If I annoyed you by nominating your page for deletion or some other edit I did, please reach out to me on my talk page. I have no ill intentions, and I could’ve made a mistake.
The most important things about Wikipedia (and any published source for that matter) are being factual and neutral. Wikipedia obviously has a reputation as not always being factual, but I would argue that the bias problem is larger.
Wikipedians have plenty of different viewpoints, as the project is a global effort. But opinions are like arseholes – you can be proud of yours, we all have one, but flashing it to others probably isn’t the best idea. The problem is that we don’t just do it consciously; bias creeps into everything we do, for the better or the worse. It affects which pages we edit, to the content we add, to which editors we argue with, to how we treat new users, and how we participate in talk pages. If we want to live up the the ideals of this website, we need to understand where we’re coming from and how our words can be perceived by others.
Confronting bias is especially important on touchy topics. You know what I mean – gender, religion, Political polarization, conflicts/wars. I’m not taking a side here, but Jesus, if you want a headache, go to the talk page of the “Gaza genocide” article. More people take Wikipedia as a news source as one may think, despite their knowledge that any anonymous person can edit it.
Both the problems of neutrality and factuality are becoming more and more important because of how search engines and large language models (LLMs) use data from this website. Search engines like Google and Bing pull data from articles to create summaries to provide to their end user, like such as in sidebars or AI overviews. LLMs like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude get trained on data dumps of Wikipedia, which then regurgitate the information back at the world. Even if you, the reader, take the content written here and by AI with a grain of salt, not everyone does. All it takes is one respected journalist or academic to republish something, and it will propagate from there.
It’s easy to roll your eyes at a page and criticize it for being biased or incorrect, but you have to be the one to change it. With the same level of effort to angrily tweet about the issue, you can click edit and change it, which can take less time and has a measurable lasting impact. Don’t be afraid of editing – doing blue-collar maintenance is a great way to get started and get a feel on how this complicated website works. But most importantly, don’t be a jerk while you’re at it. All that does is push people away and make you a more bitter person. This is the Internet’s most influential project and one of the greatest achievements of the Information Age; don’t let it go to waste.