alt Hacker NewsWhat kind of happens is that there are some people who invest their lives in Wikipedia, their opinions is what ends up mattering.
This has boths pros and cons. The good thing about it, is that these people are deeply invested in Wikipedia and therefore have a lot of incitament to do what (they believe at least) is the best for Wikipedia.
The downsides are: (1) that just because you invested a lot of time into Wikipedia you don't have biases (2) you are not immediately qualified to determine whether some article/source is bad or not from a factual point of view.
Also, it's very HARD to become a regular contributor, because you'll have to invest an insane amount of time initially to build up goodwill and reputation, when at the same time anything you do might just get reverted because someone thought it was too much detail or bad in some other way.
So it's a very punishing environment which makes sure that the actual group of Wikipedia editors is a fraction of what one could expect. (Also, the Wikipedia markup... it's really the worst dialect of Wiki syntax)
Anyway, all of this is probably not good for Wikipedia in the long run. LLM's will be much better than humans at creating "beginner" articles, and it will be increasingly hard to know what's LLM-authored. So I expect Wikipedia to go the way of Stack Overflow in the long run.
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And as an example of bias: I personally witnessed a wikipedia editors adding their own interpretation of a certain written article. This interpretation was very politically biased and not justified by the text, but these were influential wikipedia editors so that it stayed in. I then asked the author of the article on Twitter if this interpretation was correct. I was unambiguously told NO. This information (including the public twitter conversation), was rejected by the wikipedia editors because it was first hand accounts.
Which led to the rather odd result that the interpretation of an article's message by a Wikipedia editor was favoured over the explicit statement by the article's author.
Here I would have thought that it would have been prudent to simply leave out that part of speculation, but they adamantly insisted it should stay.
I must add that this happened on Swedish wikipedia, not the main English Wikipedia – which I actually found much more balanced. But the problem is that this mechanism exists in the first place.
It was at the time (5-10 years ago?) well known that the Wikipedia of some language – I don't recall which one – was at the time pretty much hijacked by a group. Oh, wait I found it - the Croatian Wikipedia.
This is unlikely to happen to the main Wikipedia, but it does demonstrate a certain brittleness and risk of bias in the system.
Sounds like you are describing Grokipedia (Grok), where the general public has rejected it as a replacement for Wikipedia. Way too much hallucinating, tainted algorithms reflecting political preferences, gossip, and unverified or disreputable sources.