Let Harvard help explain:

… when you’re doing academic research, you should be extremely cautious about using Wikipedia. As its own disclaimer states, information on Wikipedia is contributed by anyone who wants to post material, and the expertise of the posters is not taken into consideration. Users may be reading information that is outdated or that has been posted by someone who is not an expert in the field —or by someone who wishes to provide misinformation. While Wikipedia editors do correct misinformation, observers have found that they don’t catch everything—at least not right away.

Sometimes inaccurate information is posted to Wikipedia on purpose, as a hoax. In some well-documented cases, this inaccurate information continues to spread when people take it from Wikipedia and use it in books and articles.

“What’s Wrong with Wikipedia?”

We are then directed to various examples listed here.

As an editor, I have often quietly substituted more reliable sources for information when preparing various authors’ work for publication, in order to reduce the chances of this problem affectng our own work.

The whole business strikes some of us as a wildly Woke example of what can go wrong in an information society. But I will let Larry Sanger, one of the founders of Wikipedia (who is now banned from the site) tell it:

Sanger became Christian, which probably got him crossed off a lot of people’s Santa list. But how did he get banned? Well, according to Jordan Boyd at The Federalist:

Sanger and his co-founder [Jimmy Wales ] pitched Wikipedia to the world as the online encyclopedia that anyone could edit. Twenty-five years later, Sanger’s vision for the site became twisted enough for him to dub it “one of the most effective organs of Establishment propaganda in history.”

As The Federalist previously reported, Wikipedia’s paid edit disclosure policy is effectively unenforceable, doing little to nothing to keep paid propagandists and outside influences from altering articles for political gain and profit. …

“To date, every LLM is trained on Wikipedia content, and it is almost always the largest source of training data in their data sets,” the Wikimedia Foundation brags.

Sanger warned for years leading up to his ban that Wikipedia as the world knew it was “broken beyond repair.”

“An anonymous mob with practically unlimited power on the platform,” Sanger further wrote in his July 8 op-ed, “is only one dimension of Wikipedia’s problems.”

Perhaps the most alarming part of Sanger’s Wikipedia saga, however, is that the censorship that has come to define the site still appeared to catch him off guard. Sanger told Christopher Rufo in April 2024, the thought that online free speech would soon be under threat didn’t even cross his or Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales’ minds in 2001.

“Wikipedia Founder’s Ban From His Own Website Confirms The Left’s Censorship Scheme Is Far From Over,” July 8, 2026

This does not sound like a healthy situation. And surely it is beyond curious that so many people still rely on Wikipedia as a source of information.

Help? Try Britannica, just for example. Also consider using different search engines as well. The world did not begin with Google and will not end there.