Criticism of Wikipedia

Criticism of Wikipedia has been directed at its content, its procedures, the character and practices of the Wikipedia community, and its nature as an open source encyclopedia that anyone can edit.

The neutrality of this article is disputed. Please see the relevant discussion on the talk page.

Quotes

• We should be: kind, thoughtful, passionate about getting it right, open, tolerant of different viewpoints, open to criticism, bold about changing our policies and also cautious about changing our policies.
  • Jimmy Wales

• But if a reader had started on the page for either of Breivik’s guns, the Ruger or the Glock, they would not know this. That reader would find a great deal of technical information about the weapons in question – their weights, lengths, cartridges, rates of fire, magazine capacities, muzzle velocities – and detailed descriptions of their designs, all illustrated with abundant photographs and diagrams.
  • Parakilas, Jacob (March 18, 2014). Wikipedia, neutrality and guns. Action on Armed Violence. Archived from the original on September 14, 2017. Retrieved on March 7, 2018.

• What do the perpetrators of the massacres at Sandy Hook, at Aurora, at Orlando, and at Sutherland Springs have in common? They were all men under 30 and they all used versions of the same kind of firearm, the AR-15, the semi-automatic version of the military's M-16 and the bestselling gun in America. It might be difficult to make this connection because as I write this, the section on the use of AR-15s in mass killings has been deleted from Wikipedia...
  • Walther, Matthew (November 7, 2017). "The adolescent cult of the AR-15". The Week. Retrieved on March 23, 2018. 

• But on Wikipedia, as in the real world, the users with the deepest technical knowledge of firearms are also the most fervent gun owners and the most hostile to gun control. For critics, that’s led to a persistent pro-gun bias on the web’s leading source of neutral information at a time when the gun control debate is more heated than ever.
  • Brandom, Russell (March 6, 2018). "How gun buffs took over Wikipedia’s AR-15 page; After Parkland, gun control information was strangely hard to find". The Verge (Vox Media). Retrieved on March 9, 2018. 

• The bias in the articles was not explicit, but structural. The project did not insert false information into the articles, but instead purged information that showed the weapons in a bad light - dismissing it as "off topic".
  • "Pro-gun Wikipedia users spark fierce editing war; Editors against tighter controls on firearms have been purging information that shows weapons such as AR-15s in a bad light". Sky News. March 7, 2018. Retrieved on March 9, 2018. 

• A group of pro-gun Wikipedia editors tried to hide the true number of mass shootings associated with the AR-15 rifle in the aftermath of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Florida.
  • Brennan, David (March 7, 2018). "Pro-gun Group Edited AR-15 Wikipedia Page to Hide Mass Shootings". Newsweek. Retrieved on March 9, 2018. 

• The Wikimedia Foundation has defended itself and Wikipedia from allegations of being host to these kinds of influence campaigns, arguing that the encyclopaedia is constantly being updated and improved.
  • Einenkel, Walter (March 8, 2018). "A gun group has been editing Wikipedia's firearms pages to sanitize mass shootings, for months". Newsweek (Yahoo! News). Retrieved on March 9, 2018. 

• According to The Verge report and an independent follow-up by Haaretz, the top editors of the Colt page are pro-gun enthusiasts who skewed the information presented on it and are also involved in editing other articles on Wikipedia – for example, the much more general article, titled AR 15 – to push their worldview...Through countless exhausting debates, this small group of pro-gun Wikipedia editors – linked together through Wikipedia’s Firearms project (or “WikiProject: Firearms,” mentioned below) – has managed to control almost completely the discourse around the rifle, predominantly by making sure any potentially negative details about it be excluded from the original Colt AR-15 article.
  • Benjakob, Omer (March 18, 2018). "Gun Enthusiasts Are Waging a War of Attrition on Wikipedia, and It Looks Like They're Winning". Haaretz. Retrieved on March 23, 2018. 

• Have you ever wondered why the Wikimedia Foundation wants so much money? It certainly isn’t needed to operate Wikipedia. You can literally fit a copy of the entire text on your phone! So, what’s the money for? Inquiring minds want to know…
  • Elon Musk, X, (October 22, 2023); as quoted by Matthew Gault, “Elon Musk Still Doesn’t Understand How Wikipedia Works”, Vice, (October 23, 2023)