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Sorry, I am not quite sure what the problem is? I think Wikipedia is great from my day to usage. Can you point me to specific examples where the output is bad due to this? I would like to see the problem.
I assume OP has a particular set of issues that they are not in agreement with the majority of experts on.
It should be possible to fork pages. If an active editor doesn't like edits they can publish their own version. The main Wikipedia owners then choose, like they do now, which editor they support as default.
Of course there are two extremes where there are problems: disputed topics (especially contemporary political topics) and niche topics receiving little to no attention.
I think for both an improvment can be made by improving the view on the editing history. Showing what kind of editors (new accounts or ong term members? Editing only few articles or across the board? etc.) do what kind of editing. Maybe even broken down to article sections ("this section sees lots of change by new editors, while that section is stable")
But not sure how that would really look like to be usable more or less intuitively.
You think that's bad? All the actual contributors of content are chased off by those who tweak the site. What can I say, it's going to only get worse.
On the other hand, people who have unhealthy lives become totally invested in that forum or space because it's literally all they have and guard it like a mother hen guards their eggs. In Wikipedia they create a huge bureaucracy which excludes all but the most determined of users. That intensity drives away all casual users.
On the other hand I once made an edit to a Wikipedia page from an IP address - I removed an unsourced claim from the Ron Paul page - and didn't find my edit reverted or blocked in any way.
So while I have heard of the issue of frighteningly intense editors camping pages as though their life depended on it and demanding all changes be proven to the nth degree it doesn't seem to permeate the entire site.
I'm not sure if I share the same assessment. I am amazed at how robust your typical Wikipedia page is despite the chaos that goes into writing it. Given that it's not possible to make a version of reality that everyone is happy with, I think Wikipedia comes pretty dang close.
I remain an avid wikipedia reader.
But (anecdata) I have my gripes with the way it handles evidence.
My SO has a person (died already) in her family with a (relatively) short wikipedia entry. There are factual errors in the article. We know that, because we have original documents showing that the "facts" reportet in the entry are wrong.
Due to the fact that the documents cannot be published online without breaking copyright laws we can't point to a correction.
She communicated with an editor (or whatever his role was, but he had the right to approve or deny changes to the entry) who stated he could only allow changes to the "facts" if my SO could point to an online source (a credible one he said). Else he would deny changing anything. Or she should upload the documents to wikipedia if she had copyright on them.
He didn't accept the idea to send the documents to him as proof. He made it clear that it is either the wikipedia way of determining the truth or none.
We stopped. Since then I am asking myself how much of wikipedia is actually wrong and actively or passively denied from correction by these gate keepers.
Wikipedia could offer a way to upload documents for editors to review without automatically making them publicly available. This would enable fact checking and correction.
I had heard of it before but since this personal experience with German Wikipedia's "Blockwart" mentality I will never consider them a valid organisation for donations.
This pretty much describes the problem with Wikipedia, but it's highly cryptic because possibly 95% of people are never going to realize this because I don't think they even know a Talk page exists for every article. I read lots of scientific articles and I always visit the Talk pages even when I haven't spotted any errors in the article content. There's tons of crazy petty shit that goes on between the people who edit Wikipedia articles. Whether something is considered a valid source for citation depends on which part of Wikipedia's inner circle you're talking to; in some articles, contributors are shouted down because "blogs aren't authoritative" even when they're the subject falls outside mainstream media and blogs are most proximal to the subject, but in other cases I've seen blogs be considered to be perfectly adequate when it's totally inappropriate. When it comes to anything even remotely tied to news and current events, you might as well skip Wikipedia and just read MSM news articles because those are really what Wikipedia largely considers "authoritative" no matter how biased the mainstream articles actually are. I've even seen totally legit edits and sources being ultimately rejected after a person answers every question of the [obstinate] editor because "nuh uh".
Sadly, I cannot edit Wikipedia myself even though I've never even tried doing so. Even if I'm not using a VPN, it just flat out rejects my IP from even attempting to sign up.
This is how Wikipedia can either fix itself or how someone can replace Wikipedia:
- Be run by an accountable benevolent dictator who can ultimately veto any form of democracy present in the system; ultimately everything hinges on management no matter how the system is configured
- Charge people money to edit Wikipedia (imo this would fix many of the content moderation problems on the internet as a whole at the cost of fewer active users)
- Be transparent about who is in charge (Wikipedia obfuscates this with a facade that suggests that users are no different from one another, which is anything but the truth in 2022)
- Refine official policies around authoritative sources, because right now any existing policies aren't working very well