This was, I think, a reasonable characterisation of wikipedia in the early days. Things are very different now.
You have to navigate a gauntlet of deletionistas, poorly defined rules, gatekeepers, and political biases. I gave up a couple of years ago. The most difficult aspect is the arbitrary rules about what sources are authoritative and what are not.
One small example: You are (or were when I looked) required to refer to male genital mutilation as “circumcision” and are not allowed to refer to it as “male genital mutilation”. The female version may not be referred to as “circumcision” and must be called “female genital mutilation”. The opinions of the doctors who make money from this operation on males must be deferred to as definitive. Basically I found everything was like this.
You are not allowed to refer to primary sources such as journal articles but must only refer to secondary sources such as textbooks or newspapers, which are often out of date, biased or wrong. You have the ridiculous situation where people have tried to correct their own date of birth by supplying a copy of their birth certificate and this was rejected. In at least one case, the person had to arrange for their date of birth to be mentioned in a newspaper and then it was accepted.
In fields where there is no political controversy things are not so bad. But you are still subject to the deletionistas who will find any possible reason to nuke your hard work. And wikipedia’s view that there is a definitive version of the truth on any given issue makes it utterly hopeless at covering anything that is controversial. I am certain that wikipedia of the early C17 would be presenting the geocentric view of the universe as definitively true.
You are not allowed to refer to primary sources such as journal articles but must only refer to secondary sources such as textbooks or newspapers
This is not true. I could drone on about the Official Policy but maybe the better rule-of-thumb is:
(1) Don’t edit articles to push one side of an existing hot-button political issue, it’s hopeless unless you have a ton of wikipedia experience and a ton of free time,
(2) If you write things that are correct and widely-accepted, they’re pretty unlikely to be deleted, regardless of what source you cite, or even if you cite no source at all. If other people don’t like the sourcing but do like the text you wrote, they’re more likely to improve the sourcing than to delete the text.
(3) ChristianKI’s advice was actually posting on the talk page rather than editing the article directly, which is always a good bet. And if the article is so neglected that nobody does anything about your talk-page comment, then that’s a good sign that you can probably just go and edit the article without anyone bothering you.
One small example: You are (or were when I looked) required to refer to male genital mutilation as “circumcision” and are not allowed to refer to it as “male genital mutilation”. The female version may not be referred to as “circumcision” and must be called “female genital mutilation”.
I’m not sure what you were expecting. There are a gazillion people who think “circumcision” is the obviously correct term, and a gazillion other people who think “genital mutilation” is the obviously correct term. Of course there’s going to be an Official Policy on this, settled long long ago, otherwise people would spend all day in endless “edit wars” where one person changes it, and the other changes it back, and the first one changes it back again, around and around forever. You’re welcome to think that the Official Policy is wrong, but I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect that you can just easily “fix this problem” the way you can easily fix other problems on wikipedia pages.
wikipedia’s view that there is a definitive version of the truth on any given issue makes it utterly hopeless at covering anything that is controversial.
I don’t think that’s fair, I think there are lots of articles that present both sides of a controversy pretty well, for example minimum wage seems pretty good.
In fields where there is no political controversy things are not so bad. But you are still subject to the deletionistas who will find any possible reason to nuke your hard work.
I don’t want to say this never happens. I think you need a sufficiently “thick skin” that if 10% of your edits are deleted for stupid reasons, you’re generally happy about the other 90%, not stewing over the 10%.
(1) Don’t edit articles to push one side of an existing hot-button political issue, it’s hopeless unless you have a ton of wikipedia experience and a ton of free time
While editing such articles isn’t useful, if it’s a hot-button issue you are likely not the only person who cares about the issue. Showing that you think that things should be changed on the talk page matters.
You don’t have to fight the complete fight. Simply stating your position is helpful for establishing consensus for a change.
Hot button issues are not decided by the views of a single person.
