> The basic problem is that Wikipedia is a democracy
No, that is not the basic problem with Wikipedia. Had it been a democracy there would have been ways for Wikipedia readers and writers to influence what Wikipedia editors do. The 'talk' page gives the illusion of allowing such influence but in reality the decisions are made by an in-group which is mostly ideologically homogeneous. This in-group is not the same for all areas of interest but it is stable within interest areas.
Wikipedia is not a democracy, it is a collection of oligarchies - small fiefdoms united under an umbrella organisation which give them the semblance of being democratic. This problem is inherent in the way Wikipedia is organised, there is no neutral arbiter to appeal to when confronted with an ideologically homogeneous and censorious group of editors. The (only?) way out of this conundrum is the same as that for free software projects, namely to fork the project in the hope of creating a better version. While forking the content is easy - there are regular dumps which can be used for this purpose - it is another thing to actually host a successful fork. The Wikimedia foundation is sitting on a pile of donations and can afford the significant resources which go into hosting one of the most popular sites on the 'net. A fork could be hosted on IPFS or in some other way utilise peer-to-peer strategies to offload the burden of hosting popular content in a similar fashion to the way Peertube solves this problem. As far as I'm concerned the ultimate goal of any fork should be to eventually re-join the original project when the 'unbiased' version has shown to be the more popular one. While I do not doubt that an unbiased Wikipedia would be more popular than the current version it is questionable as to whether the Wikimedia foundation would agree on allowing such a re-merger to occur - time will tell.
Mergers like you mention have happened early on, and they worked.
Last I looked the decisions were not per-se arrived at by an in-group ("The Cabal"). Instead, a lot of it functions by applying smart-mob behavior. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_mob
Note that -at times (and/or at particularly small scales)- it can be really hard to distinguish a smart mob from a cabal, so I can see where the impression comes from.
The 'smart mob' - which is a bit of an odd name when applied to actions centred on a digital platform - can be a way for an in-group to form. Once that in-group has seized control over an interest area they'll (ab)use their power to keep out any further take-over attempts. As long as they are ideologically aligned with the majority of editors they're mostly free to police 'their' interest areas which unfortunately makes this a self-reinforcing structure.
I do know what you mean. At the time when I was still very active, the great majority of the time it really was a smart mob that got misidentified. Very rarely you did get to see an undesirable in-group forming (usually it turned out to be due to misunderstandings, mind). I even wrote a procedure on how to find (among other things) in-groups by exploiting existing natural processes, but I don't think I did a very good job of explaining at the time. (and it has since been rewritten a lot)
The here-relevant part of the trick was to make a change to a disputed page, and then to observe who reverts it[*]. The person or people who revert it are always going to be interesting in some way.
> Wikipedia is not a democracy, it is a collection of oligarchies - small fiefdoms united under an umbrella organisation which give them the semblance of being democratic.
The argument could be made, that any human grouping/organization of sufficiently large size ceases to be a democracy and devolves into what you describe.
And in my own experience the tipping point is in the hundreds of individuals, not thousands or millions.
Any human grouping/organization of sufficiently large size does not start out as a democracy, this is not the natural organisation form for our species. Traditionally groups are hierarchical with a 'strong' leader who leads in times of strife, often combined with a small group of 'wise' men/women who make more strategic/long-term decisions. The idea of democracy is relatively new, originating in the city-state of Athens some 500 years BC. This Athenian democracy was not a full democracy since only citizens had a voice. While that sounds good it should be noted that women, slaves, foreigners and youths below the age of military service were not eligible for citizenship and as such did not have a voice.
A true democracy is hard to achieve at larger scale but modern technology could maybe possibly eventually - yes, there is that much uncertainty - be used to attain it. Then again, even in a true democracy the individual vote can still be controlled by manipulating the voter towards whatever ideological goals desired by the individual or group in control of the information which reaches those voters.
Wikipedia could allow a more democratic form of content moderation by allowing readers to 'score' editorial decisions, a bit like e.g. the Slashdot meta-moderation system works. This would at least make it possible to weed out activist (groups of) editors who use their 'power' to turn the encyclopedia into their propaganda platform.
Wikipedia should not be made more democratic. Democracies are very bad at making encyclopedias. :-P
Note that pretty much any scoring or measurement system invented by man has ended up being subverted and exploited. Especially when there is something to be gained.
This is a classical case of "who watches the watchers". If Wikipedia is not to be made "more democratic" it should at least be possible for the "demos" (people) to point out the flaws in the organisation. While such a system can be gamed just like the current editorial system has been gamed successfully by turning parts of Wikipedia into a propaganda channel it is one more step to be taken for those who wish to game the system. In the absence of a neutral arbiter [1] some form of meta-moderation could help to point out the flaws.
Democracies don't have to make encyclopedias but they can criticise those who make (or, in this case, break) them.
[1] "Let's use machine learning to implement such a neutral arbiter!" - remember the twitter chat bot which supposedly turned racist by mere exposure to Twitter discourse.
The current system is based on "rough consensus" and the formation of smart mobs.
This does have internal checks and balances. It just doesn't quite work like a democracy system works to run a country. Nor does it have to, of course.
I'm interested in hearing what parts of wikipedia (and which wikipedia) you think have been turned into a propaganda channel. That is highly undesirable and should definitely be dealt with if still the case.
> I'm interested in hearing what parts of wikipedia (and which wikipedia) you think have been turned into a propaganda channel.
As to "which Wikipedia" the answer is that of the versions I frequent - English, Dutch, German, Swedish and French - the English-language one seems to be the most affected. Native German and French speakers (who are more likely to have those versions at #1) may want to comment on whether my assessment is correct.
As to "what parts" the answer is less clear since this is a moving target. Anything related to politics is a clear target for ideologically-motivated editors so those parts are a good example but it does not stop there. Articles related to current affairs, media and culture have attracted activist editors as well. There are plenty of studies which show Wikipedia is politically biased to the "left" [1,2,3,4,5,6], this is not simply an issue of a few parts of the site having been taken over.
No, that is not the basic problem with Wikipedia. Had it been a democracy there would have been ways for Wikipedia readers and writers to influence what Wikipedia editors do. The 'talk' page gives the illusion of allowing such influence but in reality the decisions are made by an in-group which is mostly ideologically homogeneous. This in-group is not the same for all areas of interest but it is stable within interest areas.
Wikipedia is not a democracy, it is a collection of oligarchies - small fiefdoms united under an umbrella organisation which give them the semblance of being democratic. This problem is inherent in the way Wikipedia is organised, there is no neutral arbiter to appeal to when confronted with an ideologically homogeneous and censorious group of editors. The (only?) way out of this conundrum is the same as that for free software projects, namely to fork the project in the hope of creating a better version. While forking the content is easy - there are regular dumps which can be used for this purpose - it is another thing to actually host a successful fork. The Wikimedia foundation is sitting on a pile of donations and can afford the significant resources which go into hosting one of the most popular sites on the 'net. A fork could be hosted on IPFS or in some other way utilise peer-to-peer strategies to offload the burden of hosting popular content in a similar fashion to the way Peertube solves this problem. As far as I'm concerned the ultimate goal of any fork should be to eventually re-join the original project when the 'unbiased' version has shown to be the more popular one. While I do not doubt that an unbiased Wikipedia would be more popular than the current version it is questionable as to whether the Wikimedia foundation would agree on allowing such a re-merger to occur - time will tell.