I have it in for the "Gell-Mann Amnesia effect" (is there even evidence that Gell-Mann believed in it?), but your point is well taken: Wikipedia's rules do heavily privilege journalism, and journalism is merely the first draft of history, not the camera-ready final.
It's possible that Wikipedia has carefully balanced this; if they didn't privilege reporting, a lot fewer articles would get written, about a lot of things people actually do want to look up in the encyclopedia. Reliance on journalism means they'll routinely get some bad facts, but there's a bound on how bad things will be that there wouldn't be if they just got rid of WP:RS altogether.
It's much more likely that nobody has carefully thought about this, and it's just a shambolic volunteer project taking advantage of what they have to work with.
My basic take about Wikipedia is that it's hard to argue with the results. However obnoxious their policies are to nerds like us (and I commented upthread about obnoxious experiences I've had working on it --- I no longer contribute!), it's a tremendously successful project, perhaps one of the most successful in the history of the Internet.
It's bad when they have bad facts, more so when those facts pertain to living people, even more so when someone has the correct facts and can't get them accepted, and especially so when that person is a family member of the subject.
It's less bad, to me at least, that an encyclopedia happens to lack a page, for now, on Apache Arrow.
It's possible that Wikipedia has carefully balanced this; if they didn't privilege reporting, a lot fewer articles would get written, about a lot of things people actually do want to look up in the encyclopedia. Reliance on journalism means they'll routinely get some bad facts, but there's a bound on how bad things will be that there wouldn't be if they just got rid of WP:RS altogether.
It's much more likely that nobody has carefully thought about this, and it's just a shambolic volunteer project taking advantage of what they have to work with.
My basic take about Wikipedia is that it's hard to argue with the results. However obnoxious their policies are to nerds like us (and I commented upthread about obnoxious experiences I've had working on it --- I no longer contribute!), it's a tremendously successful project, perhaps one of the most successful in the history of the Internet.
It's bad when they have bad facts, more so when those facts pertain to living people, even more so when someone has the correct facts and can't get them accepted, and especially so when that person is a family member of the subject.
It's less bad, to me at least, that an encyclopedia happens to lack a page, for now, on Apache Arrow.