Have a look How pranks, hoaxes and manipulation undermine the reliability of Wikipedia. Technical info is certainly not immune when it comes to these problems with reliability. Even worse, an incredible number of people accept stuff in Wikipedia without questioning it, to the extent that it gets repeated by sources deemed authoritative. Here is Wikipedia re-writing history, and here is a journalist who discovered she had accidentally started a Wikipedia hoax when she saw a journalist from The New Yorker quote a joke on Twitter as fact – a joke which she had entered in Wikipedia five years earlier for fun, as a stoned sophomore.

Wikiwand is one of those engineering shops they are scared of, because WikiWand have been doing better work than their own programmers, and are presenting Wikipedia content in a prettier format. And if people migrate to Wikiwand, then as you rightly say, people don't see their fundraising banners.

Their new VP of Engineering, Damon Sicore (ex-Mozilla), spelt that fear out. According to Sicore, the WMF will have to “scale to a size that enables us to compete with the engineering shops that are trying to kill us. That means we need to double down on recruiting top talent, and steal the engineers from the sources they use because well they are REALLY GOOD. ... I want everyone to keep this in mind: If we don’t move faster and better than google, apple, and microsoft (and their ilk and kin), they will consume us and we will go away. It’s that simple.”

Note well that what he's talking about going away there is the Wikimedia Foundation, not Wikipedia. The Wikipedia volunteers work for nothing; they are not reliant on donation money. And Wikipedia itself is also free, meaning it can be hosted by WikiWand, Google or anyone else who thinks they can present the content better than WMF. And if they managed to improve the content at the same time ... As I see it, this is what this expansion is about, not about keeping Wikipedia online and ad-free. And that's not what they're telling the public.

Exactly. They could tell people what they actually want the money for, cause it ain't to keep Wikipedia online and ad-free. If they provided that info, then people could make an informed choice whether to support that effort or not. It would introduce some accountability. Two flagship projects that Wikipedia donations paid for over the past couple of years were considered abject failures by the volunteer community. The third, Wikipedia Zero, is controversial because it violates net neutrality.

It is circular if the more money they are able to take as "reserves", the more they feel they can spend. You could give them $500m, and they'd eventually expand to spend that ... and would then go for a $500m reserve the year after.

Please just don't repeat the meme that a Nature study found Wikipedia to be about as reliable as Britannica.

At least say that based on a small sample of articles, a journalistic news report in Nature opined that Wikipedia's science articles were only slightly less reliable than Britannica's, but considerably less well-written, and that Britannica contested those results. That would be the truth, rather than the meme. Mkay?

Your point about the hazards of anonymous contributions is well taken.

Oh yes, they do claim that. Jimmy Wales asserts that Wikipedia is "about as accurate as traditional encyclopedias and improving all the time." Really? Really? Really? Really? Really?

First of all, the Nature piece itself found Britannica to be superior – just not by as much as expected.

Secondly, it is a matter of record that Nature only examined science articles, many of them quite specialised. It is inexcusable to omit that qualification. There simply is no evidence at all that Wikipedia is superior to Britannica in other topic areas, and copious evidence within Wikipedia itself of how often articles are biased by special interest groups (just look at the history of Wikipedia arbitration cases).

Third, Nature chose to penalise Britannica for information that was omitted, but contained in Wikipedia: that was counted as an "error". As Britannica themselves pointed out, "Nature accused Britannica of 'omissions' on the basis of reviews of article excerpts, not the articles themselves. In a number of cases only parts of the applicable Britannica articles were reviewed." In other words, they butchered Britannica articles and then penalised Britannica for the fact that the remaining stump failed to contain some item of information that the full article would have contained.

Fourth, Nature noted, but chose not to penalise Wikipedia for, confusing presentation and bad style, essentially proposing that a haphazardly compiled jumble of facts should be considered equal to a well-structured, easy-to-understand introduction to a topic written by a world-renowned expert.

Lastly, there is by now a very long list of journalists and writers found to have copied spurious facts from Wikipedia. Where is a similar list of writers embarrassed for having gotten their information from Britannica? If Lord Leveson had looked up the founders of the Independent newspaper in Britannica, he would not have ended up ascribing that achievement to some unknown Californian student.

Beyond simple errors, there is very copious evidence of bias and covert paid editing in Wikipedia. The Croatian Wikipedia was taken over by right-wing extremists, to the point where the country's education minister warned students not to rely on it, as the country's history was thoroughly falsified by fringe groups. Those are all problems Britannica has never had.

I could go on. I have been a Wikipedian for nigh on ten years. I have seen the problems first-hand.

The 2005 "study" comparing Britannica and Wikipedia was not a rigorous peer-reviewed study, and they only looked at articles on relatively obscure science topics – a fact that no one seems to remember these days. The average Wikipedia vandal would not even know how to find an entry on a topic like the “kinetic isotope effect” or “Meliaceae” (two of the articles they looked at).

The assertion that Wikipedia is as reliable as Britannica is ludicrous. Granted, it's a lot bigger than Britannica, and has articles on breaking news stories, but as reliable? Of the English Wikipedia's nearly 5 million articles, at least 10% are on no Wikipedia editor's watchlist – a result of the continuous increase in the number of articles combined with the continuous decrease in the number of active editors – and those articles are sitting ducks for subtle vandalism.

Britannica may have had errors, but it did not contain false information inserted by anonymous people for fun or for financial gain; it contained no anonymous hatchet jobs written by people's rivals, and was not full of puff-pieces written by the biography subjects themselves.

Repeating this false "Wikipedia is as reliable as Britannica" meme only contributes to future cases like this one here, or this one.

That was part of Hill & Shaw's assertion (see endnote in the original article). I'm not sure I'm entirely convinced.

I guess this page wouldn't be complete without a reference to WP:Clubhouse? An Exploration of Wikipedia’s Gender Imbalance, a 2011 paper which contains a lot of interesting data related to all of this.