It isn't so much as bad, as inevitable. And as you say, Wikipedia has the built-in antidote with the other language versions and the Talk pages.

> And as you say, Wikipedia has the built-in antidote with the other language versions and the Talk pages.

The Talk pages are just a first introduction to the sheer madness behind the scenes; one quickly starts to realize that relative few people are calling the shots in a lot of places and that their personal biases are causing serious problems. The "Reliable Sources" policy would be atrocious enough already (there are no objective processes for challenging a source's inclusion or exclusion from the informal list on a given topic, only political ones) without the "power user" editors who are clearly abusing it.