There's tradeoffs involved. Even when a journalist is doing a good job, they may have an editor butcher the article to suit a specific narrative (source: i have journalist friends). And most times, news outlets refuse to publish sources: even on the web, it's rare to find an article that has actual links to more detailed information.

Wikipedia's strength is transparency:

a lot of information is conflicting but the sources are linked to make yourself an opinion which you deem more reliable ; biased information is usually presented as such ("that person/organization claimed that...")
a lot of information is missing due to sources not filling the admissibility criteria but more information can generally be found in the debate section

Overall, there are great articles out there on any medium. But on average, i'd choose a wikipedia article over any other media any day of the week :)

[–] sparseMatrix@lemmy.ml 0 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Actually, so would I for almost everything - except journalism. Why? because wikipedia was never intended to be used that way. Reading news there is like searching for a palimpsest on a roll of recycled toilet paper. Sure, it could be there, but why would you ever think to look there for it?

Wikipedia has a big part to play, but this kind of thing just brings the information war right up onto the pages of what is arguably the best reference we have.

Curation suggests that we should protect it from becoming involved in an ideological tug of war lest it be damaged in the process.

[–] pingveno@lemmy.ml 1 points 2 years ago

I disagree. Wikipedia has historically been a good source for gathering information about an evolving event. It should of course be taken with a grain of salt, but when you have gobs of editors reviewing and revising, misinformation tends to get weeded out pretty quickly.