[FiveOhThree]

I can't be the only one who feels that Wikipedia's quality has really started to go downhill over the past 5 or so years. I've noticed more and more articles which read as ridiculously partisan, usually around subjects with any link to politics or current events.

That's probably linked to the increasing polarisation in the US, but I get the impression that the sites neutrality policies have gradually been chipped away by introducing concepts like "false balance" as an excuse to pick a side on an issue. I could easily see that causing the site to slowly decline like StackOverflow did, most people don't want to deal with agenda pushing.

Fortunately articles related to topics like science and history haven't been significantly damaged by this yet. Something to watch carefully.

[GuB-42]

I didn't notice this, in fact, I still find Wikipedia to be remarkably neutral on controversial topics. It is very explicit about not being a news website, and yet, that's where I find the best coverage for hot topics like the war in Ukraine and Gaza, Black Lives Matter, protests in Hong-Kong, etc... For instance, most western media completely disregard the Russian side of the Ukraine war, not Wikipedia, where you have both points of views shown side by side, as well as international reactions, and most importantly, sources.

It is not perfect of course, small topics and non-English Wikipedias usually show more bias, and not just about controversial topics. Even on scientific articles, you may find some guy who considers himself the king of the Estonian Striped Beetle and will not tolerate any other ideas than his, driving away other contributors because they have better things to do than go to war to defend beetle truths.

[richardfeynman]

You are getting bad information. The Wikipedia pages on those specific topics (Ukraine, Gaza, BLM) is known to be have been manipulated by groups of editors acting in coordination to advance political narratives.

[zozbot234]

Wikipedia was always insufficiently neutral about political or social topics. At a bare minimum, you need to check whether there are any highlighted controversies in the article talk page.

[amiga386]

Wikipedia itself knows how much shit it's in. Every ongoing conflict and culture-war issue is a "contentious topic", which is Wikipedia code for "editors are at each others' throats"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Contentious_topics#L...

They have a giant pile of editors banned from topics until they can play nice.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Editing_restrictions...

But you do give a great tip: at minimum, check the talk page. If it's longer than the article itself, run away.

Some articles are so far gone, even the talk page is locked down like Fort Knox. For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Gaza_genocide

That page even has an FAQ!

> Q1: Why does this article state that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza, even though this is heavily contested and neither the ICJ nor the ICC have issued a final judgment?

> A1: A September 2025 request for comment (RfC) decided to state, in Wikipedia's own voice, that it is a genocide. The current lead is the result of later discussion on the specific wording.

[psychoslave]

Do you have suggestion of better repository of knowledge gathering, which achieve better level of neutrality than Wikipedia on every matter it covers, or throw right into your face that the article doesn’t meet consensual neutral POV?

[NoboruWataya]

There is pretty much no way this was ever not going to happen, given Wikipedia's position and structure. It is a massive repository of knowledge, that is consulted by millions if not billions of people around the world on a regular basis, that is (in theory) editable by anyone and that has articles on just about every conceivable topic, including many politically charged ones. There must be immense pressure to use it to propagate all kinds of narratives. Given all of that, I think it does as good a job as can be expected of remaining objective, but absolutely you need to be careful when reading articles on politically charged topics (which is true of all media).

[sequoia]

Some of this has to do with concerted and long-running campaigns of coordinated editing (against wikipedia rules) to push a one-sided political narrative. Most notably this happened and continues to be done by Israel-eliminationists[0]. Wikipedia eventually acknowledged the problem and banned a couple of the worst offenders[1] but that's a drop in the bucket as far as I'm concerned. I read it less and less these days and don't consult it at all for anything controversial ("controversial" meaning "topics that leftists have strong opinions about").

Sadly, a system like Wikipedia is hard to defend against persistent coordinated attacks by people who have lots of time.

0: https://aish.com/weaponizing-wikipedia-against-israel/ 1: https://www.jpost.com/business-and-innovation/article-833180

[zahlman]

> I can't be the only one who feels that Wikipedia's quality has really started to go downhill over the past 5 or so years. I've noticed more and more articles which read as ridiculously partisan, usually around subjects with any link to politics or current events.

I would say this started over a decade ago. Otherwise I completely agree.

