BeIR/webis-touche2020 huggingface dataset:
Wikipedia seems to attract highly intelligent, articulate people

(with the exception of repeat vandals) with some time on their hands. Moreover, there are some experts at work here. Over time, the huge amount of solid work done by hobbyists and dilettantes can (and no doubt will) be hugely improved upon by experts. This both makes Wikipedia a pleasant intellectual community (or so it seems to some) and gives us some confidence that the quality of Wikipedia articles will, in time, if not yet, be high.
Micro-contributions can lead to incoherent and uncoordinated articles.

In a related problem, large articles constructed via numerous (individually reasonable) edits to a small article can look okay "close up", but are often horribly unstructured, bloated, excessively "factoid", uncohesive and self-indulgent when read through completely. In short, adding a sentence at a time doesn't encourage quality on a larger scale; at some stage, the article must be restructured. This happens nowhere near often enough. Users who try to do this inevitably encounter hostility or resistance, until they figure out that they should do it with a throwaway pseudonym, not a real name.
Wikipedia creates reliability through the democratic check of openness.

Openness and transparency are the greatest of democratic principles. Indeed, the hypothesis that openness is to the benefit of quality has already been tested, and to the benefit of the hypothesis: articles that have been worked on by many different people in the context of Wikipedia are now comparable to articles that can be found in some excellent encyclopedias. If, however, you insist on considering the hypothesis a priori, please ask yourself: which is more likely to be correct? 1. A widely circulated article, subject to scrutiny, correction, and potentially constant improvement over a period of months or years, by vast numbers of experts and enthusiasts, possibly updated mere minutes before you read it. Or, 2. An article written by a nonspecialist professional writer or scholar (as many encyclopedia articles are), mostly shielded from public review and improvement, likely over a year ago.
Those disaffected with humanity see Wikipedia as an outlet for their vitriol

. This is rather than having to become misanthropes, terrorists or political researchers. Some people will take great pleasure in demonstrating the idiotic futility of such rubbish. This seems like a positive quality of Wikipedia, until one realizes that any sufficiently toxic or stupid view will quickly acquire more adherents, and that defenders of a particular view will tend to create factions that might soon exist offline. And that any group perceiving itself as beleaguered or disadvantaged will band together more readily, and achieve common cause more readily. Is Wikipedia the breeding ground for this century's cults?
Wikipedia's NPOV policies contradict inherently opposing views

Many philosophers have argued that there is nothing that is completely true for everyone in all contexts. Therefore it might be so that Wikipedia's neutral point of view policy is doomed to fail because no chunk of text will be considered perfectly neutral to everyone. Even the idea that a NPOV is achievable is in itself a POV. Cory Doctorow (in a response to other criticisms by Jaron Lanier) emphasized the value of transparent history: "being able to see multiple versions of [any issue], organized with argument and counter-argument, will do a better job of equipping you to figure out which truth suits you best."
Editors form into "gangs" to impose their views on opposite minded contributors.

It makes a travesty of the revert rule when one individual can simply send an e-mail alert to friend requesting a timely "revert favour" once he has reached the limit of his daily reverts. This may apply to deletion debates as well, where a group of editors may be organised so as to always vote en masse in favour of keeping article written by one of the gang, or related to the gang's main field of interest.
Wikipedia opens discussion on "truth"; Britannica closes it

Cory Doctorow - "if you want to really navigate the truth via Wikipedia, you have to dig into those "history" and "discuss" pages hanging off of every entry. That's where the real action is, the tidily organized palimpsest of the flamewar that lurks beneath any definition of "truth."...The Britannica tells you what dead white men agreed upon, Wikipedia tells you what live Internet users are fighting over."
Many vandalisms on Wikipedia are not corrected for months

While most instances of page blanking or the addition of offensive material are soon reverted, less obvious vandalism has remained for longer periods. For example, a user made several racist edits to Martin Luther King, Jr. Day that were not reverted for nearly four hours.[54] Columnist Sujay Kumar commented: "While Wikipedia says that most vandal edits are removed within five minutes, some falsities have managed to go unnoticed. An outlandishly fake entry about Larry King's uncontrollable flatulence was posted for a month."[2]
Wikipedia's collectivism produces mediocre information

Jaron Lanier, Digital Maoism - "The hive mind is for the most part stupid and boring. Why pay attention to it? The problem is in the way the Wikipedia has come to be regarded and used; how it's been elevated to such importance so quickly. And that is part of the larger pattern of the appeal of a new online collectivism that is nothing less than a resurgence of the idea that the collective is all-wise, that it is desirable to have influence concentrated in a bottleneck that can channel the collective with the most verity and force. This is different from representative democracy, or meritocracy. This idea has had dreadful consequences when thrust upon us from the extreme Right or the extreme Left in various historical periods. The fact that it's now being re-introduced today by prominent technologists and futurists, people who in many cases I know and like, doesn't make it any less dangerous."
Nature's study showed Wikipedia to be 31% less accurate than Britannica

