When there is a heated, with a lot of strong and exaggerated arguments on both sides, and I don’t know what to believe, or I’m overwhelmed with the raw information, I look at Wikipedia. Or even something that is not a current event, but the information I found on the internet doesn’t feel reliable.
I’m sure some would find flaws there, but they do a good job of keeping it neutral and sticking to verifiable facts.
But the fact that a lot of editors fight about such issues means that it ends up being somewhat neutral, no?
Depends on who’s currently winning the fight.
Sometimes? For a long time, an Ukrainian group in their national guard was called “proscribed terrorist organization”, but when I checked a few months ago, none of the linked sources supported any such thing. Apparently only Russia, and only after they invaded, declared them terrorists (and this was not even in any of the much older given sources). I changed it, but some Russian troll called CityOfSilver who has editor privileges reverted my edit and repeatedly insulted me, despite me trying to deescalate. Luckily, some actual Admin did a drive-by and fixed the article, but the article was still wrong for several months and if that idiot had his way it would still be wrong.
Found you! While he appears to be way more than a Russian troll, he was indeed very insulting in his edit summaries. The admin also appears to be an invested contributor to the article who merely coincided with this event; it seems they were merely resolving this discussion. Pending edits (ones that require approval) are separate from the usual edits people fly by.
That was about more stuff that was unsourced in the same line, I guess CityOfSilver would have loved to keep that as well, they seem to hate sourced information. I didn’t remove that because I didn’t know enough about them. The case with Azov was because I actually had done some reading into them when the war started, so I had at least some cursory experience with them.