Another "wikipedia is shite but I'm not going to give any examples and I'm going to ignore the fact I could have edited it to make it better but didn't" post.
If i have to edit it to make it accurate, why should i rely on wikipedia in the first place?
When i wrote an MBR/VBR for some real mode x86 stuff, i initially relied but on the wikipedia and osdev pages for FAT and the bios/bootlader stuff. This is how i learned the hard way how unreliable it is. Details are left out, the scope of validity for information is rarely specified, vague "many implementations" phrases that do not give any hints whether a certain behavior needs to be emulated or not.
I ended up discarding both wikipedia and the osdev wiki and using the IBM PS/2 reference manual, as well as some details from the MS PnP specification.
I had similar issues with the wikipedia explanation of the german Hl- and Ks-Signal systems for train safety, as well as articles related to intel peripheral controllers and serial ports. Often they are just not deep and detailed enough to answer my questions.
[tl;dr] It feels like reading a pop-sci article when you actually need the original paper.
You are confused about wiki, it's encyclopaedic articles and an overview, a good jumping off point (that's what the references at the bottom of the page are for, does this help https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_boot_record#References), not the sum of all human knowledge
"If i have to edit it to make it accurate, why should i rely on wikipedia in the first place?"
And there we have it, the entitlement with no expectation of giving anything back. It's for other people too. You're not the only person who uses wiki, you just haven't realised it yet.
Read the primary sources! They are the source of truth, there is no need to rely on wikipedia editors or journalists to rephrase it correctly, which they are often unable to.
Just bypass wikipedia. Your implication that its something that the world requires is not correct.
Counterpoint: I fact checked and corrected an article - the original article author misread the cited source and claimed statistics that were plausible but incorrect. In the process I improved the readability of the paragraph I touched up. My change was never reverted, and it was within the last year on a page related to slavery and human trafficking - so not exactly fringe, and subject to lots of eyeballs.
I would not be surprised if a lot of the people carrying forward the “Wikipedia is uneditable” meme have not even tried to edit Wikipedia at this point.
Why are ignoring this whole thread, full of testomies to the fact that you can't, actually, edit any of it? May be this view isn't true, but in context of this conversation intellectual honestly requires at least to acknowledge, if not meaningfully challenge it.
Counterpoint: I fact checked and corrected an article - the original article author misread the cited source and claimed statistics that were plausible but incorrect. In the process I improved the readability of the paragraph I touched up. My change was never reverted, and it was within the last year on a page related to slavery and human trafficking.
I suspect people complaining about reverted edits follow the same pattern as people leaving negative reviews online: people tend to be vocal when unhappy, and people that haven’t had problems aren’t motivated to do the opposite.
I have made many minor edits across many articles over the years, and never had a single one reverted directly. Some have been swallowed up during later re-writes and that's fine too. The thing is with Wikipedia, is a) register for an account, and b) start with very small edits.
That said, I've never tried to create an article - maybe that's where the real battleground is?
Perhaps link to a few such testimonies? I can see eg. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31057311> where people are explaining why an edit might not have been accepted for good reason. Make a case instead of complaining you're so hard done by.
Edits can be done by asking rather than doing, a small edit was made after I asked for some clarity in the lattices article. WFM as they say.