Andrew Orlowski, "Wikipedia science 31% more cronky than Britannica's", The Register (16 Dec. 2005) - "Science journal Nature chose 42 science articles from both Encyclopedia Britanica [sic] and gave peer reviewers a blind test to find mistakes. That gave the free-for-all web site a fighting chance — as it excluded the rambling garbage and self-indulgence that constitute much of the wannabe "encyclopedia" social science and culture entries. [...] Britannica turned up 123 "errors", and Wikipedia 162. In other words, the quality of information coming from Wikipedia was 31 per cent worse.
Less significant articles on Wikipedia don't hamper significant ones

Critics of Wikipedia concede that the encyclopedia's coverage of pop culture does not impose space constraints on the coverage of more "serious" subjects, as spelled out in the "Wiki is not paper" article. As Ivor Tossell noted: "That Wikipedia is chock full of useless arcana (and did you know, by the way, that the article on "Debate" is shorter than the piece that weighs the relative merits of the 1978 and 2003 versions of Battlestar Galactica?) isn't a knock against it: Since it can grow infinitely, the silly articles aren't depriving the serious ones of space."
Peer review processes frequently entrench the status quo.

Many great advances in the social and natural sciences have come by challenging the status quo and, because of that, their contributions were ignored or belittled by their peers. For example, George Akerlof, Nobel Laureate in Economics in 2001, had his classic paper (for which he won the Nobel Prize) entitled "The Market for Lemons: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism" rejected by the American Economic Review for being trivial and by the Journal of Political Economy because it conflicted with economic theory. Only after submitting it to a third journal, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, did the breakthrough article become published. Wikipedia allows for discourse where other venues would not.
Wikipedia is equally accurate and reliable as Encyclopedia Britannica

Daniel Terdiman. "Study: Wikipedia as accurate as Britannica". December 15, 2005 - "For its study, Nature chose articles from both sites in a wide range of topics and sent them to what it called "relevant" field experts for peer review. The experts then compared the competing articles--one from each site on a given topic--side by side, but were not told which article came from which site. Nature got back 42 usable reviews from its field of experts.
Wikipedia suffers from systemic bias; disproportionate coverage

Wikipedia has been accused of systemic bias, a tendency to cover topics in a detail disproportionate to their importance. As an example, Stephen Colbert once faux-praised Wikipedia for having a "longer entry on 'lightsabers' than it does on the 'printing press.'" Some call this "geek priorities". There are many long and well-written articles on obscure characters in science fiction/fantasy and very specialised issues in computer science, physics and math. Other topic areas are less active.
Insurance mandates can be unprecedented and still constitutional

Randy Barnett. "Is Health Insurance Mandate Constitutional?" The Volokh Conspiracy. December 9, 2009: "I realize this may seem counter-intuitive to many readers, but consider this. Anything that has never been done before is literally unprecedented, which means it lacks any precedent. So the question is, will the Supreme Court want to authorize this new extension of congressional power in light of the fact that it violates the first principles it affirmed in Lopez and Morrison? Or, to the contrary, will it want to take the opportunity reaffirm that these principles still apply, notwithstanding Raich, in a case with no further implications beyond the statute in question?"
Congress has power to level insurance mandates for general welfare

Democratic House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer said in November of 2009: "Well, in promoting the general welfare the Constitution obviously gives broad authority to Congress to effect that end. The end that we're trying to effect is to make health care affordable, so I think clearly this is within our constitutional responsibility." The words "general Welfare" show up in the first line of Article I, Section 8: "The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises, to pay the debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States."
Insurance mandate unconstitutional only if imprisoning uninsured

David Orentlicher. "An Individual Mandate to Purchase Health Care Insurance Is Constitutional." Huffington Post. December 14, 2009: "there are no constitutional barriers to the kind of insurance mandate contemplated by Congress. To be sure, if Congress passed a law whose only provision entailed a mandate for individuals to purchase a product, and violators of the law were automatically subject to incarceration, constitutional concerns would arise."
Insurance mandates set dangerous precedent for federal power

