alt Hacker NewsIt's funny. Today people say that of Wikipedia, as if it was trustworthy. But it used to be common knowledge to just "don't trust anything on Wikipedia". Wikipedia was never like a regular encyclopedia, it just wanted to be one.
Its biggest advantage over traditional encyclopedias was its breadth and how quickly it could be updated. The trade-off was that articles could vary greatly in quality and could be edited by anyone, making accuracy less consistent than in traditionally edited reference works. So the effort to reduce breadth and say it shouldn't be updated quick... that's just strikes me (as someone fairly old) as kind of funny.
TBH, "Don't trust anything on Wikipedia" was always just stuck up posturing. Plenty of badly sourced, badly edited and biased articles in regular encyclopedias too, but because Wikipedia is contributed to by the unwashed masses, don't trust it.
"Don't use Wiki as a primary source" is much more to the point - it's not meant to be. Use it to find the primaries.
Also, I don't see this as "reducing breadth" so much as attempting to hold to a minimum standard of "has this been written up anywhere by someone other than the people who started it?" which isn't perfect, but it's been the stance since the beginning.