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I've read some people over here refer to Wikipedia like that. Do they only use western sources or something like that?

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[-] Erika3sis@hexbear.net 3 points 10 hours ago

The best way to think of Wikipedia is that the site represents the consensus of everyone who is proficient in a particular language; has the means and technical understanding of how to edit Wikipedia; and has a lot of free time to edit Wikipedia.

For English, this means that most edits are made by highly educated white US-Americans, Canadians, Australians and Europeans, who either live comfortably off their parents, have a job that gives them a lot of free time, or perhaps they're even businessowners or get paid to edit Wikipedia to promote an agenda (see: CIA edits to Wikipedia).

In any case, this is going to give Wikipedia's most prolific editors a particular bias in terms of which sources have prestige, which topics they write about and how they write about them. There's also a lot that can be said of the political leanings of the site's founders, site admin/moderation, its biggest donors being Big Tech companies like Google and Amazon, etc.

this post was submitted on 07 Apr 2026
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