[TuringTest]

Oh dear, you need to learn about the GamerGate incident which started August 2012. All the extreme division and online manipulation through the collaborative creation of false narratives started right there, with that issue, before contaminating the entire political landscape.

It's the Eternal September of our generation, and it's not recognised enough as such. Before that, the internet was a different place.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamergate

[epx]

In the last 2-3 years, every contribution I made has been reverted by a reviewer or editor, either giving some excuse like lack of references, or none at all. Ceased to contribute to articles, and financially as well.

[baranul]

Wikipedia has a number of notorious and strange editors who have taken it over as if it was their personal kingdom, where they censor and revert at their pleasure. It's their Wikipedia versus for the public. MrOllie is among the most infamous (somehow has over 258,000 edits - WTH) of this type of editor (or sadistic censor), with a number of articles and posts elsewhere on the Internet about him[1][2].

Complaints about him seem to do nothing, as he appears to have support and students of his brand of sadism and censorship. For instance, Remsense (over 97,000 edits). The group that they are part of, backs each other up and gangs up on others, to make sure they'll get their way.

[1] https://thomashgreco.medium.com/artificial-intelligence-bots...

[2] https://x.com/docmilanfar/status/1928609721835045047

[hulitu]

> That's probably linked to the increasing polarisation in the US,

Not really. The phenomenon exists in other languages Wikipedias. I think it is related to the fact that NGOs that "shape" political discourse and politicians have become "sensible" to the text in Wikipedia pages.

It is always good, when you read Wikipedia, to "follow the money", i.e. look at the sources, see if they make sense.

In the last 5 years, a lot of online platforms, HN also, are used by state actors to spread propaganda and Wikipedia is perfect for that because it presents itself as a "neutral" source.

[zppln]

Fully agreed. The Talk pages are a very interesting read these days. I things continue down this path I think Wikipedia will be a lot less relevant in the coming years, at least for current events and things related to the on-going culture war.

[jdauriemma]

Example?

[frakkingcylons]

I haven’t noticed this.

[beloch]

There's a reason why historians tend to view anything more recent than 10-20 years ago as politics. If you don't want to get embroiled in political debates, stick to stuff old enough to be history. There's still politics there, but it's less raw.

Wikipedia doesn't restrict itself to topics that are older than ten years ago, so some of their material is necessarily going to be viewed as political.

e.g. Wikipedia has a stand-alone page on Elon Musk's Nazi salute[1].

{Edit: It's worth noting here that Wikipedia also maintains separate pages for things like Bill Clinton's relationship with Jeffrey Epstein[3].}

This particular page is very interesting because of the sheer amount of political blow-back it's caused for Wikipedia. If you're a Republican, this one page may be the biggest reason you might view Wikipedia as having become "ridiculously partisan". As a direct result of this page, and the refusal to remove or censor it, Musk is now taking aim at Wikipedia and calling for a boycott[2]. He also had his employees produce Grokipedia which, notably, does not include a page on his Nazi salute.

Musk may have had a public falling out with Trump, but he is still very much plugged into the Republican party. He's about to throw a lot of money at the mid-term elections. So, naturally, one hand washes the other and Wikipedia is on every good Republican's hit list. The kicker is that a lot of Republicans, who don't like Musk and think he's a Nazi/idiot, are going to feel a lot of Musk-instigated pressure from their own party to target Wikipedia.

This is the price Wikipedia pays for including recent events and refusing to bow to demands for censorship.

__________________

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk_salute_controversy

[2]https://www.lemonde.fr/en/pixels/article/2025/01/29/why-elon...

[3]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relationship_of_Bill_Clinton_a...

Disclosure: I'm Canadian and am neither a Republican or a Democrat.

[FiveOhThree]

I'm also not American so I'm not well-versed in this topic, but perhaps to raise the obvious:

Does Wikipedia really need a page running for thousands of words on Musk allegedly making a Nazi salute?

It's longer than some of the content on major historical figures, yet this is a subject that I'd be surprised to see mentioned again after a few years have passed.

Considering that the subject matter is highly sensitive and concerns a living person I'm surprised that such an article was allowed at all.

