In the past few years I've noticed more and more issues on Wikipedia. It has never been perfect, but in the past it seemed like anything without sufficient sources would quickly get flagged as "citation needed" or questionable statements would get a warning label slapped on them.

Now, I can visit pages for certain medical conditions that contain completely unsourced claims with no "citation needed" nor any warnings. When I try to search for it, I often trace it back to alternative medicine or pseudoscience influencers.

The sad part is that when I've tried to remove obviously flimsy information, someone will immediately come along and add it back. Unless you're ready to spend months in a Wikipedia edit war with someone who obsesses over a page, there's no point in even trying. These people know the rules and processes and will use every one of them against you. When that fails, they'll try to pull rank. If that fails, they'll just quietly continue editing and rewriting (possibly from alt accounts) until you get too tired to fight the battle any more.

> The sad part is that when I've tried to remove obviously flimsy information, someone will immediately come along and add it back.

The trick is to write about your proposed edit on the talk page and wait a few days. If nobody has complained, you make the edit and write "see talk" in the edit summary. The notion that you should push an edit first and wait for someone to revert you just doesn't work in practice except for trivial typo fixes. Discuss your edit in depth, then push it once you have a presumed near-consensus for it.

Do you recall a couple? It's one of my minor hobbies when I'm bored to try to find sources and fix Wikipedia articles that others have trouble with. As examples that this is a good faith attempt and not the usual online comment technique of "oh yeah? show me!", here are some stories of edits I got in that others said they had trouble with:

- https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Blog/2024-10-17/Path_Depende...

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40655989

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Weierstrass_function#Accu...

And my personal favourite is recently when the most ridiculous thing was added to Bukele's Gang Crackdown: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Salvadoran_gang_c...

If you still have the desire to have some of these fixed, post here and I'll put it in my queue and get to it at some point. If you don't want the resulting interaction from other commenters here, send it to my email (in profile).

Wikipedia is ultimately a consensus summarizer frequently mistaken for a truth-seeker. So you have to make the case for something being true somewhere where the experts live, and then Wikipedia can express the experts' opinion. But crucially, it is not truth-seeking on its own.

I've noticed this exact same thing. And I too just gave up. People have their pet causes and they force the article to match, and normal, non-obsessed people give up.

Any controversial topic should never be read on Wikipedia, it will not be accurate.