If Wikipedia is so utopian, why do so many people have bad experiences with it?

Wikipedia is not utopian, Lisa. And its infamous mismanagement of information can never be reconciled with its lofty stated goals of "free knowledge" and "equal access" to information. That is why it, along with the housing bubble, is one of the biggest shams of the 21st century. I wish there could have been a way to foster more reputable ethical accountability within the project, but alas, the moral character of the bearded co-founder proved to be far short of what was needed for that challenging task. By seating the Wikimedia Foundation board and staff with cronies and insiders, Wales insured that Wikipedia would always be ruled by the mob, watering down quality with every edit.

Wikipedia was a truly remarkable idea. Unfortunately like most remarkable ideas, it is seriously messed up by human interference.

So many editors there have these inferiority complexes where they think people are trying to belittle them by adding a few lines of text here, or a link there. How could anyone else really improve their lovingly crafted piece of research.

That is ultimately the problem isn't it. An article should only have one author. Perhaps if several people were allowed to write their own viewpoint of the same topic, it really would become a more democratic website instead of this dictatorship.

I'll still use it for my own research, but I'll never trust the information on there to be the most accurate, or the most important. Individual websites always have more in-depth information as they are written by enthusiasts with time to dedicate to their subject of choice.

Definitely not Utopian by any conceivable definition of the term, nor does it have the goal of breaking down class barriers. As for making information free, well, you get what you pay for!

Wikipedia holds over 3,000,000 articles. I don't know exact numbers, but I suspect the kinds of problems you're talking about would affect only a very minor percentage of those articles.

It has its problems, but Wikipedia is still a valuable resource for most basic information.

Easy, because the negative people are more vocal and have more of a reason to speak out than the millions of other people who use it daily and find it helpful.

because they're so stupid!!! lol