I’m not sure what you were expecting. There are a gazillion people who think “circumcision” is the obviously correct term, and a gazillion other people who think “genital mutilation” is the obviously correct term. Of course there’s going to be an Official Policy on this, settled long long ago, otherwise people would spend all day in endless “edit wars”
Sure, but the point was about the double standard of using “circumcision” for one side an “genital mutilation” for the other It’s ok to have an official policy, but you’d expect it to be justified and consistent.
Sure, but the point was about the double standard of using “circumcision” for one side an “genital mutilation”
If you make the decision which term to use based on the merits of the term that’s a valid point. That’s not Wikipedia’s policy. Wikipedia’s policy is to use words the way they generally used.
Take a look at Google ngrams for “male genital mutilation” and “female genital mutilation”. The difference between usage is two orders of magnitude. Most people use the term circumcision in the male case and not in the female case and it’s Wikipedia’s rule to go with what has most usage. That rule is consistently applied in this case.
This happens also for political correct language that someone proposes and that differs with general use. The guidelines around talking about suicide (at least when I saw the discussion) for example go for terms that are in common usage and not the political correct ones that are engineered to reduce the chance of people committing suicide.
Having a Wikipedia that says “You might have an argument for why term X is benefitial over term Y for political reasons such as equality but we don’t care we go for the common usage.” is a useful heuristic to prevent a bunch of social justice activism from creeping into Wikipedia.
Complaining on the one hand that Wikipedia’s policy are biased towards the left and then objecting to Wikipedia valuing the principle of equality not enough is not very consistent. You need policies to fight people who come and tell you “obesity is a discriminatory term, the political correct term is X”.
It’s also relevant that “circumcision” is a fairly accurate description of what is done to boys, but not of most of the things that are done to girls; and that many of the things done to girls are more severe in their effects than circumcision. So it’s not at all obvious that calling the thing done to boys “circumcision” and the thing done to girls “mutilation” is wrong; they are not at all the same thing, the word “circumcision” is more appropriate to the former than to the latter, and the word “mutilation” is more appropriate to the latter than to the former.
(To be clear, I am not saying that you’re wrong if you call what is done to boys “mutilation” [EDITED to add: or, more to the point, that Vanilla_cabs is]. Only that using different terminology in the two cases doesn’t need to be a double standard; it suffices to be picky about the meaning of “circumcision” or restrictive about what you call “mutilation” or both.)
It’s also relevant that “circumcision” is a fairly accurate description of what is done to boys, but not of most of the things that are done to girls; and that many of the things done to girls are more severe in their effects than circumcision.
It’s relevant to the merits of using the term in general, but’s it’s completely irrelevant from the policy decision in Wikipedia. The policy decision inside Wikipedia is about what terms people actually use outside of Wikipedia.
If someone wants to change the usage of a term with a similar pattern in Google nGrams in Wikipedia they are very unlikely to succeed even if they have really good arguments (like in the case of suicide).
Yes, to be clear, I meant relevant to this discussion and specifically to Vanilla_cabs’s complaint that Wikipedia’s policy amounts to a double standard. The policy of using the most widely used terms could produce unfairly inconsistent results, if the populace at large were biased (e.g., differential outrage for things affecting men vs things affecting women, or for things associated with “Western” religions versus things associated with “weird foreign” religions), or if different topics were commonly discussed by different groups of people (e.g., if cutting off foreskins were widely talked about among the populace at large but cutting off clitorises were more commonly a concern of anthropologists) -- but in the present case it’s not clear that even that is true; one could plausibly arrive at the same terminological decisions as Wikipedia while having fairness and consistency as important goals.
(I agree that even if this weren’t so, there wouldn’t be much prospect of changing Wikipedia’s usage.)
one could plausibly arrive at the same terminological decisions as Wikipedia while having fairness and consistency as important goals.
While that’s true, when interacting with Wikipedia it’s useful to have an accurate model of how it functions. If you just look at the reasoning for why those terms might be generally good for society to use, you will likely be surprised when you are exposed to another conflict in Wikipedia over terms.
