If you can get past the ridiculous optimism (are they being paid for that shit?) and wade through the general length, there are some nuggets of harsh truth for the Wikishits in this piece.
I hope for their sake, it didn't get read by certain people.
1. Only an idiot thinks a 20 year old is equipped to serve any kind of Supreme Court type role. Says a lot that these are the only internal governance roles on Wikipedia that are directly elected. Which probably doesn't matter, because as usual on Wikipedia, their Supreme Court didn't make a damn bit of difference as far as ending a long running, highly disruptive and yet certainly intractable dispute.
2. 70% of Wikipedia editors think that epidemiology is not a medical topic. And that's exactly what you would expect to see, if you opened up the task of building an encyclopedia to every unemployed dumb shit product of the American education system.
3. Wikipedia is not an encyclopedia, it's a news aggregator. Even though the lab leak theory relates to events that happened over eighteen months ago, and there is lots of science on the matter already, they're still obsessed with the idea they need to splatter the whole encyclopedia with what the newspapers have to say about it. Why?
4. As a consequence, Wikipedia is still in the grip of the Guerrilla Skeptics, a force multiplying Democratic Left activist organisation dedicated to the Defence of Science (TM). It features the sort of fuckwit who thinks Science needs defending. It's science, you fuckwits. Which is why every dispute like this, turns into a hardcore battle of the devout, against even those with pretty sensible positions, such as acknowledge the news reports without giving them equal prominence to the science.
5. Wikipedia is a failure. Why are people still giving it credit for not promoting deadly cures? The only qualification required for a community of randoms to decide not to do that, is the ability to read. Eminently achievable, even in America. But hilarious that they might even have to outsource that to India. Wikipedia isn't meant to kill people. No gold stars to be had here.
6. The true mark of Wikipedia's failure here, as always, since they aspire to be a grown up encyclopedia with editorial processes etc, is just how insanely stupid they got, over a relatively simple editorial matter of how to deal with the fact that the news media are giving attention to a probably political effort to raise doubts about China, when there's no actual scientific evidence that it came from a lab.
7. It is indeed not a good thing that you can't actually determine what the settled Wikipedia view is on what to say about the lab leak theory. Or that they won't be honest and sign off on a statement that acknowledges it is in dispute, and probably always will be. This cannot be waved away by some bullshit about how Wikipedia is an amorphous blob of differing opinions. Because when it matters, when it comes to things like wanting to put every Daily Mail journalist out of a job based on a claim with even less evidence behind it that the lab leak theory, you bet they have a view. And they don't care who knows that it is a lie, that even a grad student can figure out it goes against all scientific and academic opinion on the matter.
Last but not least, Wikipedia editors are still insanely delusional about the quality of their own product ("gold standard"), which in reality, is as fucking bad as the process by which it is made would suggest. But what would you expect from a generation that doesn't even remember when real encyclopedias based on weighty academic tomes were an actual thing?
Hopefully they'll all die in a horrific nuclear war triggered by an edit war over something like this, that'll teach them. Do they even know how World War I started? I doubt it. It is in Wikipedia, albeit even the "summary" paragraph is excessively wordy to the point of being impenetrable Military History porn.
Crap is crap. It is not gold. Not even gold leafed. Have you ever tried to gold leaf faeces? Impossible. If you teach your kids using Wikipedia, they will turn out stupid. But there is at least a risk some of them get addicted to writing war porn, like they're learned scholars, not students. And to be honest, that's the only goal of Wikipedia. Like all sick cults, they only want to survive.
And like all cults, the risk of their insanity in the pursuit of the Holy Scripture and their Glorious Leader actually leading to death and even global nuclear war, while hopefully small, are never truly off the table. But what is for damn sure, is smart people will have their time wasted, and their children's future put at risk, if the cult isn't kept safely in its compound. Hopefully stocked up with lots of precariously placed oil lamps.
You don't get that shit with Encyclopedia Brittanica. And your kids don't grow up stupid.
Brittanica:
Wikipedia:World War I began after the assassination of Austrian archduke Franz Ferdinand by South Slav nationalist Gavrilo Princip on June 28, 1914.
Just like good journalism, it's an art form to be able to know how to write something in a way that doesn't look like you want the reader to know how smart you are, that you actually appreciate your job is to impart important information to them.On 28 June 1914, Gavrilo Princip, a Bosnian Serb Yugoslav nationalist and member of the Serbian Black Hand military society, assassinated the Austro-Hungarian heir Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo, leading to the July Crisis.
Wikipedia editors can't do that. Wikipedia editors are by and large, children, either actually, or emotionally. People of exceedingly low intelligence. Unemployable. They probably hate the Daily Mail because they know they couldn't even get a job there, let alone somewhere they consider a reliable source.