wikipidea

Wikipedia, as a collective, is a hero because they have stayed true to their original heroic goal of creating a free online encyclopedia with all human knowledge. They have achieved this through an open-source philosophy with volunteer contributors and have become one of the most powerful forces on the Internet, proving other people wrong. Wikipedia has had some struggles and has faced information bias. Studies have shown that Wikipedia articles have a left-wing bias and what Tom Scott defined as a WEIRD bias (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic). As Wikipedia is run through the communal work of the people who use it, they don't have a formal method to combat this bias other than increasing Wikipedia usage in underrepresented areas.

On average, Wikipedia has 3 errors per article, which is comparable to Britannica's 2 errors per article. However, this dramatically decreases as the article becomes more specialized, as more specialized articles are frequented by people who understand them and require a higher level of knowledge to comprehend. To quote journalist Liam Mannix, "There's no reason to expect Wikipedia to be accurate... And yet it is." Furthermore, 50% of physicians use Wikipedia and edit articles themselves. Research has also shown that college students who were instructed to learn about a topic through Wikipedia before class performed better in class. (I personally find this to be true, as having a base-level understanding of a topic before class helps a lot.)

Personally, I think the creators of Wikipedia are heroes because I believe spreading information to everyone is incredibly important