[Video] Wikipedia is Perishing as an Authoritative Source, It's Being Overrun by Public Relations (PR) and Professional Propagandists
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Instead of Improving Wikipedia Gets Worse Over Time
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TODAY'S main (or 'feature') video covers the Wikipedia situation [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]. It mentions wiki software (I've used many over the years, even at the back end), Wikileaks, and wikis as a concept. The general conundrum isn't new. But it's getting worse. The crisis deepens. Some wikis are bloated and they have a spam issue, which further contributes to database bloat. Having installed and managed many wikis for 20 years, with various different implementations, I am getting fed up. In Wikipedia, it's a sordid mess, both the technical side and the contents. The schema and backward compatibility are a mess; I know this based on personal experiences and research done last year (trying to make wikis less resource-hungry).
The corollary or overall conclusion is that Wikipedia has been getting worse as a function of its supposed 'popularity' (number of readers) because the temptation to corrupt it, using money as an instrument of influence, continues to grow. Persistent edit wars favour those who have deeper pockets and hence more "patience" (salaries to edit).
What we have left of Wikipedia right now is a repository of many articles, in many different languages, whose editors include many Public Relations (PR) agencies rather than domain experts, especially when it comes to politics and business.
Power corrupts. Money corrupts too. Wikipedia has become corrupt and the foundation behind Wikipedia is an instrument of oligarchy.
This isn't where we were led to believe Wikipedia would go. The idea that as many editors as possible would get things right overlooks the corrupting power of money. Wikipedia's parent entity is happy to take loads of money from megacorporations and oligarchs, with a special "taste" for Western ones.
Wikipedia is not the worst site. It's not. But stop treating it as an objective, authoritative source. It's not the ground truth or holy grail, it's just a site that any shill can tamper with. Many articles in Wikipedia are marketing and sometimes people or companies write the pages about themselves.
As I note in the video, even Wikipedia's own co-founder keeps blasting Wikipedia and what it has become. █