Wikipedia:Dark side of Wikipedia
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Just as there are some excellent articles on Wikipedia, there is also a dark side of the project. By "dark side", I am not referring to a split personality or to the existence of certain editors who go to the "dark side of the Force"-level "WikiHate". Instead, I am using the metaphor of the "Dark Side of the Moon", the side which we cannot see from the Earth. An alternate title might be "The dusty corners of Wikipedia".
In the "dark side" or the "dusty corners", there are some articles which do not quite reach the standard of an encyclopedia. They are not well-researched, neutral articles that summarize the main points set out in reliable, published secondary and tertiary sources. Normally, the Wikipedia procedures of improving the quality of an article work quite well, from Pages needing attention and Find or fix a stub to the NPOV dispute or even Votes for deletion.
However, in some cases, these procedures may fail, especially if an article is about a little known subject and if it is not linked into Wikipedia's web by being categorized. If an article is orphaned, and has no links to it, and if the article topic is obscure, an editor may be able to pen an article that is filled with Original Research, synthesis, POV, bias, weasel words, and peacock terms. The article may, for all intents and purposes, resemble a website chat page post full of her or his personal opinions.
This is a page dedicated to these seemingly hopeless (yet fixable) cases and only those should be listed here.
There may be various reasons for these lower-quality articles: sometimes there may be only adherents to one particular view around on Wikipedia who are willing to write about a subject, or the subject is so highly controversial that every touch of the article will immediately result in an edit war, frustrating all the people involved. Maybe the subject is so difficult or complex that only a few experts on Earth could treat it adequately but these people have not yet discovered Wikipedia. ;-)
What to do
[edit]Contentious information about living or recently deceased people
[edit]If you see WP:BLP issues, such as unsourced (or poorly sourced) contentious statements about living people (or recently deceased people), you can delete this information when you see it. The Biographies of Living People rules say: "Contentious material about living persons (or, in some cases, recently deceased) that is unsourced or poorly sourced—whether the material is negative, positive, neutral, or just questionable—should be removed immediately and without waiting for discussion. Users who persistently or egregiously violate this policy may be blocked from editing."
Dubious or unsourced statements
[edit]For non-BLP issues, such as dubious statements or unsourced claims (not regarding people), you could add a {{fact}} tag. This will indicate to other readers that a citation is needed. You can also tag the entire article. Sometimes rectifying the orphan status of an article will help draw the attention of experts to the article, who will improve it.