There was an extensive discussion and vote about this. The view that prevailed (by 85 to 55 in the official vote tabulation) was that the attribute wouldn't be all that effective at stopping spam, that we could clean the spam links in the normal editing process, and that we could help out the good sites we referenced by boosting their Google ranking.
I was in the minority. I hope that some version of the attribute will be restored in the future. The comment on the vote says, 'More advanced heuristic use of rel="nofollow" is likely to come, when someone has the time to put in the effort to make it work.' Maybe someone reading this has the skills to help out.
In the meantime, if you see spam in a Wikipedia article, feel free to fix it. The "Edit this page" link is at the top, and the bottom, and the left margin. Be bold!
Indeed there at least 22 non-english language versions of Wikipedia....
Actually, according to this listing, there are versions of Wikipedia in 159 languages. That tally counts all languages with at least one article other than the Main Page. There are 90 that have at least 100 articles.
If the version you decide you want to cite to is the current one, don't link to it, because that link will go to whatever is current when someone else follows it. Instead, make a trivial non-vandalism edit to the version you want, like adding an extra blank space after the last sentence. The version you want is now no longer the current one and you can create a stable link to it. If you're a neatnik you can then go back and remove the superfluous blank space, but, even as a Wikipedian who hates vandalism, I wouldn't consider that necessary.
the inability to have a permanent link to the revision as it exists NOW is a known problem. You can link to any prior revision with a direct and permanent link though.
Right, hence the workaround: If you want to cite the current version, edit it innocuously by adding a blank space at the end of a paragraph. Then the version you want to cite is no longer the current version and can be linked to.
A stable version of wikipedia with controlled updates has also been considered though there has been no real movement on this yet.
The idea of a stable version of the English-language Wikipedia (with the additional possibility of releasing it on CD, DVD or even on paper) is under consideration (check that article's talk page, too). It would require a method of selecting and validating the articles that would be included. Different validation ideas include designating experts or implementing community review, with/. moderation mentioned as one possible model. Doing anything like that will be tough, though. Doing it on a monthly basis is pretty much out of the question.
The current wikipedia state...Is sad. When anybody can change the entire entry without anybody noticing.. the "Douche" entry was insulting some girl with first and last name for about a week or two before it was changed.
Without a serious review system, I can see it becoming a nest of crap that no one will be able to use.
I just went through the entire history of the Wikipedia article on Douche. I learned more about douching than I ever wanted to know. (Still, the review is much easier with the new Mediawiki v1.4, implemented in beta just this week. You can go directly from any version of the article to its immediate predecessor or successor, or you can do the same in the "diffs" that display the changed sections and highlight what was changed.) When I review the article, I don't find anything like what you describe.
The article seems to be a favorite place for the kiddies to insert people's names, but this vandalism gets reverted quickly. The first one ("Oh, and Eric's a douche") lasted all of one minute back in March before it was reverted.
Now, I'll admit, they got us this week. The vandalism that added someone's name at 2:02 on December 21 wasn't reverted for thirteen hours. I guess we were all at our Winter Solstice rituals. But there is nothing remotely close to "insulting some girl with first and last name for about a week or two before it was changed."
So, if you had added such a claim to a Wikipedia article, I'd just delete the misinformation, while giving my reasons (as above) in the edit summary or on the article's talk page. If you could back up your assertion, you could restore the passage. If you and I couldn't reach agreement, we'd get other participants involved. Here on Slashdot, with its "serious review system", however, all I can do is post this response.
Wikipedia has its own infoculture as well, considering how many topics there are (understandably) on arcane technical and computer-related topics. Try submitting something arcane on, oh say religion. See how fast it gets dumped into the Votes for Deletion que.
To learn something arcane from eastern religion, you can read about the three gunas, a concept developed by the Samkhya branch of Hinduism: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guna. If you're more of a big-picture guy, maybe you'd prefer to start with the general article on Samkhya philosophy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samkhya.
So, uh, just how arcane do you want?
AFAICT, none of these articles has ever been proposed for deletion.
Wikipedians have devoted a lot of thought to the idea of creating a "validated" version of Wikipedia, with article versions that pass some kind of test. Anyone could still edit the current version but the validated version would be frozen.
How to validate? One possibility is to designate experts, but another that's been mentioned is indeed/. style moderation. See http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Validation.
