There’s also the rules of Wikipedia. Things like what constitutes a “source” really skew things. Lots of worthy sources aren’t a mainstream news outlet or academic journal, but are excluded. This creates biases of its own.

Wikipedia is great in many ways, but I would say it’s not really designed to be neutral.

Wikipedia’s sourcing rules are a big part of the problem. Reliable sources on Wikipedia mostly means prestige, center-left Anglosphere media and a narrow slice of academic publishing. In practice that gives generalist news outlets more epistemic weight than field-specific experts, and it excludes large amounts of accurate but unfashionable or non-English material. The result is a replication of whatever biases are already baked into mainstream journalism.

The gatekeeping also isn’t democratic. A small, durable cluster of editors on WP:RSN effectively decides which sources are allowed, banned, or given special status. They aren’t vetted for expertise and don’t need to disclose conflicts of interest, yet their decisions propagate across thousands of articles. If a coordinated group influences RSN, they can shape whole domains simply by defining which sources count as "real."

WP:NPOV becomes a matter of which media ecosystems have the loudest megaphone, not which sources are actually most accurate. Control the allowed sources and you control the encyclopedia.