The Congressional Budget Office acknowledged the unprecedented nature of an individual mandate when assessing the Clinton health care reform proposal of 1993: “A mandate requiring all individuals to purchase health insurance would be an unprecedented form of federal action. The government has never required people to buy any good or service as a condition of lawful residence in the United States. An individual mandate has two features that, in combination, make it unique. First, it would impose a duty on individuals as members of society. Second, it would require people to purchase a specific service that would have to be heavily regulated by the federal government." - Hartman, Robert and van de Water, Paul, “The Budgetary Treatment of an Individual Mandate to Buy Health Insurance,” Congressional Budget Office memorandum, August 1994.
Constitution does not grant power for health insurance mandates

Larrey Anderson. "No health care in the Constitution." American Thinker. November 2, 2009: "The words 'general Welfare' show up in the first line of Article I, Section 8: 'The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States ... [Emphasis added.]' Notice that the Constitution doesn't say the 'general welfare of the citizens of the United States.' It says "general Welfare of the United States.' This clause only gives the Congress the power to raise money to defend the country and pay for the day-to-day operations of the government. It says nothing at all about building bridges to nowhere, or paving bike paths, or spending money on any other kind of pork barrel project -- including health care."
Commerce clause does not authorize health insurance mandates

Congressional Research Service: "Despite the breadth of powers that have been exercised under the Commerce Clause, it is unclear whether the clause would provide a solid constitutional foundation for legislation containing a requirement to have health insurance. Whether such a requirement would be constitutional under the Commerce Clause is perhaps the most challenging question posed by such a proposal, as it is a novel issue whether Congress may use this clause to require an individual to purchase a good or a service."[2]
Federal mandates are common; no problem with insurance mandates

Ohio Attorney General Richard COrdray and Iowa's attorney general, Tom Miller. "Why we won't file states' rights suits." Politico. April 2nd, 2010: Congress "has ample power" to legislate under health care. "We live under mandates every day. Without them, society as we know it would disintegrate. We live under mandates every day. Without them, society as we know it would disintegrate. Every criminal law tells us what we cannot do. And sometimes the law tells us what we must do. Congress can require young Americans to register for the draft to serve in the military, for example, or can require us all to pay taxes for programs like Social Security and Medicare. We can — and do — argue about what shape these laws should take, without claiming that our leaders are constitutionally barred from dealing with our most pressing problems."
Health insurance mandates fall under taxation powers

Mark Hall. "Is it unconstitutional to mandate health insurance?" August 25th, 2009: "An insurance mandate would be enforced through income tax laws, so even if a simple mandate were not a valid 'regulation,' it still could fall easily within Congress’s plenary power to tax or not tax income. For instance, anyone purchasing insurance could be given an income tax credit, and those not purchasing could be assessed an income tax penalty. The only possible constitutional restriction is an archaic provision saying that if Congress imposes anything that amounts to a 'head tax' or 'poll tax' (that is, taxing people simply as people rather than taxing their income), then it must do so uniformly (that is, the same amount per person). This technical restriction is easily avoided by using income tax laws. Purists complain that taxes should be proportional to actual income and should not be used mainly to regulate economic behavior, but our tax code, for better or worse, is riddled with such regulatory provisions and so they are clearly constitutional."
Not buying insurance is no transaction; no commerce clause authority

David B. Rivkin. The Federalist Society Online Debate Series: Individual Health Care Insurance Mandate Debate. November 3, 2009 November 6th, 2009: "There is no doubt that Congress can regulate an entire array of economic activities, large and small, inter- and intra-state. Thus, for example, there is no problem, Constitution-wise with having Congress regulate health care insurance purchase transactions. The problem with an individual insurance purchase mandate, however, is that it does not regulate any transactions at all. It regulates human beings, simply because they exist, and orders them to engage in certain types of economic transactions."
Unconstitutional to require individuals to buy private insurance

David B. Rivkin Jr. and Lee A. Casey. "Illegal health reform." Washington Post. August 22, 2009: "But can Congress require every American to buy health insurance? In short, no. The Constitution assigns only limited, enumerated powers to Congress and none, including the power to regulate interstate commerce or to impose taxes, would support a federal mandate requiring anyone who is otherwise without health insurance to buy it."
Health insurance mandates incentivize behavior, like many other laws

David Orentlicher. "An Individual Mandate to Purchase Health Care Insurance Is Constitutional." Huffington Post. December 14, 2009: "At one time, the Supreme Court restricted the ability of Congress to use its taxing power to regulate people's activities. In the early part of the 20th Century, the Court drew a distinction between taxes designed to raise revenue, which were permissible, and taxes designed to regulate behavior, which might not be permissible. But this distinction was jettisoned by 1937, and the taxing power is now recognized as a broad congressional power."
Congress can't regulate behavior indirectly impacting commerce