Every article has an associated Talk page. If you're interested in a particular assertion in the article, it's worth checking there. You may find that a seemingly innocuous sentence in the article is the result of extensive discussion between proponents of the competing views, and that the text is carefully crafted to be correct in everyone's eyes.
Then again, you may find absolutely nothing. It can be frustrating for the editor as well as for the reader. I sometimes find myself wondering whether an apparent error in the article is there because someone knew more than I do, or less. Not every edit is accompanied by an explanation, let alone a citation to a source. Making citation an absolute requirement, instead of a piece of advice, might make the articles more valuable, but would make it more difficult for people to contribute.
All articles are supposed to be NPOV -- written from a neutral point of view. If someone wrote, "New Hampshire is the only state that doesn't oppress its citizens with income taxes or sales taxes," that insertion of an anti-tax POV would be changed by another editor. In fact, the page history shows that someone fixed a less biased version that read: "There are no general sales or individual income taxes, which fits with the state motto of 'Live free or die'."
One weakness in the policy, which you've discovered, is that people disagree about the importance of various neutrally stated facts. Some people would argue that the state's tax policy is more important, and more worthy of being mentioned in the introduction, than the fact that it's named for the English county of Hampshire. Many of the edit wars that occur are about how prominently to feature a particular fact, and about how much detail to provide on a particular aspect of the subject of the article. These issues are harder to deal with than just removing blatant biases. The overall pattern of such decisions will tend to reflect the outlook of the user group. It's still worth something to make sure that the information in the article, whether it's in the intro or further down, is NPOV. (Speaking as a liberal who favors progressive income taxes, I have no problem saying that it's not a bias to describe New Hampshire's tax system. The article should include that information, which some would consider praise and I'd consider a criticism!)
I agree with you that the article should discuss average income and the town meeting system. The latter point is covered at the "Town meeting" article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Town_meeting#New_Ham pshire) but something should be in the article on the state. If you, as a resident, are knowledgeable on the subject, please go ahead and edit either or both of those articles. This is how the knowledge base grows, with many people contributing what they know.
Wikipedia content is freely available. One consequence of that decision is that somebody with no connection to Wikipedia can set up a mirror site, grab our content, slap on ads, bury the required credit to Wikipedia way down at the bottom of the page, and use SEO tricks to get a higher Google listing. There are several other sites that do the same thing.
I took a quick scan of the edit history for New Hampshire and couldn't identify the specific edit you mention. It's certainly possible that it was an attack from a right-winger. In general, you're right that "there is a struggle about content" in many articles. As with many media, there are complaints about left-wing bias and about right-wing bias. One difference between Wikipedia and more centrally controlled media is that, with the diverse editing of Wikipedia articles, the biases don't necessarily all go in the same direction.
There are separate Wikipedias for different language. You visited the main page for the English-language Wikipedia, the largest, which has 350,000+ entries (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page). The occasion for the press release is that the total number of articles in all the different languages combined has just reached 1,000,000.
The Wikipedia article on Slashdot (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slashdot) was vandalized by an anonymous user who inserted the "left wing and anti-american" passage that you quote. That passage was in the article for all of two minutes before it was removed, according to the page history (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Slashd ot&action=history -- it was the edit at 16:40 UTC, reverted by user Fredrik at 16:42).
There's a good chance that the vandalism was by a Slashdotter who was curious to see how quickly garbage would be removed. This "experiment" has been done, people. Repeatedly. Please stop it. Blatant errors in articles that get lots of attention are corrected quickly. Subtle errors in obscure articles can linger for a long time. We know this. Vandalizing Wikipedia adds nothing to the sum of human knowledge.
I'm a liberal Democrat (voted for Kucinich in the primary). I haven't detected any systematic spin of the type you describe. Some particular articles tend toward a right-wing point of view because right-wing editors have been more active on those articles. It would certainly be helpful if more people with a progressive orientation would become involved.
Jimmy Wales has essentially no involvement with article content. The systematic bias arises not from any one person's efforts but from demographics. For example, there's a certain amount of Americo-centrism just because so many editors are from the U.S. In addition, certain subject areas (computers, popular culture) tend to get more attention because Wikipedia attracts people interested in those things.
The strength of a project like Wikipedia is in the axiom "Given enough eyeballs, all errors are shallow" (expanded from Eric Raymond's original "all bugs are shallow").
