BIG Tech can use its power to influence the uneducated masses.
And we are all uneducated in many important areas of life. That is the key thing to remember.
At G, they just decided to use Wiki as a seed list and ranked things accordingly. Searching and sorting the world's info in an egalitarian way was just too much hassle
I don't think it's quite right to say it was too much hassle. I would say that with existing tech and the resources available, the only other way to create a seed list is to hire a team of bona fide experts at huge expense. In sixteenth-century history (one of the few areas that I could call myself an expert), I have to say that Wikipedia has gone from being a joke to being my most common starting point.
Basically, getting your seed list would require vastly more effort than creating a new edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. I don't see a source other than Wikipedia that could fit the bill for diversity of content and quality of content. You not only need all the info that's in the EB, you need a hundred times that breadth and you need it in 100 languages. And the additional languages are not translations, it's new, non-overlapping content that is in typically created from scratch. If you read a few languages, it can be enlightening to read the "same" article in multiple languages.
What do you think of Neil De Grasse Tyson? Should we use Cosmos reboot show notes as a seed? He's a brilliant guy, right?
In fact, if Neil De Grasse Tyson had taken an hour to read the Wikipedia article on Giordano Bruno, the first episode of the Cosmos reboot would not have been a complete abomination to historians. Tyson was literally 100 years out of date on his historiography of Bruno, while Wikipedia did a fine job of summarizing scholarship.
For most topics, I think Wikipedia is actually the best choice among a set of inherently flawed choices of seed lists. What if they had used the Cosmos show notes?