I think the issue is if an article doesn't get enough attention, it's easy for people to slip in blatantly false or misleading information for self interested reasons. I imagine this is worse on non-english wikipedia but it does also happen on English.

So on Wikipedia, you need to always be thinking about whether anyone has a motivation to manipulate the article and checking to see whether they in fact have. You could argue that this is true of everything though, and at least on Wikipedia people are usually pretty clumsy about revealing their biases.

Well said. The major problem with Wikipedia is that unless a topic is extremely popular, most of the editors interested in working on the topic will have a huge bias toward one particular point of view. They will directly cite advocacy organizations that support their view in the body of the article over neutral sources. Fixing this is basically impossible. "The encyclopedia that anyone can edit" is true in the sense that "anyone can become an editor" which is true in the sense of "anyone can become a millionaire." In reality, reforming a problematic article on Wikipedia would take a major investment into getting an account with the requisite reputation and friends in similar positions of power. Most of us can't be bothered.

The other major problem with Wikipedia is the low quality of many of its writers, at least (again) for topics a little outside mainstream interest. Last time I edited Wikipedia, I discovered an organized editing effort by a professor teaching a course at a community college. I tracked it to the course website, and apparently as a semester long project, students were asked to pick an article and slowly incorporate improvements to it as well as check the quality of other incoming changes.

Now, I've taught classes at a pretty well regarded public university, and having had to grade the writing of incoming students from good high schools, my assessment of the writing skills provided by America's primary education system is Not Great. I can only imagine that the caliber of student coming into a typical community college is even worse. This isn't to trash this particular student or even the class, but to give an idea of who's editing Wikipedia, on a good day.

The article I was reading (which I'd regard as important - I actually found it after seeing statistics it provided quoted by well-known publications) had slowly been turned into complete garbage over the course of a few months by this student. It was barely coherent English. Statistics were misquoted and misinterpreted throughout (everyone citing the Wikipedia article had been misled, as a result). And this was the result of one editor doing a bad job, not even deliberate astroturfing. Suffice it to say, it's very dangerous to take Wikipedia seriously on any subject of importance unless the article about it has been widely reviewed.

That's exactly it. It's not that every article is unreliable, it's that there is no way to tell. I suppose you can take a look at the edit history and see how sparsely vetted an article is, but some metric like that prominently displayed to portray signal-to-noise would be an improvement.

I'm sure there are folks here who would disagree but I'd generally trust mainstream global news sources like The Economist, New York Times, and Wall Street Journal. (Which is not to say they don't get stories or even whole narratives wrong.)

Agreed. They certainly have their biases, but they are at least correct about the facts they state almost all the time, and when they have factual inaccuracies, they seem to be rare, honest mistakes. Better than a lot of sources of information related to politics, that are full of intentionally incorrect facts.

I was interviewed for a fairly trivial story in the WSJ based on something I wrote on Twitter a while back. Total nothingburger comment and, from a 30 minute conversation, total nothingburger quote. But the amount of back and forth, confirming quote and associated details, etc. was incredible. Most pubs would have just quoted the tweet.

(That said, I've also been interviewed for a breaking news story and that's simply run.)

Wikipedia is in this uncanny valley of reliability, where it looks impartial when you take a superficial glance, but when you look closer it isn't. This lulls you into false sense of security that allows the occasional lie* through your filters.

* I saw lie, because if you tried to fix the inaccuracy it would not be allowed.

Wikipedia is not a primary source. You wouldn’t describe it as a source or cite it. That people don’t know this is one of Wikipedia’s failings.