[gibspaulding]

Friendly reminder that we all have the power to improve this! Become an editor and If you come across a problematic article, you can make improvements, or even just flag it as needing work. I know this is not a small ask, and can feel discouraging if you see more issues than you have time to address or your edits are not accepted, but when you consider the relatively small number of editors and the huge number of readers (not to mention AI’s being built on it) it is likely one of the more significant differences you can make towards improving the greater problem polarization.

[FiveOhThree]

The impression I've had from trying to contribute in the past has been that some editors will fight tooth and nail to prevent changes to an article they effectively own. The maze of rules and regulations makes it far too easy to simply block changes by dragging everything through protracted resolution processes.

Even something as clear-cut as "the provided source doesn't support this claim at all" becomes an uphill struggle to correct. When it comes to anything related to politics this problem is also exaggerated by editors selectively opposing changes based on whether they apply a desired slant to the text.

[encom]

I'm not going into an edit war with some deranged redditor activist.

[burnt-resistor]

Utopian lionization that doesn't reflect reality or the bullshit. Unqualified people have the power to tell experts who were there that their contributions are insignificant, wrong, or that details don't matter. That's just stupid and pointless, and so less people contribute to hostile and idiotic half-assery.

I'll take curated information that is better and rigorous every time.

[zahlman]

> Friendly reminder that we all have the power to improve this! Become an editor and If you come across a problematic article, you can make improvements, or even just flag it as needing work.

This works very well when there's a clear non-partisan issue with the text, like a logical inconsistency or the citation doesn't line up with the claim or the prose is just sloppy or unnatural.

If someone is trying to push biased sources, good luck.

The I-swear-it-isn't-a-cabal of highly-active editors knows policy better than you do, and they will continue to conveniently know policy better than you do no matter how much time you spend studying it. (And if you study it and then try to do your business anonymously, they will consider it suspicious that you know anything about policy and demand that you log in to your nonexistent long-standing account.) And that policy allows them to use highly biased sources because they are on they "reliable sources" list, except it isn't really a single list but rather some sources are restricted in applicability, unless it's one of them using it inappropriately. And the bias of those sources doesn't disqualify them as long as it's properly taken into consideration by whatever arcane rules, except this doesn't happen in practice and nobody will care if you point out them doing it, as long as it serves their purposes.

Meanwhile, the way sources get approved as reliable is generally that they agree with other reliable sources. Good luck trying to convince people that a source has become unreliable. You aren't going to be able to do it by pointing out things they've repeatedly objectively gotten wrong, for example. But they'll happily spend all day listing every article they can find that an ideologically opposed source has ever gotten wrong (according to them, no evidence necessary).

And it all leans in the same direction because the policy-makers all lean in the same direction. Because nobody who opposes them will survive in that social environment. There are entire web sites out there dedicated to cataloging absurd stuff they allowed their friends to get away with over years and years, just because of ideological agreement, where people who dispute a Wikipedia-established narrative on a politically charged topic will be summarily dismissed as trolls.

On top of that they will inject additional bias down to the level of individual word-choice level. They have layers and layers of policy surrounding, for example, when to use words like "killing", "murder", "assassination" and "genocide" (or "rioting" vs "unrest" vs "protest"); but if you compare article titles back and forth there is no consistency to it without the assumption of endemic political bias.

WP:NOTNEWS is, as far as I can tell, not a real policy at all, at least not if there's any possible way to use the news story to promote a narrative they like.

And if the article is about you, of course you aren't a reliable source. If the Wikipedians don't like you, and their preferred set of reliable sources don't like you, Wikipedia will just provide a positive feedback loop for everything mainstream media does to make you look bad. This will happen while they swear up and down that they are upholding WP:BLP.

I've been watching this stuff happen, and getting burned by it off and on, for years and years.

[amrocha]

It’s more likely that you became more radicalized so what used to read as neutral seems partisan now.

[FiveOhThree]

Is it radicalised to want even a basic premise of neutrality in an encyclopedia?

Despite not being particularly political, even I raise an eyebrow when an article opens with "____ is a <negative label>, <negative label>, <negative label> known for <controversial statement>"

[bakugo]

I mean... this is a very real phenomenon, but probably not in the way you're thinking of.

There are many simple statements of fact that, 15 or 20 years ago, were as universally uncontroversial as "the sky is blue", but today are considered radically controversial political opinions, and will get you banned for most online platforms if you dare utter them.