Every now and then I go through some of wikipedias sources on certain social topics because I don't trust them at all. The amount of BS I've found in papers, even though I don't eve have any research background at all is impressive.
My favourite was probably this one paper where the author essentially made a reddit-post asking a community about themselves, then cherry-picked (the post is still up, with timestamps and all) a few comments and came to a conclusion that didn't really fit those hand-picked comments.
In conclusion: Wikipedia is a dumpster fire and shouldn't be used for anything other than hard facts like dates and for entertainment.
Wikipedia actually aims to use secondary or tertiary sources, because of the likely bias in primary (and to some extent, secondary) sources. Statements of fact shouldn’t be supported only be primary sources (publications), though they may be referenced for the historical context. However, quality control on something as big as Wikipedia is essentially impossible.
An encyclopaedia with rather low standards that many people sadly treat as an absolute source of truth.
You're right that this isn't really a wikipedia problem though. It's a matter of education because an overwhelming majority of the population isn't competent enough to fact-check memes on facebook, let alone wikipedia, and if wikipedia doesn't do it either, then that responsibility is pushed all the way back to the scientists doing the actual research.
This is an incredible lack of redundancy if you consider how important wikipedia has become in shaping public opinion. It's a system where the scientific publication process is the single point of failure and this article clearly shows that it does fail rather often.
So what way is there to make this process safer? There needs to be at least another link in the chain that confirms information, preferably two or three.
... that somehow manages to have articles on proeminent subjects that are more in depth and factual than any competing encyclopedic endeavor, while, at the same time, far surpassing them by orders of magnitude on breadth for obscure and less academic topics.
Wikipedia is not an encyclopedia in the traditional sense, and can't be judged on the same standards. It is simply in a league of its own, it fails in different ways than traditional editor-controlled projects and is a fantastic repository of human knowledge and educational resource.
Wikipedia is overall great, though highly politicized in some topics, for science/engineering topics there's actual review by other Wikipedians and sourcing is solid.
Moreover, the talk page always has anything that might be controversial about the article that you might be interested in.
Sure, it will rarely display incorrect data, but it happens less and less as antivandalism bots become smarter.
Wikipedia itself has descended into the same pathologies you see in 'science' today: a bunch of gatekeepers who, by account of having been there the longest, have set up a moat of rules and 'culture' and such, to the point where newcomers are shut down or drowned out. I'm not saying it's impossible to get in; but only those that sufficiently mould themselves to the existing people and structures will last long enough to become fully accepted. And so the system sustains itself.
I wanted to edit an article about an obscure religious group that included some blatantly wrong statements about the espoused ideology. They had an academic tertiary source making these claims extrapolated from reaearch by the same author that made both plausible claims but also included similar inferences. Being a very obscure group there aren't many other academic sources discussing it. All literature that could disprove these claims comes from non-academics affiliated with the group which are a no-go.
As per Wikipedia rules (which took hours to figure out), there's not much one can do short of getting some impartial or friendly academic to publish a more reasonable article.
I already spend a lot of time trying to "fix the internet" and just don't have the stamina to also start fixing wikipedia now. I'm also being turned away by the constant stories of edit-wars that tend to happen about certain controversial topics.
Do you mind telling us which paper it was? I have a faint idea which one you mean, because I've read a bunch about reddit, and I would love to know if it's the same one or something else.
My favourite was probably this one paper where the author essentially made a reddit-post asking a community about themselves, then cherry-picked (the post is still up, with timestamps and all) a few comments and came to a conclusion that didn't really fit those hand-picked comments.
In conclusion: Wikipedia is a dumpster fire and shouldn't be used for anything other than hard facts like dates and for entertainment.