Wikipedia boasts itself as a free encyclopedia that everyone can edit. This clearly lies heavily into the "wisdom of the crowd" trope. One should understand that "wisdom of the crowd" fails when the subset of correct answers is limited, and that limit is nearly omnipresent since it's decided by the zeitgeist of that crowd; the excessive rules and moderations of Wikipedia is essentially censorship or at least censorship-adjacent, further limiting this subset and essentially rendering any of the supposed-to-be "wisdom" into something that might as well be the mad blabber of an old man.

I personally have Wikipedia's ridiculous moderations done to me. Global Times, a Chinese media outlet, is listed as unreliable source in English Wikipedia. Every PRC Chinese knows that Global Times is part of CCP's propaganda system, so one can safely assume that whatever is published there is what the CCP wants you to believe in, and thus should be considered fairly accurate when it comes to CCP's mainstream attitude on issues; however, on English Wikipedia, references to Global Times are removed with zero regards of context. On the "list of unreliable source" page, users are encouraged to find alternative source, but zero advices had been given on cases where the issue in question is deemed insignificant enough (or CCP wants it to be down-played) that Global Times is the only source available other than "talking it out" with whoever that requires your Global Times reference to be removed. This has serious implications: since CCP wants full deniability of everything they've put out, the fact that you are not allowed to say that "Global Times, which largely reliably represents CCP's stances, has claimed such and such" implies English Wikipedia is in on being a part of CCP's censorship. This obviously violates their own standard of "Neutral Point of View" (which is, as it's shown over the recent times, often not neutral at all; see sections on bureaucracy below).

Sometimes people uses the excuse of them being "volunteers" so they "have no time to check every single reference in details". In my opinion this is extremely bad argument: this is exactly the job you volunteer to do, you don't get to not do the job using "volunteer" as an excuse. For example, if you volunteer at a public library, you don't get to say that because you're a volunteer you have no time to put the misplaced books back to their original places, because that's exactly part of the volunteering job you're supposed to do. Somehow this kind of ridiculous arguments which will never work in real life is widely used to defend Wikipedia administrators' poor behaviour and widely accepted by the unassuming folks; I personally believe this is due to the fact that "contributing to Wikipedia" is thought of as something that is noble and good for the overall society in the larger public psyche; and unlike in China, people in the English-speaking part of the Internet tend to give much more leeway (than they should've given) to the people who they think are "doing good things"; and of course whether Wikipedia actually chooses to live up to that expectation are completely up to each and individual administrators, which anyone with a slight weariness about power and its structure would not and should not fully trust…

There exists situations where there's enough incentive to manufacture fake knowledge but there's not enough moderation to keep that in check (or even more sinister, it's secretly purposefully allowed). This kind of situations allows the following kinds of attacks to happen:

• One is able to influence (or to gain or confirm the ability to influence) the cognition of the speakers of a certain language about foreign things by manufacturing fakes that pretends to be of those particular foreign origins. Example: the Scots wikipedia controversy: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scots_Wikipedia#Controversy], American manufacture fake Lowland Scots.
• One is able to influence (or to gain or confirm the ability to influence) the cognition of the speakers of his own language about foreign things by manufacturing fakes that pretends to be a translation of foreign artifacts to that language. Example: the Zhemao hoax. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhemao_hoaxes], Chinese manufacture fake Chinese articles of Russia.
• One is able - sometimes even have to - bypass the restriction of having to go through the draft-approval process required by the English Wikipedia by first translating the article to a less-moderated language, publish that translated version, and introduce it back into English Wikipedia in the name of translation. e.g.: HTMX. An article on HTMX was rejected at least 4 times for being mostly relying on 1st party source, was eventually added to English Wikipedia through a translation of the Swedish version.

This is not a problem that can be solved by having more volunteers and more bureaucracy; doing that only raises the difficulty and will not kill the incentive. The incentive stems from the fact that Wikipedia is (wrongly) seen as the "entry point of truth" (and for most of the time, the only entry point of truth) and Wikipedia's model only allows one narrative of truth.

English is currently the most widely spoken language; for this reason, English Wikipedia has the most volunteers, and thus people have a tendency to think the English version of an article is "the most correct". This is obviously not correct, especially when it comes to local things like cultural specialties; naturally, the people English Wikipedia would seek to translate the articles from other versions of Wikipedia, which is - note this - never a guarantee of actual, truthful info about the local issue in question. For example, the Shameen Incident was an incident on June 23, 1925 that happened between foreign settlers on Shameen and the Chinese locals on Shakee; firearms were shot and people have been killed. According to materials of the time period, there had been accusations from both side, both claiming that the other side was the one that used firearms first, and the answer to the question of "who did it first" was inconclusive. However, the CCP has been insisting that it was the foreigners from the Shameen side who attempted murder first, which is repeated in all of their related "academic research"; and because that specific conclusion is the one that's getting recognized in China, naturally that would be the only conclusion that's going to appear on the Chinese Wikipedia (before people painstakingly dig through the old archives), and thus that would be the only conclusion that's going to appear on the English side as well. If this is not a case of inherent internal bias, then what is?

