alt Hacker NewsAre there actual good examples showing errors of fact on Wikipedia that are verifiably incorrect, that demonstrate how it is "captured"?
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I find it more surprising that the common understanding has shifted away from "wikis are crap for anything new or political".
As soon as there is a plausible agenda for selecting a narrative the way Wikipedia works we should be sceptical.
For recent examples, everything to do with Biden and family, and Gamergate. These pages are still full of discussion; and what's written is more ideological than factual. You can follow these pages to see how an in-group selects a narrative.
And these topics are not nearly as controversial as race, feminism, or transgender topics.
I’d say Wikipedia definitely has a strong “woke” bent to it. Either in the language or the choice of what facts to show. Here’s an example I deleted that had been there for quite a while https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Salvadoran_gang_c...
I really like Wikipedia, though, and I think over time we will get around to fixing it up.
How about Gabrowski et al.: "Wikipedia’s Intentional Distortion of the History of the Holocaust", about the outsize influence of certain coordinated Polish editors on the Wikipedia articles about Poland and the Holocaust?
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/epdf/10.1080/25785648.2023.2...
Quote from the conclusion:
> This essay has shown that in the last decade, a handful of editors have been steering Wikipedia’s narrative on Holocaust history away from sound, evidence-driven research, toward a skewed version of events touted by right-wing Polish groups. Wikipedia’s articles on Jewish topics, especially on Polish–Jewish history before, during, and after World War II, contain and bolster harmful stereotypes and fallacies. Our study provides numerous examples, but many more exist. We have shown how the distortionist editors add false content and use unreliable sources or misrepresent legitimate ones.
For a more recent paper, "Disinformation as a tool for digital political activism: Croatian Wikipedia and the case for critical information literacy" by Car et al. says that:
> The Hr.WP [Croatian Wikipedia] case exemplifies disinformation not only as content manipulation, but also as process manipulation weaponising neutrality and verifiability policies to suppress dissent and enforce a single ideological position.
https://doi.org/10.1108/JD-01-2025-0020