Wikipedia itself isn't bad. The issue is that as a result of its structure and Wikimedia's various overlapping efforts, a lot of people simply don't recall that encyclopedias aren't meant to be a universal resource for detailed research (but rather introductory), and worse they don't tend to follow references or citations.
Resources for obtaining special-purpose knowledge have just about been washed up in favor of skimming Wikipedia's generalities, which may foster incomplete or incorrect understanding of complex topics, in turn leading to memes that people regurgitate in other contexts.
In this way Wikipedia has the potential of becoming Minitrue. I've pondered on the implications of systemically planting subtle factual distortions in tens of thousands of articles over periods of time, but since you hear about some edit war or pompous bureaucrat imposing their agenda every other day, it might already be happening in a less dramatic fashion.
One of the major problems that is that Wikipedia is not just an encyclopedia, but is also used as a news archive. These two different products have different audiences and should have different features. For example, an encyclopedia usually is a fact-checked summary of events, whereas a news archive is a stream of all news events, that doesn't require factchecking. Much of the complaints above arise from powerful groups in Wikipedia trying to control the fact-checking aspect of the site, when all most people need is the news archive part.
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Wikipedia itself isn't bad. The issue is that as a result of its structure and Wikimedia's various overlapping efforts, a lot of people simply don't recall that encyclopedias aren't meant to be a universal resource for detailed research (but rather introductory), and worse they don't tend to follow references or citations.
Resources for obtaining special-purpose knowledge have just about been washed up in favor of skimming Wikipedia's generalities, which may foster incomplete or incorrect understanding of complex topics, in turn leading to memes that people regurgitate in other contexts.
In this way Wikipedia has the potential of becoming Minitrue. I've pondered on the implications of systemically planting subtle factual distortions in tens of thousands of articles over periods of time, but since you hear about some edit war or pompous bureaucrat imposing their agenda every other day, it might already be happening in a less dramatic fashion.
One of the major problems that is that Wikipedia is not just an encyclopedia, but is also used as a news archive. These two different products have different audiences and should have different features. For example, an encyclopedia usually is a fact-checked summary of events, whereas a news archive is a stream of all news events, that doesn't require factchecking. Much of the complaints above arise from powerful groups in Wikipedia trying to control the fact-checking aspect of the site, when all most people need is the news archive part.
My site, Newslines, is an attempt to build a new archive without Wikipedia's biases. You may be interested in this analysis: http://newslines.org/blog/wikipedias-13-deadly-sins/