Trying to edit wikipedia is a hellish experience. The vast majority of articles have one or more de facto owners who will do everything they can to preserve control over their turf. They tend to be experts in rules laywering which is how they got their power in the first place. So "addressing inaccuracies" typically involves 5 minutes of editing and a month-long war afterwards.
And that doesn't even begin to address that wikipedia's rules are insane to begin with. Just the rules covering acceptable usernames are almost 4000 words long (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Username_policy).
I'm so tired of this meme. No one owns an article. [0] You say "de facto", but just because someone disagrees with you on something, it doesn't mean they disagree with every edit or do it only for that article. The vast majority of articles barely have anyone watching them.
> who will do everything they can to preserve control over their turf.
The fact that you describe it as "turf" only further proves that you have this mentality of the article being a battleground.
> They tend to be experts in rules laywering which is how they got their power in the first place.
What power? Even admins on Wikipedia can't overrule consensus and discussion. What's this about rule lawyering too? They just understand the community norms better. I don't walk into a fancy restaurant and complain about "rules lawyering" after I get kicked out for breaking the dress code. Once someone tells you about a rule, you should read up on it, not boisterously claim that you should be above the community rules.
> Just the rules covering acceptable usernames are almost 4000 words long
Seems simple enough to me:
> This page in a nutshell: When choosing an account name, do not choose names which may be offensive, misleading, disruptive, or promotional. In general, one username should represent one person.
Those 4000 words should only matter if you don't find the above to be sufficient explanation.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Ownership_of_content
Over 1000 hits for "ownership" on ANI: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Search&pr...
> What's this about rule lawyering too?
Nearly 1000 hits for "wikilawyerng" on ANI: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Search&pr...
Are you seriously trying to persuade someone who has doubts about the accuracy of Wikipedia content with a link to a Wikipedia page?
Nobody cares what should happen 'in principle' unless the principles are enforced — which they are often not. See for example how the enforcement of the verifiability policy looks like.[0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Articles_lacking_sour...
Maybe because the moment he would try to actually go and even, say, enforce the verifiability policies that already exist, an angry crowd of self-important ignoramuses would stop him in his tracks shouting 'Stop right there, you filthy deletionist! The article is notable!' and drag him to the dramaboards to have him blocked. And I should know, I have had the same thing happen to me on Commons.
> A Nature study (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4530930.stm) found it to be comparable in accuracy to Brittanica.
Are you seriously referring to that one over-ten-year-old study which used a non-representative sample of articles?
[0] As in, the writer of Penny Arcade, of course.
Here you're shouting others down by trying to shame them. Please don't do that. Being unwilling or incapable of cleaning up the messes others make does not disqualify one from criticizing the mess makers.
Here we are in a topic that actually documents the hostility people encounter when participating in Wikipedia, a topic that provides overwhelming anecdotal evidence among the comments that people are being actively discouraged from contributing to Wikipedia by hostile admins and topic campers (something I have personally experienced) and you pretend the actual problem is lazyness.
You deserved your downmod.
It's a trap, because it ensures the only people who direct it are the ones who also have time to get fill the site with unimportant trivia and camp out. Unsurprisingly, anything to do with the current culture war is a lost cause.
Why haven't you tried to address those inaccuracies? I could sympathize if you said you did and were rebutted, but sounds to me like someone complaining that their local beach is full of trash when they themselves never bothered to help clean it.
> At the rate in which I encounter inaccurate data on Wikipedia that I can identify, it makes me suspicious of nearly everything on the site.
If you don't do that for every source you use, you might be suffering from the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect.
> but it's hardly a substitution for a legitimate source let alone encyclopedia.
A Nature study (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4530930.stm) found it to be comparable in accuracy to Brittanica.
> Nonetheless, I know plenty of people who take it as legitimate and cite it as if it's an authority.
Encyclopedias are tertiary sources, they should be used as reference works, not sources in and of themselves.