Interesting take—but unfortunately, there have been a bunch of well-documented instances of people or companies trying to edit their own Wikipedia page, to make it fit their preferred narrative a bit better. I think moderation by benevolent, experienced editors plays a fairly large role, and that has to be a beneficient one when they have no dogs in the fight. On the partisan / political stuff though—it does come out in the form of a general liberal bias (MSM-like, you might almost say). On topics where the two camps are of roughly equal strength (say Palestino-Isrealian conflict) the result is somewhat underwhelming too. Yes—there is great attention given to factual accuracy, but the need to not fit any narrative, be it of one side or the other, generally results in articles that lack intellectual structure and clarity (both of which require a writer to make some narrative choices, at some point). I donate to it almost every year, nonetheless, because as you point out : not many institutions have had any long-term, massive success in keeping alive the values of what the internet was first supposed to be.
Interesting take—but unfortunately, there have been a bunch of well-documented instances of people or companies trying to edit their own Wikipedia page, to make it fit their preferred narrative a bit better. I think moderation by benevolent, experienced editors plays a fairly large role, and that has to be a beneficient one when they have no dogs in the fight. On the partisan / political stuff though—it does come out in the form of a general liberal bias (MSM-like, you might almost say). On topics where the two camps are of roughly equal strength (say Palestino-Isrealian conflict) the result is somewhat underwhelming too. Yes—there is great attention given to factual accuracy, but the need to not fit any narrative, be it of one side or the other, generally results in articles that lack intellectual structure and clarity (both of which require a writer to make some narrative choices, at some point). I donate to it almost every year, nonetheless, because as you point out : not many institutions have had any long-term, massive success in keeping alive the values of what the internet was first supposed to be.