Erwin Chemerinsky. The Federalist Society Online Debate Series: Individual Health Care Insurance Mandate Debate. November 3, 2009 November 6th, 2009: "Professor Chemerinsky also overlooks the existence of two major cases – United States v. Lopez and United States v. Morrison – in which the Supreme Court, in 5 to 4 decisions, has specifically rejected the notion that Congress can regulate non-commercial behavior merely because, arguably, such behavior can have an impact on Commerce. The Court's overarching reason for doing so was its compellingly articulated belief that the Commerce Clause is a limited grant of power and one that cannot be infinitely capacious. This reasoning is unassailable."
Mandatory health insurance not analogous to car insurance

Randy Barnett, Nathaniel Stewart and Todd Gaziano. "Why the Personal Mandate to Buy Health Insurance Is Unprecedented and Unconstitutional." The Heritage Foundation. December 9, 2009: "automobile insurance requirements impose a condition on the voluntary activity of driving; a health insurance mandate imposes a condition on life itself. States do not require non-drivers, including passengers in cars with potentially bad drivers, to buy auto insurance liability policies--even though such a requirement undoubtedly would lower the auto insurance premiums for those who do drive. The auto insurance requirement is linked to driving and to the possibility that bad driving may cause injuries to others, including passengers in the driver's car, not to those who benefit from roads generally."
Fed has power to institute necessary national insurance mandates.

The only way that health insurance reform will work nationally, helping insure over 30 million uninsured and reducing premiums for every one, is if all Americans are required to buy insurance and be involved in a national risk pool. Because there is a compelling benefit to the "general welfare" to institute such a national program, the federal government does have Constitutional authority to impose a health insurance mandate. If the States were left to do this, with some instituting a mandate and some not, many would be left uninsured and the risk pool would not be adequately spread. The difference in benefits to the country clearly justifies federal action under the Constitution.
Mandates create cartel of govt-supported insurance companies

"Health Care Reform And The Constitution." PoliGazette. August 23rd, 2009: "it would for the first time involve the government setting up either a government monopoly or a government-selected cartel for which it would then use statutory power to require each and every citizen to become customers. The government would then have completely eliminated any pretense of individual market freedom, creating a situation where individuals would be required to contribute money out of each and every paycheck to either a government entity which would be staffed and/or controlled by political appointees or to a cartel made up of companies that would owe their continued existence on the cartel list to the continued acquiescence of political overseers. Either way, the reduction in individual autonomy and freedom over health care choices would be dramatically decreased and inevitably politicized. Companies that are good contributors to the party currently in power would be allowed to stay on the list so that consumers could still choose them. Companies that the party currently in power chooses to dislike would be excluded from the cartel and driven out of power."
Medicare tax mandate sets precedent for health insurance mandate

David Orentlicher. "An Individual Mandate to Purchase Health Care Insurance Is Constitutional." Huffington Post. December 14, 2009: "a mandate to purchase insurance can be justified by the Constitution's grant to Congress of a taxing power and a commerce clause power. The taxing power is a well-established basis for enacting an individual mandate. Indeed, this country has had a tax-based mandate to purchase health care insurance for nearly 45 years. The Medicare program imposes a payroll tax on Americans as a way to fund coverage of their hospital costs once they reach age 65. People cannot opt out of Medicare; it is an obligatory system of health care insurance for one's senior years. Similarly, Congress can use a payroll tax to implement a mandate for individuals to purchase health insurance before they reach age 65. Under the House bill, for example, people will pay a 2.5 percent tax on their income unless they have health care coverage."
Health insurance mandates "take" private property

Peter Urbanowicz and Dennis G. Smith. "Constitutional implications of an 'individual mandate'" Federalist Society: "the question of whether the compelled purchase of health insurance constitutes the 'taking' of private property under the Fifth Amendment. Given the novel nature of the individual health insurance mandate, a Fifth Amendment challenge can be expected. Requiring a citizen to devote a percent of his or her income for a purpose for which he or she otherwise might not choose based on individual circumstances could be considered an arbitrary and capricious “taking” no matter how many hardship exemptions the federal government might dispense."
There is no fundamental right to go without insurance

Mark Hall. "Is it unconstitutional to mandate health insurance?" August 25th, 2009: "Under both liberal and conservative jurisprudence, the Constitution protects individual autonomy strongly only when “fundamental rights” are involved. There may be fundamental rights to decide about medical treatments, but having insurance does not require anyone to undergo treatment. It only requires them to have a means to pay for any treatment they might choose to receive. The liberty in question is purely economic and has none of the strong elements of personal or bodily integrity that invoke Constitutional protection. In short, there is no fundamental right to be uninsured, and so various arguments based on the Bill of Rights fall flat. The closest plausible argument is one based on a federal statute protecting religious liberty, but Congress is Constitutionally free to override one statute with another."