Where are the eyeballs to find the errors? You can tell through the "Recent changes" link on each site. I look at http://www.infoshop.org/wiki/index.php/Special:Rec entchanges and I see, in the last week, a total of six edits by three different people. At this moment, a check of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Recentchanges -- set to the default of showing the last 50 edits -- shows that those 50 edits accumulated in two minutes, thirty-four seconds. So, on which site is bias or factual error more likely to be corrected?
Nir, see my reply to Munra. There's no option for an email report that I know of. You have to log in to Wikipedia to view your Watchlist. That's no imposition, because once you get hooked, you'll be logging in every day anyway.
Wikipedia has a useful feature called a "Watchlist" for each user. The default is that your Watchlist includes the articles you've edited, but you can delete any of them from the list, and you can add any other articles you want. When you click on the "My watchlist" link, you see a display of links to the most recent changes to every article on your Watchlist. (It defaults to covering the last three days but you can lengthen or shorten the period scanned.) Thus, you know which articles have been edited, and by whom, and you see the editor's Edit Summary about what s/he did.
As a result, most articles, including (I'd guess) every article of any importance, has at least one person watching it. Instead of the single "primary contact" that you suggested, there can be several people who are automatically notified of any change. I don't need to keep checking each article that I care about. If it sits there for months unchanged, then someone edits it, I'll know about it.
For a prominent and controversial article, you can bet that several Wikipedians of sharply conflicting views are ready to pounce on any change that biases the article against their side. For example, we get the occasional stupid insult inserted into the articles on Bush or Kerry. They're gone within minutes. (No, this is not a suggestion that you should do something stupid yourself, just to see if I'm right.)
One of the examples you give is Chile. One of the Wikipedia articles about Chile, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._intervention_in_ Chile, discusses the role of the CIA in ousting the elected government of Salvador Allende.
Yes, I've seen right-wing bias on Wikipedia, but it's always subject to correction.
At the Infoshop project you mention, I see from their guidelines (http://www.infoshop.org/wiki/index.php/Guidelines) that "liberal,... pro-government, pro-hierarchy speech is prohibited" and "Anti-anarchist speech is prohibited." Interesting -- it seems there's a hierarchy in that someone has the power to prohibit me from saying things I might want to say. Do these guidelines constitute pro-hierarchy speech? If so, where do I file my complaint?
Actually, the article on the Big Bang (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Bang) identifies it as part of astrophysics and cosmology, and reports that it's "the prevailing scientific theory about the early development and shape of the universe." There's a section on criticisms of the theory, but they're all scientific criticisms. There's no mention of God or of the Titans.
This is a suitably encyclopedic approach. People who care about the scientific theory can read this article. People who want to know the contents of religious or mythological accounts of creation look at other articles.
Every article on Wikipedia has an associated Talk page. To go there, click on "Discuss this page" to the left of the article (blue link if someone has discussed the article, red if you'll be the first). You can post your own comments or queries. More to the point, you can see what others have said. There may be a debate raging about a particular assertion, and you can read both sides.
Every article also has available its complete history -- the first version that was posted, and every subsequent change. You can look at any version, you can compare any two versions, and you can see who made each change. An article that's been edited by many different people is more likely to be reliable than one that's the work of only a few. You access this information by clicking on "Page history", also in the menu to the left of the article.
Incidentally, the next link down under "Page history" is "What links here". If you're not satisfied with the article you found, you may get what you need from other Wikipedia articles that link to that article. Of course, often the first article you reach has useful links to other Wikipedia articles or to external websites. Failing that, you can post a question on the Reference Desk: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reference_d esk.
This is exactly right, except that there are actually a few useful articles otside the areas of computing, gaming and communications.
An example of Wikipedia's value: I encountered a reference to the Treaty of Trianon. I'd never heard of it. I looked it up on Wikipedia and got what I needed. It was a 1920 treaty that defined Hungary's boundaries; the article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Trianon) included a map of the affected territories and a summary of the treaty's other provisions.
Was the article error-free? No. It referred to subsequent actions affecting these territories and mentioned the Munich Agreement as having occurred in 1939. I happened to know that 1938 was the correct date, so I fixed it. There may well be some other error(s) remaining.
Points to bear in mind:
(1) As a zillion other people have said, you wouldn't cite this article in a formal paper, or otherwise expose yourself to bad consequences if something in it turned out to be wrong -- but for a quick overview of the Treaty of Trianon, it's much better and faster than running your own Google search.