Even if there are good arguments for another term the answer is “If the wide society uses a bad term, engage with society Wikipedia isn’t the place for activism”.
I was trying to address it by saying: There are some areas where Wikipedia has flaws and there’s little or nothing we can do about it; there are other areas where Wikipedia has flaws and we can help fix them without too much effort and it can be very impactful and good. The point of (that part of) my comment was to point out that if you see the circumcision-vs-GM thing as a flaw, it would be a flaw that’s in the first category (i.e. practically unfixable), and we should shrug and move on, and we shouldn’t generalize from that to forget that the second category also exists.
The point of (that part of) my comment was to point out that if you see the circumcision-vs-GM thing as a flaw, it would be a flaw that’s in the first category (i.e. practically unfixable), and we should shrug and move on, and we shouldn’t generalize from that to forget that the second category also exists.
Whether or not the circumcision-vs-GM thing is a flaw depends what the purpose of Wikipedia happens to be. You might want Wikipedia to have a different purpose then it has, but I think that having an entity with the purpose for which Wikipedia was created is valuable.
Your argumention why it’s a flaw was also clearly faulty because it’s not about what terms the doctors who perform the procedure want to use.
There’s some complexity from seperating “X is a flaw according to my values” from “X is a flaw according to Wikipedia’s values” but it’s doable. And I do things that an institution with Wikipedia’s values provides value to society.
(If you look at what I wrote, I have never stated any opinion about whether it’s a flaw or not. It’s not relevant to the narrow point I wanted to make. You’re welcome to argue about it with other people.)
Wikipedia’s articles on circumcision and FGM include coverage of the ethical controversy both around the practice (in the case of male circumcision) and the colonialism inherent in the name (in the case of FGM).
Their page on source selection states:
“ Many Wikipedia articles rely on scholarly material. When available, academic and peer-reviewed publications, scholarly monographs, and textbooks are usually the most reliable sources. However, some scholarly material may be outdated, in competition with alternative theories, or controversial within the relevant field. Try to cite current scholarly consensus when available, recognizing that this is often absent. Reliable non-academic sources may also be used in articles about scholarly issues, particularly material from high-quality mainstream publications. Deciding which sources are appropriate depends on context.”
If you are alone you need to understand the rules reasonably well.
What I propose here is just to raise issues on talk pages and if someone else already wrote something make a new argument. Often this doesn’t take long.
You are not allowed to refer to primary sources such as journal articles but must only refer to secondary sources such as textbooks or newspapers, which are often out of date, biased or wrong.
Rules in Wikipedia are a matter of consensus. If you care about the rules it’s easy to give your opinion when rule changes get proposed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Feedback_request_service is a way to register yourself to get regularly a message on your talk page for one rules discussion. While a user that only participates in rule discussion and nothing else is likely seen as a bit dubious, if you write short messages on the talk page whenever you think something should be improved,
One small example: You are (or were when I looked) required to refer to male genital mutilation as “circumcision” and are not allowed to refer to it as “male genital mutilation”.
Wikipedia’s rule is to use the terms that are most commonly used by authoritative sources out in the world. Given how language is used out in the world it’s often not consistent.
It doesn’t matter whether it’s a hot button political issue or an unpolitical one’s like deciding whether to use the greek or latin name for an anatomical structure where things would get easier when latin names get used consistently.
The opinions of the doctors who make money from this operation on males must be deferred to as definitive.
That’s not true. If you could for example argue that authoritatie sources like the New York Times and the Washington Post use another term then the doctors you have a case within the rules of Wikipedia.
While you can argue that rules should be different (and you actually can argue that in RFC’s in Wikipedia) it’s deferring to authoritative sources is a rule that works for finding consensus.
And wikipedia’s view that there is a definitive version of the truth on any given issue makes it utterly hopeless at covering anything that is controversial.