What Wikipedia have claimed as "Neutral Point of View" is thus in fact never neutral - it's the biased point of view of the canon of the current world (and in certain cases more specifically, the world the administrators and higher-up bureaucrats believe to be and shhould be exist; see sections on administrators' power below). One could argue that history was never truly about what really happened; but the blatant disregard of truth, allowed and sometimes even (implicitly) promoted by administrators, is ridiculously rampant.

Wikipedia's rules on the so-called "unreliable source" allows unreliable but not-listed source to masquerade themselves as "reliable", because all sources are considered reliable at first. This means that journalists can manufacture lies at their respective media outlets and masquerade their lies as truth through Wikipedia, and if those lies aligns with administrators own bias, no questions would ever be asked (because why would they?). Among the many rules of English Wikipedia, there is absolutely no rules for cases where the report is indeed slanderous other than engaing in a grueling debate about its legitimacy with people which could very well be containing paid actors; in fact, Wikipedia's WP:CHURNALISM page explicitly stated that:

If a reliable source decides to fact check a press release and write a story about it, it then meets the definition of coming from a reliable source.

As for what counts and what does not count as a "fact check" and what counts and does not count as a "fact" is, of course, at the mercy of the administrators, who may or may not decide to have a random power trip and mess with you for afternoon tea party desserts; and if your lies were flattering enough to their worldview and their ego, they might very well let them stay. For example, the myth of Yasuke being a "black samurai" is completely manufactured with zero historical document backings (apparently the only document existing that mentioned him only referred to him as a baggage carrier); it manages to exists because of a circular reference between the English Wikipedia and a book based on this myth that its mastermind wrote; with no serious fact-checking on both sides and no obvious rule-breaking on the Wikipedia side, the article stays & a fake knowledge is arbitrated to be truly factual. A more important fact is that this is only changed due to a major public backlash that exposed the inner workings of this myth; you'd have no chance to debunk this under Wikipedia's existing rules, because the book the Wikipedia article does exist and Thomas Lockley did get recognized as a legit scholar before this; any doubt about its legitimacy would thus be disregarded unless you painstakingly explain what actually have happened between the book and Wikipedia, and even after that your debunking could simply be ignored just because some of them wanted a black samurai to exist due to their ideologies.

The administrators of Wikipedia are given immense power. People do not have the correct idea of how far this power can reach. One must note that Wikipedia, especially English Wikipedia, is seen by the majority of people to be accurate, even when nothing on Wikipedia truly is (other than things like mathematics, where denying the truth would be really difficult). People would say "well if you disagree with it why can't you just edit it and prove it yourself?". The fact is that "edit it yourself" and "talking things out" when people don't like what you've written (which - note this - does not imply that the one who made the edit is wrong in anyway) is neither a working remedy nor a proper solution; it is brought up only as a distraction to take people's focus away from the authoritarian nature of the system.

One must understand that the system of Wikipedia allows its users to retain an extremely high degree of anonimity, which means that an administrator can register sockpuppet accounts to his heart's content without being ever suspected as long as he keeps being secretive about it and keeps lying when confronted. Due to anonimity, there is no executable mechanism to prevent this from happening; if an administrator is ever accused of engaging in edit war or any other activities that will get normal users banned, no one will be none the wiser since no one can actually trace back to the administrator account from the sockpuppet account (note that IPs are not definitive evidence since certain (if not most) ISPs offer a dynamically-allocated shared IPv4 IP pool for their customers); the only relatively realistic scenario where an administrator (or higher-up bureaucrat) would ever have their power removed is infighting. The page for Wikipedia administrators laughably contains a short section about "grievances by users", within which the only choice of the unjustly-treaded user is to beg (or, to use their words that we already know that never are truly what they mean, "express their concerns directly to the administrator responsible and try to come to a resolution in an orderly and civil manner"), and the user cannot even be free of fear of being unjustly dismissed even if they have to resort to begging, because on within the same section they just have to include their spiteful attitude and remind them that "complainants should be aware that their behavior is equally taken into account as the user that they are discussing".

When combined with unchecked power and practically none of the supposed-to-exist respnsibilities for the content they produce or moderate, despite whatever they have claimed and have been claiming about their own neutrality, administrators and the higher-up bureaucrats are the only group of people who can consistently change the narrative at large on Wikipedia towards the direction they want; this obviously have grave implications, including but not limited to the potential existence of nepotism, bribery and rent-seeking; and I must remind you, that this is the group of people who's in complete control of what is deemed to be one of the only modern gateway of knowledge.

People will say that I'm only writing conspiracy theory at this point and "it's possible doesn't mean it's actually happening". They forgot that the other side of that argument is that "even if it's true you'd have no way to know". Consider how this system is, I wouldn't be surprised if it did end up being exposed that there was indeed a secret society of Wikipedia administrators that offered special service provided you have the right connection and the right amount of money.

The reasons why Wikipedia still stands are that (1) it's convenient and (2) the detriments of it, despite being extremely harmful, would not manifest in an immediately fatal manner for most people. Can a future without Wikipedia exist? The answer is not that it can, but rather that it must: a new system that can make use of crowd knowledge but requires none of the bureaucratic structure to operate must be designed and widely adopted within the current society.

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Last update: 2025.7.23