Criticism of Wikipedia—of its content, procedures, and operations, and of the Wikipedia community—covers many subjects, topics, and themes about the nature of Wikipedia as an open source encyclopedia of subject entries that almost anyone can edit. Wikipedia has been criticized for the uneven handling, acceptance, and retention of articles about controversial subjects. The principal concerns of its critics are the factual reliability of the content; the readability of the prose; and a clear article layout; the existence of systemic bias; of gender bias; and of racial bias among the editorial community that is Wikipedia. Further concerns are that the organization allows the participation of anonymous editors (leading to editorial vandalism);
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In "Wikipedia: The Dumbing Down of World Knowledge" (2010), Edwin Black characterized the editorial content of articles as a mixture of "truth, half-truth, and some falsehoods".[1] Similarly, in "Wisdom?: More like Dumbness of the Crowds" (2011), Oliver Kamm said that the encyclopedic articles usually are dominated by the editors with the loudest and most persistent editorial voices (talk pages and edit summaries), usually by an interest group with an ideological "axe to grind" on the subject, topic, or theme of the article in question.[2] Politics and ideology entries are also criticized on Wikipedia. In two works published in 2012, "The 'Undue Weight' of Truth on Wikipedia" by Timothy Messer–Kruse, and "You Just Type in What You are Looking for: Undergraduates' Use of Library Resources vs. Wikipedia" by Mónica Colón–Aguirre and Rachel A. Fleming–May, the authors analyzed and criticized the undue-weight policy (relative importance of a given source), and concluded that Wikipedia is not about providing correct and definitive information about a subject,[3] but instead presenting, as editorially dominant, the perspective taken by most authors of the sources for the article. This allegedly uneven application of the undue-weight policy creates omissions (of fact and of interpretation) that might give the reader false impressions about the subject matter, based upon the factually incomplete content of the Wikipedia
In "Wikipedia: The Dumbing Down of World Knowledge" (2010), Edwin Black characterized the editorial content of articles as a mixture of "truth, half-truth, and some falsehoods".[1] Similarly, in "Wisdom?: More like Dumbness of the Crowds" (2011), Oliver Kamm said that the encyclopedic articles usually are dominated by the editors with the loudest and most persistent editorial voices (talk pages and edit summaries), usually by an interest group with an ideological "axe to grind" on the subject, topic, or theme of the article in question.[2] Politics and ideology entries are also criticized on Wikipedia. In two works published in 2012, "The 'Undue Weight' of Truth on Wikipedia" by Timothy Messer–Kruse, and "You Just Type in What You are Looking for: Undergraduates' Use of Library Resources vs. Wikipedia" by Mónica Colón–Aguirre and Rachel A. Fleming–May, the authors analyzed and criticized the undue-weight policy (relative importance of a given source), and concluded that Wikipedia is not about providing correct and definitive information about a subject,[3] but instead presenting, as editorially dominant, the perspective taken by most authors of the sources for the article. This allegedly uneven application of the undue-weight policy creates omissions (of fact and of interpretation) that might give the reader false impressions about the subject matter, based upon the factually incomplete content of the Wikipedia