I think this misunderstands Wikipedia. Wikipedia’s goal isn’t truth but to reflect the current consensus among good sources. This is argued quite explicitely.
I do think that a place where I can go when I want to read the consensus among good sources about a topic is valuable.
It an openly known fact that mainstream media leans heavily on one side of the political spectrum. This makes it very difficult to find “authoritative” sources that tell a certain side of the story on a lot of topics.
As a habit, when I want to edit a page, I check the talk page. On any topic that the mainstream media touches (not only politics, but also critical reviews of movies, etc.), it is often longer than the article, and riddled with nitpicks and gotchas. I don’t want to waste my time on arguing there, and I think that’s the intended effect.
On any topic that the mainstream media touches (not only politics, but also critical reviews of movies, etc.), it is often longer than the article
Fun fact, a couple years ago, as background research for a blog post I was writing, I read the entire archives of Talk:Cold fusion, literally starting at Archive 1 and continuing through all 48 (maybe 44 at the time or whatever) pages. It was possibly the most boring thing I’ve ever done. Every now and then there was a new reference or argument, but mostly the same arguments were rehashed over, and over, and over, across the generations, as old arguers would quit or get banned, and they’d be replaced by newcomers on each side of the debate. :-P
It an openly known fact that mainstream media leans heavily on one side of the political spectrum. This makes it very difficult to find “authoritative” sources that tell a certain side of the story on a lot of topics.
It’s true that there are topics where it’s hard to find sources that qualify for Wikipedia and those aren’t good fights to be had. However there are plenty of cases where sources are available.
Talk pages are about discourse between different people. The amount of people on both sides matters for how conflicts are resolved. If someone else already made an argument adding your position in addition is helpful.
The amount of people on both sides matters for how conflicts are resolved. If someone else already made an argument adding your position in addition is helpful.
On controversial topics, a few persons arguing can already produce an article’s length of points. How can a newcomer weigh in? There is (generally) no vote. You can just add more points. For those points to have a slight chance of being relevant, you need to read all the discussion and the rules referred to. And then someone will point that you forgot a yet-unmentioned-rule, and your words will only add to the noise and make it more difficult for the next one to weigh in.
There’s no formal vote but if you have a page where two people have a long discussion of A vs B and a few other people take position A (and write a sensible comment—“I support A” might not be enough) but no additional person takes position B according to Wikipedia policy there’s consensus for A.
Then when the page gets changed to A it’s invalid for anybody to switch it to B. The lines around what counts as consensus are a bit fuzzy but in general that’s the decision making process. If people don’t agree on what consensus is conflicts can be escalated.
This seems a little harsh. Sure Wikipedia has many rules, mostly to prevent bias or people pushing agendas. It’s not perfect, but in general I have found it to be a reliable, neutral source of information especially in controversial subjects such as Middle East politics for example.
And as the original poster says, if you find something inaccurate, spend 5 minutes to give back and fix it. I have made hundreds of small edits and maybe only a handful have been deleted / rolled back
I can’t talk about your specific examples of course but I would trust (cited) articles on Wikipedia above most sources on the web.
This was, I think, a reasonable characterisation of wikipedia in the early days. Things are very different now.
You have to navigate a gauntlet of deletionistas, poorly defined rules, gatekeepers, and political biases. I gave up a couple of years ago. The most difficult aspect is the arbitrary rules about what sources are authoritative and what are not.
One small example: You are (or were when I looked) required to refer to male genital mutilation as “circumcision” and are not allowed to refer to it as “male genital mutilation”. The female version may not be referred to as “circumcision” and must be called “female genital mutilation”. The opinions of the doctors who make money from this operation on males must be deferred to as definitive. Basically I found everything was like this.
You are not allowed to refer to primary sources such as journal articles but must only refer to secondary sources such as textbooks or newspapers, which are often out of date, biased or wrong. You have the ridiculous situation where people have tried to correct their own date of birth by supplying a copy of their birth certificate and this was rejected. In at least one case, the person had to arrange for their date of birth to be mentioned in a newspaper and then it was accepted.
