I feel like not enough people appreciate the simple fact that Wikipedia is essentially the most well-organized and complete collection of human knowledge in existence, and furthermore, it’s available to everyone who has access to the internet for free in dozens of languages.
There are tens of thousands of individuals collaborating every hour of every day to collect knowledge and share it with the rest of the world purely out of the desire to document and teach, and millions of people spending hours in the Wikipedia rabbit hole learning about subjects that they would have had no opportunity to without it.
Wikipedia is amazing. It’s the modern Library of Alexandria.
As an ex-contributor, what goes on behind the scenes is absolutely wild. If you’re ever bored and want something to take over your life… Start editing Wikipedia.
Also an ex-contributor; if you want to keep your respect for Wikipedia as a great source of well cited facts then do not look into the qualifications for being a cited source, once you dive into the citations of an article and see important facts having their citation be a random blog post on blogspot from 2003 it starts to feel a little like the Great and Powerful Oz.
You should be doing that anyway, always look at the sources if you care about the info.
As I generally read the science related pages, I have yet to find a bad citation, they are almost always from an accredited journal or other verified source. The Wikipedia chemistry section has saved me so much time and given me so much helpful info. The pages on genes and proteins are also usually amazing!
I agree, they’re awesome.
It depends, the reliable sources guidelines do get followed to a tee for controversial/edit warred articles
Me when I check some minor article and I notice some questionable things, go into the talk page, and observe the fireworks behind the scenes
Thank you for your service