(2) Errors are less likely to persist where the "many eyeballs" theory is strongest. If you want to know something about the Munich Agreement, you're better off going to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Munich_Agreement, where more people have been paying attention to that subject. An article on a minor topic, edited by only a few people, is more likely to be wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
There was an extensive discussion and vote about this. The view that prevailed (by 85 to 55 in the official vote tabulation) was that the attribute wouldn't be all that effective at stopping spam, that we could clean the spam links in the normal editing process, and that we could help out the good sites we referenced by boosting their Google ranking.
I was in the minority. I hope that some version of the attribute will be restored in the future. The comment on the vote says, 'More advanced heuristic use of rel="nofollow" is likely to come, when someone has the time to put in the effort to make it work.' Maybe someone reading this has the skills to help out.
In the meantime, if you see spam in a Wikipedia article, feel free to fix it. The "Edit this page" link is at the top, and the bottom, and the left margin. Be bold!
Indeed there at least 22 non-english language versions of Wikipedia....
Actually, according to this listing, there are versions of Wikipedia in 159 languages. That tally counts all languages with at least one article other than the Main Page. There are 90 that have at least 100 articles.
If the version you decide you want to cite to is the current one, don't link to it, because that link will go to whatever is current when someone else follows it. Instead, make a trivial non-vandalism edit to the version you want, like adding an extra blank space after the last sentence. The version you want is now no longer the current one and you can create a stable link to it. If you're a neatnik you can then go back and remove the superfluous blank space, but, even as a Wikipedian who hates vandalism, I wouldn't consider that necessary.
the inability to have a permanent link to the revision as it exists NOW is a known problem. You can link to any prior revision with a direct and permanent link though.
/. moderation mentioned as one possible model. Doing anything like that will be tough, though. Doing it on a monthly basis is pretty much out of the question.
Right, hence the workaround: If you want to cite the current version, edit it innocuously by adding a blank space at the end of a paragraph. Then the version you want to cite is no longer the current version and can be linked to.
A stable version of wikipedia with controlled updates has also been considered though there has been no real movement on this yet.
The idea of a stable version of the English-language Wikipedia (with the additional possibility of releasing it on CD, DVD or even on paper) is under consideration (check that article's talk page, too). It would require a method of selecting and validating the articles that would be included. Different validation ideas include designating experts or implementing community review, with
The current wikipedia state...Is sad. When anybody can change the entire entry without anybody noticing.. the "Douche" entry was insulting some girl with first and last name for about a week or two before it was changed.
Without a serious review system, I can see it becoming a nest of crap that no one will be able to use.
I just went through the entire history of the Wikipedia article on Douche. I learned more about douching than I ever wanted to know. (Still, the review is much easier with the new Mediawiki v1.4, implemented in beta just this week. You can go directly from any version of the article to its immediate predecessor or successor, or you can do the same in the "diffs" that display the changed sections and highlight what was changed.) When I review the article, I don't find anything like what you describe.
The article seems to be a favorite place for the kiddies to insert people's names, but this vandalism gets reverted quickly. The first one ("Oh, and Eric's a douche") lasted all of one minute back in March before it was reverted.
Here are subsequent corrections reverting such edits, with their lag times showing how long the vandalism stayed up before it was caught:
one minute
three minutes
two minutes
seven minutes
one minute
nine minutes
one minute
Now, I'll admit, they got us this week. The vandalism that added someone's name at 2:02 on December 21 wasn't reverted for thirteen hours. I guess we were all at our Winter Solstice rituals. But there is nothing remotely close to "insulting some girl with first and last name for about a week or two before it was changed."
So, if you had added such a claim to a Wikipedia article, I'd just delete the misinformation, while giving my reasons (as above) in the edit summary or on the article's talk page. If you could back up your assertion, you could restore the passage. If you and I couldn't reach agreement, we'd get other participants involved. Here on Slashdot, with its "serious review system", however, all I can do is post this response.
Wikipedia has its own infoculture as well, considering how many topics there are (understandably) on arcane technical and computer-related topics. Try submitting something arcane on, oh say religion. See how fast it gets dumped into the Votes for Deletion que.
a . And, yes, there are also articles about Lindisfarne http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindisfarne, the Lindisfarne Gospels http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindisfarne_Gospels, and even Penda http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penda_of_Mercia.