In fields where there is no political controversy things are not so bad. But you are still subject to the deletionistas who will find any possible reason to nuke your hard work. And wikipedia’s view that there is a definitive version of the truth on any given issue makes it utterly hopeless at covering anything that is controversial. I am certain that wikipedia of the early C17 would be presenting the geocentric view of the universe as definitively true.
This is not true. I could drone on about the Official Policy but maybe the better rule-of-thumb is:
(1) Don’t edit articles to push one side of an existing hot-button political issue, it’s hopeless unless you have a ton of wikipedia experience and a ton of free time,
(2) If you write things that are correct and widely-accepted, they’re pretty unlikely to be deleted, regardless of what source you cite, or even if you cite no source at all. If other people don’t like the sourcing but do like the text you wrote, they’re more likely to improve the sourcing than to delete the text.
(3) ChristianKI’s advice was actually posting on the talk page rather than editing the article directly, which is always a good bet. And if the article is so neglected that nobody does anything about your talk-page comment, then that’s a good sign that you can probably just go and edit the article without anyone bothering you.
I’m not sure what you were expecting. There are a gazillion people who think “circumcision” is the obviously correct term, and a gazillion other people who think “genital mutilation” is the obviously correct term. Of course there’s going to be an Official Policy on this, settled long long ago, otherwise people would spend all day in endless “edit wars” where one person changes it, and the other changes it back, and the first one changes it back again, around and around forever. You’re welcome to think that the Official Policy is wrong, but I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect that you can just easily “fix this problem” the way you can easily fix other problems on wikipedia pages.
I don’t think that’s fair, I think there are lots of articles that present both sides of a controversy pretty well, for example minimum wage seems pretty good.
I don’t want to say this never happens. I think you need a sufficiently “thick skin” that if 10% of your edits are deleted for stupid reasons, you’re generally happy about the other 90%, not stewing over the 10%.
While editing such articles isn’t useful, if it’s a hot-button issue you are likely not the only person who cares about the issue. Showing that you think that things should be changed on the talk page matters.
You don’t have to fight the complete fight. Simply stating your position is helpful for establishing consensus for a change.
Hot button issues are not decided by the views of a single person.
Sure, but the point was about the double standard of using “circumcision” for one side an “genital mutilation” for the other It’s ok to have an official policy, but you’d expect it to be justified and consistent.
If you make the decision which term to use based on the merits of the term that’s a valid point. That’s not Wikipedia’s policy. Wikipedia’s policy is to use words the way they generally used.
Take a look at Google ngrams for “male genital mutilation” and “female genital mutilation”. The difference between usage is two orders of magnitude. Most people use the term circumcision in the male case and not in the female case and it’s Wikipedia’s rule to go with what has most usage. That rule is consistently applied in this case.
This happens also for political correct language that someone proposes and that differs with general use. The guidelines around talking about suicide (at least when I saw the discussion) for example go for terms that are in common usage and not the political correct ones that are engineered to reduce the chance of people committing suicide.
Having a Wikipedia that says “You might have an argument for why term X is benefitial over term Y for political reasons such as equality but we don’t care we go for the common usage.” is a useful heuristic to prevent a bunch of social justice activism from creeping into Wikipedia.
Complaining on the one hand that Wikipedia’s policy are biased towards the left and then objecting to Wikipedia valuing the principle of equality not enough is not very consistent. You need policies to fight people who come and tell you “obesity is a discriminatory term, the political correct term is X”.
It’s also relevant that “circumcision” is a fairly accurate description of what is done to boys, but not of most of the things that are done to girls; and that many of the things done to girls are more severe in their effects than circumcision. So it’s not at all obvious that calling the thing done to boys “circumcision” and the thing done to girls “mutilation” is wrong; they are not at all the same thing, the word “circumcision” is more appropriate to the former than to the latter, and the word “mutilation” is more appropriate to the latter than to the former.
