Sanger, and I agree that re-basing Wikipedia as a platform of debate -- as competing articles -- is wrong. But interestingly, you opted to include both Sanger and Wales in your write-up. I suspect you see some value in letting your readers hear both guys' arguments. There is value in hearing multiple perspectives, especially when an encyclopedia claims to be neutral.
I am not a fan of how some of the money is spent (financing the lifestyles of some of the Valley elite, for example, is not high on my priority list). But I recognise that nothing is perfect and the whole thing, and the whole thing's independence, are of such value to humanity that I keep supporting it with my money as well as some of my time.
You can take issue with aspects of how anything is run and still have faith that they are worth trying to fix and that the project as a whole is worth continuing.
Come to think of it, this reminds me of something else we've come to take for granted recently. What was it called again?
Great explanation for the viability of Wikipedia on its birthday. It has certainly been a godsend in my life for getting important, and sometimes, not so important, as in trivial, info when I needed it, during the last 25 years.
However, being the Pollyanna that I am, I like to think that if Jimmy Wales got hit by a bus, (or jumped into the river at Bedford Falls), somebody else would have come along to create Wikipedia or similar. It developed to meet a need; the necessity of providing a rapidly and instantly connected world that was waking up and demanding to have more and more info about itself. ❤️🇨🇦
Certainly. Self-interested actors -- sometimes very well-funded and sophisticated -- have been trying to manipulate Wikipedia since it got big c.2005. It's a never-ending threat.
Very well thought through Mr Gardner. It's rare that I fully agreecwith anyone, I am a bit of a grouch. But you are totally right here. Nice work. I hope it is widely shared.
I think you need to make a list of good big things on the internet- there’s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ArXiv?wprov=sfti1#. Then there’s the Linux os, and tens of thousands of many years of software available for anyone for free.
Wikipedia is great but is not the only good thing.
I take your point -- there's lots that good on the Internet -- but I think you miss mine: None is a giant on the scale of Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, etc. Except Wikipedia.
This confusion between operations and editorial mimics the eternal fight over the CBC in Ottawa. We see it in Hansard records constantly. The government sends over $1 billion to the broadcaster annually. The law says politicians cannot touch the newsrooms. But the money link creates a perception of bias that no law can fix. Your idea to move Wikimedia to Switzerland is smart. Physical distance is often the only way to prove you are truly independent.
I don’t think there is evidence of “systemic bias” throughout English Wikipedia. And the X-crowd hand-wringing about the site as a whole is misplaced, if their position was some version of “you can’t trust anything on wiki”.
OTOH, it’s a different accusation if the contention is directional bias on contentious issues. That might be considered “anecdote” as a reflection of the entire project, but may amount to something more substantial with regards to the specific topic of discussion.
And anecdotes of hyper-partisan editors who are incredibly active within very specific domains (as demonstrated by Woodgrains) would seem to lend credence to that POV. It doesn’t impugn the whole project of 7 million articles, but it should trigger some caveat emptor around some hot-button stuff.
(Edit: btw, here is another “anecdote” by Woodgrains…)
Dan, I cannot applaud you enough for writing this. You give eloquent expression to my own gratitude for Wikipedia and its *daily* presence in my life. As a writer, and simply a citizen of the world interested in learning, I turn to it constantly to learn and be informed. It’s why I’ve also chosen for years to be one of its many financial contributors. I contribute because Wikipedia gives me hope for mankind. It gives me heart. Thank you again, Dan.
I am not a prolific Wikipedia editor, but I have enough experience that it informs some of the big issues. First, if you want to teach a young adult to read and write, Wikipedia is a great exercise. I wish this had been available to me when I was young. The policies enforce a discipline which are a necessary condition for every kind of writing: faithfully read the text and rewrite the content in your own words. I hope I am not confessing to stupidity here, but this was hard for me to learn.
The strength of Wikipedia has little to do with trust and truth. Reliability is the highest achievable standard given the plethora of volunteer and often anonymous content creators. The credibility of the editor is irrelevant, as it should be. Every valid Wikipedia edit is merely a rewording from a reliable source. When editing does not meet that standard, it's junk. So an enormous reform effort is incremental; that is, it consists of editors citing sources and re-writing content to make it consistent with a reliable source. That does not make it true, but it does direct readers to sources so that they are in a better position to evaluate its truthfulness.