OK, how about Saint Oswald of Northumbria? Read how he helped to establish the monastery at Lindisfarne (where monks later produced the Lindisfarne Gospels) and about his eventual martyrdom at the hands of Penda, the cruel pagan king: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oswald_of_Northumbri
To learn something arcane from eastern religion, you can read about the three gunas, a concept developed by the Samkhya branch of Hinduism: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guna. If you're more of a big-picture guy, maybe you'd prefer to start with the general article on Samkhya philosophy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samkhya.
So, uh, just how arcane do you want?
AFAICT, none of these articles has ever been proposed for deletion.
Wikipedians have devoted a lot of thought to the idea of creating a "validated" version of Wikipedia, with article versions that pass some kind of test. Anyone could still edit the current version but the validated version would be frozen. How to validate? One possibility is to designate experts, but another that's been mentioned is indeed /. style moderation. See http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Validation.
Every article has an associated Talk page. If you're interested in a particular assertion in the article, it's worth checking there. You may find that a seemingly innocuous sentence in the article is the result of extensive discussion between proponents of the competing views, and that the text is carefully crafted to be correct in everyone's eyes.
Then again, you may find absolutely nothing. It can be frustrating for the editor as well as for the reader. I sometimes find myself wondering whether an apparent error in the article is there because someone knew more than I do, or less. Not every edit is accompanied by an explanation, let alone a citation to a source. Making citation an absolute requirement, instead of a piece of advice, might make the articles more valuable, but would make it more difficult for people to contribute.
All articles are supposed to be NPOV -- written from a neutral point of view. If someone wrote, "New Hampshire is the only state that doesn't oppress its citizens with income taxes or sales taxes," that insertion of an anti-tax POV would be changed by another editor. In fact, the page history shows that someone fixed a less biased version that read: "There are no general sales or individual income taxes, which fits with the state motto of 'Live free or die'."
m pshire) but something should be in the article on the state. If you, as a resident, are knowledgeable on the subject, please go ahead and edit either or both of those articles. This is how the knowledge base grows, with many people contributing what they know.
One weakness in the policy, which you've discovered, is that people disagree about the importance of various neutrally stated facts. Some people would argue that the state's tax policy is more important, and more worthy of being mentioned in the introduction, than the fact that it's named for the English county of Hampshire. Many of the edit wars that occur are about how prominently to feature a particular fact, and about how much detail to provide on a particular aspect of the subject of the article. These issues are harder to deal with than just removing blatant biases. The overall pattern of such decisions will tend to reflect the outlook of the user group. It's still worth something to make sure that the information in the article, whether it's in the intro or further down, is NPOV. (Speaking as a liberal who favors progressive income taxes, I have no problem saying that it's not a bias to describe New Hampshire's tax system. The article should include that information, which some would consider praise and I'd consider a criticism!)
I agree with you that the article should discuss average income and the town meeting system. The latter point is covered at the "Town meeting" article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Town_meeting#New_Ha
Wikipedia content is freely available. One consequence of that decision is that somebody with no connection to Wikipedia can set up a mirror site, grab our content, slap on ads, bury the required credit to Wikipedia way down at the bottom of the page, and use SEO tricks to get a higher Google listing. There are several other sites that do the same thing.
I took a quick scan of the edit history for New Hampshire and couldn't identify the specific edit you mention. It's certainly possible that it was an attack from a right-winger. In general, you're right that "there is a struggle about content" in many articles. As with many media, there are complaints about left-wing bias and about right-wing bias. One difference between Wikipedia and more centrally controlled media is that, with the diverse editing of Wikipedia articles, the biases don't necessarily all go in the same direction.
There are separate Wikipedias for different language. You visited the main page for the English-language Wikipedia, the largest, which has 350,000+ entries (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page). The occasion for the press release is that the total number of articles in all the different languages combined has just reached 1,000,000.
The Wikipedia article on Slashdot (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slashdot) was vandalized by an anonymous user who inserted the "left wing and anti-american" passage that you quote. That passage was in the article for all of two minutes before it was removed, according to the page history (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Slashd ot&action=history -- it was the edit at 16:40 UTC, reverted by user Fredrik at 16:42).
There's a good chance that the vandalism was by a Slashdotter who was curious to see how quickly garbage would be removed. This "experiment" has been done, people. Repeatedly. Please stop it. Blatant errors in articles that get lots of attention are corrected quickly. Subtle errors in obscure articles can linger for a long time. We know this. Vandalizing Wikipedia adds nothing to the sum of human knowledge.