(To be clear, I am not saying that you’re wrong if you call what is done to boys “mutilation” [EDITED to add: or, more to the point, that Vanilla_cabs is]. Only that using different terminology in the two cases doesn’t need to be a double standard; it suffices to be picky about the meaning of “circumcision” or restrictive about what you call “mutilation” or both.)
It’s relevant to the merits of using the term in general, but’s it’s completely irrelevant from the policy decision in Wikipedia. The policy decision inside Wikipedia is about what terms people actually use outside of Wikipedia.
If someone wants to change the usage of a term with a similar pattern in Google nGrams in Wikipedia they are very unlikely to succeed even if they have really good arguments (like in the case of suicide).
Yes, to be clear, I meant relevant to this discussion and specifically to Vanilla_cabs’s complaint that Wikipedia’s policy amounts to a double standard. The policy of using the most widely used terms could produce unfairly inconsistent results, if the populace at large were biased (e.g., differential outrage for things affecting men vs things affecting women, or for things associated with “Western” religions versus things associated with “weird foreign” religions), or if different topics were commonly discussed by different groups of people (e.g., if cutting off foreskins were widely talked about among the populace at large but cutting off clitorises were more commonly a concern of anthropologists) -- but in the present case it’s not clear that even that is true; one could plausibly arrive at the same terminological decisions as Wikipedia while having fairness and consistency as important goals.
(I agree that even if this weren’t so, there wouldn’t be much prospect of changing Wikipedia’s usage.)
While that’s true, when interacting with Wikipedia it’s useful to have an accurate model of how it functions. If you just look at the reasoning for why those terms might be generally good for society to use, you will likely be surprised when you are exposed to another conflict in Wikipedia over terms.
Even if there are good arguments for another term the answer is “If the wide society uses a bad term, engage with society Wikipedia isn’t the place for activism”.
That wasn’t my complaint. I just pointed that it was waveman’s point and Steven Byrnes failed to address it.
I was trying to address it by saying: There are some areas where Wikipedia has flaws and there’s little or nothing we can do about it; there are other areas where Wikipedia has flaws and we can help fix them without too much effort and it can be very impactful and good. The point of (that part of) my comment was to point out that if you see the circumcision-vs-GM thing as a flaw, it would be a flaw that’s in the first category (i.e. practically unfixable), and we should shrug and move on, and we shouldn’t generalize from that to forget that the second category also exists.
Whether or not the circumcision-vs-GM thing is a flaw depends what the purpose of Wikipedia happens to be. You might want Wikipedia to have a different purpose then it has, but I think that having an entity with the purpose for which Wikipedia was created is valuable.
Your argumention why it’s a flaw was also clearly faulty because it’s not about what terms the doctors who perform the procedure want to use.
There’s some complexity from seperating “X is a flaw according to my values” from “X is a flaw according to Wikipedia’s values” but it’s doable. And I do things that an institution with Wikipedia’s values provides value to society.
(If you look at what I wrote, I have never stated any opinion about whether it’s a flaw or not. It’s not relevant to the narrow point I wanted to make. You’re welcome to argue about it with other people.)
I agree with all three points.
Wikipedia’s articles on circumcision and FGM include coverage of the ethical controversy both around the practice (in the case of male circumcision) and the colonialism inherent in the name (in the case of FGM).
Their page on source selection states:
“ Many Wikipedia articles rely on scholarly material. When available, academic and peer-reviewed publications, scholarly monographs, and textbooks are usually the most reliable sources. However, some scholarly material may be outdated, in competition with alternative theories, or controversial within the relevant field. Try to cite current scholarly consensus when available, recognizing that this is often absent. Reliable non-academic sources may also be used in articles about scholarly issues, particularly material from high-quality mainstream publications. Deciding which sources are appropriate depends on context.”
If you are alone you need to understand the rules reasonably well.