I’m a retired librarian and wiki user since the 1990’s. It is and always has been a gift which overlaps with the credo of public librarianship. I’m proud to support them. These days I often reflect that of all the techbros, Wikipedia is the only one that didn’t be(come) evil.
like a voice in the wilderness. now I can entertain the pleasant thought that I have voices in my head, after all these years :)
thanks for doing what you do to uphold the spirit of us all.
Thought provoking piece, Dan. All I do with Wikipedia is read it a lot, and make occasional financial contributions - and I feel better about both, having read your post.
Excellent detailed piece
Disclaimer, I'm a long-time critic of Wikipedia. I hope I'm a "thoughtful" one, but never mind. And I don't want to spend all day writing a critique which will have no effect, so grant me some charity to hit some high points, and be blunt.
If you have never tried to edit a controversial Wikipedia article, you have no idea of the insanity behind the facade. Sorry, it's disqualifying in my view. It's something that needs to be experienced directly and personally. And of course, to some Wikipedia-boosters, that then invalidates the critic - which is part of the point of the criticism.
"However energetic this one editor is, however bad his efforts may be, he is the equivalent of a vandal spray-painting graffiti on the side of a battleship." - NO! THIS IS FALSE! He was not an aberration, but a very high-ranking, extremely well-protected and senior member. He regularly abused his position to harass people, and got away with it. The relevant analogy is much more akin to the corrupt officials in Trump's administration, not "one bad apple".
"Let's make Wikipedia better.". That can't be done. The entire structure of it is designed to reward petty power-tripping and worse. Again, are you going to try to make the Trump administration better?
Moreover, you're making what I call the "cockroach" argument. That is, if you dine at a restaurant, and you find a big cockroach in your food, it's not a good defense for the owner to say: "But that's only one cockroach - you don't see any other cockroaches, do you? In fact, let's not blow this out of proportion. We have to keep it in perspective. The rest of these meals, without cockroachs that you can see, are pretty good, aren't they?". To be clear, the idea is if you see one big cockroach in your food, there's probably a horde of others around somewhere.
Eh, this is long enough. You may mean well, but you're still working too much from the PR of Wikipedia, and not enough from the analysis that the serious critics have done (which I'll grant is sometimes lost in the culture war).
Thanks for referring to Wales as "co-founder" here though. It's the right thing to do.
On editing: I've spoken to lots and lots and lots of people who have edited, including going out of my way to find people frustrated by the process. In other words, I did journalism the way journalism is always done. If you think that's disqualifying, your beef is with journalism, not me. (And I think you're wrong.)
As to much that follows, even if I grant you all you say is perfect reflection of reality, why does that lead it "it can't be improved?" I don't get it.
On cockroaches: Public health regulations typically allow some level of contamination or whatever because perfection is impossible in human affairs. And if that were the standard, not only would all the restaurants be closed, so would all the food production. And we'd be dead. I'm pro staying alive. Controversial, I know, but there it is.
Re: the "co-founder" thing. I thought about including something about that little controversy but forgot. I know people love to obsess over such things. Writing historian, particularly technology history, I encounter heaps of that sort of "controversy." I think it's silly, in general, and it's particularly silly here -- because Wikipedia wasn't created by Jimmy Wales and/or Larry Sanger, it was created by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger and dozens and dozens of others who were in at the beginning. And even more to the point: the beginning was just the beginning. The real answer to the question, "who founded Wikipedia" is "millions of people." So, sorry, I just don't care about that label one way or the other.
"If One Person Says It's Raining and Another Says It's Not Raining Then the Journalist Should Look Out the Window and Report the Truth"
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2023/11/14/rain-look/
[look out the window == try editing controversial articles]
It can't be improved because the very structure of Wikipedia denigrates expertise in a topic. That's directly what goes wrong in one of your proposals. The joking way of describing this is Wikipedia's unofficial motto is "experts are scum". That anti-expert aspect is intrinsic to how it works. This is a long-time critic point which doesn't seem to ever get through.
I most strongly disagree with your characterization about "silly". It's matter of someone much more powerful taking away deserved credit from someone much less powerful. Another part of journalism is "comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable." (not the reverse!)