I'm a liberal Democrat (voted for Kucinich in the primary). I haven't detected any systematic spin of the type you describe. Some particular articles tend toward a right-wing point of view because right-wing editors have been more active on those articles. It would certainly be helpful if more people with a progressive orientation would become involved.
Jimmy Wales has essentially no involvement with article content. The systematic bias arises not from any one person's efforts but from demographics. For example, there's a certain amount of Americo-centrism just because so many editors are from the U.S. In addition, certain subject areas (computers, popular culture) tend to get more attention because Wikipedia attracts people interested in those things.
The strength of a project like Wikipedia is in the axiom "Given enough eyeballs, all errors are shallow" (expanded from Eric Raymond's original "all bugs are shallow").
c entchanges and I see, in the last week, a total of six edits by three different people. At this moment, a check of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Recentchanges -- set to the default of showing the last 50 edits -- shows that those 50 edits accumulated in two minutes, thirty-four seconds. So, on which site is bias or factual error more likely to be corrected?
o r_adminship to see the current nominees and to cast your vote. There are currently 282 active admins (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_adm inistrators), rather large for an efficient cabal.
Where are the eyeballs to find the errors? You can tell through the "Recent changes" link on each site. I look at http://www.infoshop.org/wiki/index.php/Special:Re
By the way, Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, doesn't designate the administrators. They're chosen by the community. At any moment you can go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_f
Nir, see my reply to Munra. There's no option for an email report that I know of. You have to log in to Wikipedia to view your Watchlist. That's no imposition, because once you get hooked, you'll be logging in every day anyway.
As a result, most articles, including (I'd guess) every article of any importance, has at least one person watching it. Instead of the single "primary contact" that you suggested, there can be several people who are automatically notified of any change. I don't need to keep checking each article that I care about. If it sits there for months unchanged, then someone edits it, I'll know about it.
For a prominent and controversial article, you can bet that several Wikipedians of sharply conflicting views are ready to pounce on any change that biases the article against their side. For example, we get the occasional stupid insult inserted into the articles on Bush or Kerry. They're gone within minutes. (No, this is not a suggestion that you should do something stupid yourself, just to see if I'm right.)
Yes, I've seen right-wing bias on Wikipedia, but it's always subject to correction.
At the Infoshop project you mention, I see from their guidelines (http://www.infoshop.org/wiki/index.php/Guidelines ) that "liberal, ... pro-government, pro-hierarchy speech is prohibited" and "Anti-anarchist speech is prohibited." Interesting -- it seems there's a hierarchy in that someone has the power to prohibit me from saying things I might want to say. Do these guidelines constitute pro-hierarchy speech? If so, where do I file my complaint?
This is a suitably encyclopedic approach. People who care about the scientific theory can read this article. People who want to know the contents of religious or mythological accounts of creation look at other articles.
Every article also has available its complete history -- the first version that was posted, and every subsequent change. You can look at any version, you can compare any two versions, and you can see who made each change. An article that's been edited by many different people is more likely to be reliable than one that's the work of only a few. You access this information by clicking on "Page history", also in the menu to the left of the article.
Incidentally, the next link down under "Page history" is "What links here". If you're not satisfied with the article you found, you may get what you need from other Wikipedia articles that link to that article. Of course, often the first article you reach has useful links to other Wikipedia articles or to external websites. Failing that, you can post a question on the Reference Desk: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reference_d esk.
An example of Wikipedia's value: I encountered a reference to the Treaty of Trianon. I'd never heard of it. I looked it up on Wikipedia and got what I needed. It was a 1920 treaty that defined Hungary's boundaries; the article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Trianon) included a map of the affected territories and a summary of the treaty's other provisions.
Was the article error-free? No. It referred to subsequent actions affecting these territories and mentioned the Munich Agreement as having occurred in 1939. I happened to know that 1938 was the correct date, so I fixed it. There may well be some other error(s) remaining.
Points to bear in mind:
(1) As a zillion other people have said, you wouldn't cite this article in a formal paper, or otherwise expose yourself to bad consequences if something in it turned out to be wrong -- but for a quick overview of the Treaty of Trianon, it's much better and faster than running your own Google search.
(2) Errors are less likely to persist where the "many eyeballs" theory is strongest. If you want to know something about the Munich Agreement, you're better off going to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Munich_Agreement, where more people have been paying attention to that subject. An article on a minor topic, edited by only a few people, is more likely to be wrong.