life: made of waffle cones since 2005

But those ambitious politicians and conquerors didn’t do the dirty work themselves. They had underlings, generals and officers and common soldiers and bureaucrats, to enforce their will. Those underlings participated in acts that, by any reasonable standard of moral behavior, range from the merely distasteful to completely abhorrent. It would be comforting to think that those who murdered children, burned houses with the residents inside, committed acts of sexual violence, and enslaved the survivors were uniquely evil. It would be easier to believe that these participants had somehow forfeited their humanity somewhere along their path to organized violence. We would prefer to fool ourselves into thinking they formed a special class of malefactors separate from the farmers and shopkeepers and laborers who made up their societies as a whole. These ideas would be wrong. The agents of empire and conquest were not a marked group of sadists; they fit quite comfortably within the mainstream of the societies that produced them and benefited from their actions.

Patrick Wyman, Perspectives: Past, Present, and Future Substack, 2024

See also: the amount of text on the talk page of ROGD in Dutch wikipedia to get people to stop citing tabloids in favour of its existence and start actually starting the article with "this is BS research that turned out to be untrue".

All the information presented on Wikipedia is supposed to have a citation - that's why when it doesn't it says "citation needed." Wikipedia also makes sure that all its online citations are archived - usually via the wayback machine.

This means that when you read something on Wikipedia, you can check the source they are citing and verify the information.

This actually makes Wikipedia a very useful research starter. You can use it to get an initial impression of the information, and then follow the citations for a deeper understanding.

None of this is to say that there aren't biases in Wikipedia - there definitely are and you should be aware of that so you can verify and judge the quality of the information for yourself. Even Wikipedia acknowledges that sometimes it is wrong.