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You're reading a different wikipedia than I am. Or describing what you hope it could be?

The Wikipedia I read is a collection of sentence fragments that sometimes contradict each other before the period, and the sentences often contradict each other within the paragraph. Then, that confused mix is filtered through an army of agenda based editors.

The example of this that killed the joy I found in wikipedia was the Hookah page. My friends and I were smoking a lot of hookah in college, so I decided I wanted to learn more about it. The wikipdeia page was incredibly pro-hookah, and cited various stores that sold hookah equipment. When I researched it fully, I found the WHO did a study that showed hookah smoke contains a tremendous amount of tar, users hold the smoke in their lungs longer, absorbing more tar, and the 'shisha' (tobacco) is actually burned- not "roasted," which is the word hookah promonets use to dissemble.

It was completely impossible to get that information onto the page, despite learning tons of wiki culture and really working at it for months.

After that I noticed the same thing on a huge quantity of pages. Writing and organizing information is hard. It can't be done well by an unfocused committee of people, even if they care. Add in self-interested saboteurs, and you've got a recipe for disaster.




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