25 Years of Wikipedia

Every time I try to contribute, I get censored by some gatekeeper. It feels as open and inviting nowadays as StackOverflow.

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?

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.

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[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.

When you say you disagree, I assume you mean that you disagree that Wikipedia's approach is good. I don't think I was making that claim, however. I have no value position on Wikipedia's approach except that I appear to endorse it by participating. There are certainly true things that Wikipedia will not contain because they are insufficiently described in sources that Wikipedians find acceptable. But nonetheless that is Wikipedia's purpose: to find a list of sources that generally report fact, and to aggregate them.

Like any consensus-based thing it's pretty loose. It's unlikely that EN wikipedia had much of a position on the reliability of the Asahi Shimbun newspaper, for instance.

As an example, when I resurrected the Makoto Matsumoto article, I mirrored it to my personal wiki[0] in case it is deleted from the original. Another loss I lament is that of Chinese Numbered Policies[1] which I think is a genuinely interesting list and a meaningful categorization that I will eventually re-create on my personal wiki.

I'm a Wikipedia inclusionist which means I want as many true things there as possible in a way that represents the truth as accurately as possible, but it's a collaborative effort and that means that sometimes I don't get what I want.

Any way, as you can see from my earlier experience, I seem to have a skill of getting facts into Wikipedia when others do not, and I have a personal desire to see them there as well. So if you want to list a couple of the examples you had trouble with I can see if I can help. I know you said "politics and current events", but hopefully there are non-emergent situations that you can describe because evolving situations require more attention than I'm able to apply at the moment. I will still try, though. As an example, the Salvadoran Gang Crackdown had some ridiculous language on it that I removed[3] that was clearly an attempt to insert a left-wing (as it is in the US) political slant.

To be clear, I have no affiliation with Wikipedia (beyond the fact that as an auto-confirmed user I have the user privilege to create articles without going through AfC). I just have a personal interest in fact recording[2].

0: https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Makoto_Matsumoto

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia%3AArticles_for_delet...

2: https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Observation_Dharma

3: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Salvadoran_gang_c...

If I want to look something up, I always check out wikipedia first. Its not always accurate, but its invariably a lot more accurate on most topics than random information across the web. Its also pretty easy to spot bad quality wiki articles once you get the gist of the site

Its amazing that wikipedia exists - there've been multiple hardcore attempts to kill it over the years for profit, but its still managing to go