What I propose here is just to raise issues on talk pages and if someone else already wrote something make a new argument. Often this doesn’t take long.
Rules in Wikipedia are a matter of consensus. If you care about the rules it’s easy to give your opinion when rule changes get proposed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Feedback_request_service is a way to register yourself to get regularly a message on your talk page for one rules discussion. While a user that only participates in rule discussion and nothing else is likely seen as a bit dubious, if you write short messages on the talk page whenever you think something should be improved,
Wikipedia’s rule is to use the terms that are most commonly used by authoritative sources out in the world. Given how language is used out in the world it’s often not consistent.
It doesn’t matter whether it’s a hot button political issue or an unpolitical one’s like deciding whether to use the greek or latin name for an anatomical structure where things would get easier when latin names get used consistently.
That’s not true. If you could for example argue that authoritatie sources like the New York Times and the Washington Post use another term then the doctors you have a case within the rules of Wikipedia.
While you can argue that rules should be different (and you actually can argue that in RFC’s in Wikipedia) it’s deferring to authoritative sources is a rule that works for finding consensus.
I think this misunderstands Wikipedia. Wikipedia’s goal isn’t truth but to reflect the current consensus among good sources. This is argued quite explicitely.
I do think that a place where I can go when I want to read the consensus among good sources about a topic is valuable.
It an openly known fact that mainstream media leans heavily on one side of the political spectrum. This makes it very difficult to find “authoritative” sources that tell a certain side of the story on a lot of topics.
As a habit, when I want to edit a page, I check the talk page. On any topic that the mainstream media touches (not only politics, but also critical reviews of movies, etc.), it is often longer than the article, and riddled with nitpicks and gotchas. I don’t want to waste my time on arguing there, and I think that’s the intended effect.
Fun fact, a couple years ago, as background research for a blog post I was writing, I read the entire archives of Talk:Cold fusion, literally starting at Archive 1 and continuing through all 48 (maybe 44 at the time or whatever) pages. It was possibly the most boring thing I’ve ever done. Every now and then there was a new reference or argument, but mostly the same arguments were rehashed over, and over, and over, across the generations, as old arguers would quit or get banned, and they’d be replaced by newcomers on each side of the debate. :-P
It’s true that there are topics where it’s hard to find sources that qualify for Wikipedia and those aren’t good fights to be had. However there are plenty of cases where sources are available.
Talk pages are about discourse between different people. The amount of people on both sides matters for how conflicts are resolved. If someone else already made an argument adding your position in addition is helpful.
On controversial topics, a few persons arguing can already produce an article’s length of points. How can a newcomer weigh in? There is (generally) no vote. You can just add more points. For those points to have a slight chance of being relevant, you need to read all the discussion and the rules referred to. And then someone will point that you forgot a yet-unmentioned-rule, and your words will only add to the noise and make it more difficult for the next one to weigh in.
There’s no formal vote but if you have a page where two people have a long discussion of A vs B and a few other people take position A (and write a sensible comment—“I support A” might not be enough) but no additional person takes position B according to Wikipedia policy there’s consensus for A.
Then when the page gets changed to A it’s invalid for anybody to switch it to B. The lines around what counts as consensus are a bit fuzzy but in general that’s the decision making process. If people don’t agree on what consensus is conflicts can be escalated.
This seems a little harsh. Sure Wikipedia has many rules, mostly to prevent bias or people pushing agendas. It’s not perfect, but in general I have found it to be a reliable, neutral source of information especially in controversial subjects such as Middle East politics for example.
Also research shows that Wikipedia is a reliable source https://www.zmescience.com/science/study-wikipedia-25092014/ although I’m sure you can find research that shows the opposite.
And as the original poster says, if you find something inaccurate, spend 5 minutes to give back and fix it. I have made hundreds of small edits and maybe only a handful have been deleted / rolled back
I can’t talk about your specific examples of course but I would trust (cited) articles on Wikipedia above most sources on the web.