Also various other newspaper archives have mind-numbing amounts of scanned material dating back well over 100 years, and the Wikipedia Library provides free access to these resources for editors.
This just isn't true. Most wikipedia references have a hyperlink and a proper citation which can be looked up using traditional means. For example, a cite might look like this:
"Intel Pentium Processor G6950 (3M Cache, 2.80 GHz) with SPEC Code(s) SLBMS". Ark.intel.com. 2010-07-13. Archived from the original on 2011-03-09. Retrieved 2010-07-29.
The link to intel.com has rotted, but:
1) There's an archive of the page so the information hasn't been lost
2) There's also a full citation, with which you can write a letter to Intel asking them for the document in question ("Intel Pentium Processor G6950 (3M Cache, 2.80 GHz) with SPEC Code(s) SLBMS"). This is a lot more detail than you'd have in a traditional encyclopedia. If you're a researcher, the encyclopedia has given what you need to seek more detail from the primary source - and that's the whole point!
archive.org and wikipedia.org working together is really powerful.
In terms of book references Wikipedia simply wins, hands down. Those don't rot.
It's unclear what your point is. Are you suggesting wikipedia shouldn't also have citations to content published online, simply because it might be removed?
There are 81 citations. Of these, only 9 are not citing published books with an ISBN, or articles published in journals.
4 are citations to papers or articles published by physics professors on their university websites (Berkeley, Riverside, CUNY, Caltech)
Three are links to magazines: Quanta Magazine, Scientific American, Physics World
The remaining two are a link to the Nobel Foundation (regarding a nobel prize award) and a link to Merriam-Webster for a definition of "Quantum."
> At best you can get some people's opinion about something.
Nah, not even close.
Cherry picking can only occur if I'm generalizing, and I am not. Counter-examples aren't cherry-picking.
Your statement "At best you can get some people's opinion about something" has been disproven.
"Wiki" is a type of software, like "editor" or "web browser". It is not the name of wikipedia.
Yes yes, language evolves, but this is like someone deleting the Internet Explorer link from their Windows desktop and saying "I deleted the internet from this computer, I don't have the internet any more".
I’d bet any mining of actually working citations would average closer to 2015. It used to be people citing something from the 70’s or 80’s would get strange looks from people who lived then, now I see Millenials looking at Gen-Z kids that way.
History is written not by the victor, but by the last wiki editor.