On the old saying: There's only one weather outside. If you go and look, that's it. What you are describing is not that, which is perfectly obvious if you imagine me saying, "I tried editing and it was easy therefore the complaints are false." I cannot believe you are arguing that that is a serious diagnostic!
And I really, really don't want to engage the "founder" debate. Which, yes, I think is silly. Why? Because it's the title isn't defined and the criteria aren't defined so it's a completely subjective judgement. In other words, two perfectly reasonable, fair-minded people, may investigate the facts and come to opposite conclusions, and there's no way to decide who's right (provided neither has made factual errors). In other other words, there's a case to be made for co-founder, there's a case to be made for founder, and reasonable people can and will differ. And... it doesn't matter. Neither of them built Wikipedia. Millions did.
As I said, I'm just hitting the high points, apply charity, PLEASE.
Forget it. I give up. I have nothing to gain from this, and I can indeed lose.
I appreciate the pushback. You’re always substantive. I wish everyone were..
I have to agree with Seth on some of these points.
I've edited Wikipedia for 20 years. I continue to edit because of my belief in the optimistic points that you highlight, like the worldwide, communal effort to publish a multilingual encyclopedia. However, disturbing trends in narrative bias emerged that weren't around 20 years ago. It baffles me that people minimize this problem because it's grown into a quiet yet insidious disease of confidence and trust, which is the basis of your book with Wales.
Seth is not complaining that editing is too easy. My experience has been that the editorial process is too easily moderated towards narrative bias. Detecting this bias demands an enormous cognitive load in critical thinking and disposition on the part of editors like me.
Al-star examples of editorial bias are found in Gamergate, Twitter Files, and cultural Marxism articles. There's been a decent amount of coverage online about the history of these articles' revisions. Or just take a look at each articles' Talk discussions.
I rarely edit content on these because they're too controversial for me. But I've edited far less controversial articles and am baffled at the reasons that moderating editors revert my changes, yet allow other content through.
One revision I made cited a brief to the Supreme Court to balance out an article's sources. My source were lawyers arguing against a cited claim in the Wikipedia article. The article cited a journalist who claimed argument A, and the lawyers claimed argument B. I didn't redact argument A because I believe multiple perspectives demonstrate a neutral view, which is a part of Wikipedia guidelines. But the moderating editor redacted my addition of argument B. We might be able to dismiss this as an undecided case still in oral argument, which it was at the time that I made the edit. Yet fast-forward a few months and the Court sided with argument B. So I made my edit again, this time stating that SCOTUS itself had ruled for argument B -- against the journalist's argument. Now, this moderating editor has a choice: will they redact my edit despite it being legal precedence? It baffles me that I have to keep on top of these kinds of bias, where a journalist's argument is weighted more heavily than a lawyer filing briefs to the highest court in our country.
This isn't an isolated example of one bad moderator or lead editor. There is a reform needed, yes! for neutral editors who think critically. Of the controversial articles, I edited the Twitter Files. I'd followed that since the news broke, and 4 years of citing journalists' coverage and key figures opinions about the Twitter Files should have created a robust article. It didn't. My critical read noticed a glaring bias. Despite 7 printed pages of content in the Wiki article, only 1 sentence referred to the 17,000 page investigation by the bipartisan US House select committee, and only 1 sentence referred to 3 federal Courts who reviewed the evidence. Both government institution's conclusions were waft aside by editors as Big Nothing-burgers -- eerily similar to the original response by many people back in 2022. Time will tell if my edits that expanded the coverage of the government's conclusions about the controversial topic will hold against editorial reversions. The larger point in this example is the casual reader cannot notice the de-amplification of important, reliable sources because of the noise from a deluge of cited journalists.
Too often, controversial topics are bent towards a narrative bias in Wikipedia. Some are easier to detect, like sources citing one argument in a court case rather than the other argument. Other biases require close and critical reading to detect. The cognitive load to detect these biases fall on editors to correct. I've grown too tired to read Wikipedia articles closely and make a substantial edit based on reliable sources. It's just easier to let biased editors paraphrase CNN, the NYTs, the Guardian, or any journalist. This hyper-reliance on citing the coverage of journalists rather than experts, like lawyers and judges in my example above, has snowballed into an insidious problem of trust for the encyclopedia.
So when Seth said "very structure of Wikipedia denigrates expertise in a topic", I'd clarify that the guidelines, stylebooks, and governing mechanism appear OK on paper, but in actuality have not scaled to meet the shifts in politicized rhetoric that emerged since Wikipedia was born. You plugged Sanger, and I agree that re-basing Wikipedia as a platform of debate -- as competing articles -- is wrong. But interestingly, you opted to include both Sanger and Wales in your write-up. I suspect you see some value in letting your readers hear both guys' arguments. There is value in hearing multiple perspectives, especially when an encyclopedia claims to be neutral.
I am not a fan of how some of the money is spent (financing the lifestyles of some of the Valley elite, for example, is not high on my priority list). But I recognise that nothing is perfect and the whole thing, and the whole thing's independence, are of such value to humanity that I keep supporting it with my money as well as some of my time.
You can take issue with aspects of how anything is run and still have faith that they are worth trying to fix and that the project as a whole is worth continuing.
Come to think of it, this reminds me of something else we've come to take for granted recently. What was it called again?
Oh, right: democracy.
Great explanation for the viability of Wikipedia on its birthday. It has certainly been a godsend in my life for getting important, and sometimes, not so important, as in trivial, info when I needed it, during the last 25 years.
However, being the Pollyanna that I am, I like to think that if Jimmy Wales got hit by a bus, (or jumped into the river at Bedford Falls), somebody else would have come along to create Wikipedia or similar. It developed to meet a need; the necessity of providing a rapidly and instantly connected world that was waking up and demanding to have more and more info about itself. ❤️🇨🇦
https://www.neutralpov.com/p/inside-irans-wikipedia-war
Again not systemic bias.
But you find a hot button topic, and sometimes you get malfeasance
Certainly. Self-interested actors -- sometimes very well-funded and sophisticated -- have been trying to manipulate Wikipedia since it got big c.2005. It's a never-ending threat.
Very well thought through Mr Gardner. It's rare that I fully agreecwith anyone, I am a bit of a grouch. But you are totally right here. Nice work. I hope it is widely shared.
Wow! I am convinced. Thank you for sharing this perspective on Wikipedia. It gives me hope!
Dan
I think you need to make a list of good big things on the internet- there’s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ArXiv?wprov=sfti1#. Then there’s the Linux os, and tens of thousands of many years of software available for anyone for free.
Wikipedia is great but is not the only good thing.
I take your point -- there's lots that good on the Internet -- but I think you miss mine: None is a giant on the scale of Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, etc. Except Wikipedia.
It would be very interesting to know the scale of the various web entities that are in some form public knowledge repositories.
This confusion between operations and editorial mimics the eternal fight over the CBC in Ottawa. We see it in Hansard records constantly. The government sends over $1 billion to the broadcaster annually. The law says politicians cannot touch the newsrooms. But the money link creates a perception of bias that no law can fix. Your idea to move Wikimedia to Switzerland is smart. Physical distance is often the only way to prove you are truly independent.
Thanks for the article. I learned a lot about a service I use a lot and now appreciate a whole lot more.
Terrific piece, I found myself agreeing with virtually everything.(Rare for me!) Thanks
This is a well argued piece.
I don’t think there is evidence of “systemic bias” throughout English Wikipedia. And the X-crowd hand-wringing about the site as a whole is misplaced, if their position was some version of “you can’t trust anything on wiki”.
OTOH, it’s a different accusation if the contention is directional bias on contentious issues. That might be considered “anecdote” as a reflection of the entire project, but may amount to something more substantial with regards to the specific topic of discussion.
And anecdotes of hyper-partisan editors who are incredibly active within very specific domains (as demonstrated by Woodgrains) would seem to lend credence to that POV. It doesn’t impugn the whole project of 7 million articles, but it should trigger some caveat emptor around some hot-button stuff.
(Edit: btw, here is another “anecdote” by Woodgrains…)
https://open.substack.com/pub/tracingwoodgrains/p/how-wikipedia-whitewashes-mao?r=pbogx&utm_medium=ios&shareImageVariant=overlay