Wikipedia Founder Sees Serious Quality Problems 459
Juha-Matti Laurio writes "The Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales has acknowledged there are real quality problems with the online project. From the article: 'Meanwhile, criticism from outside the Wikipedia camp has been rebuffed with a ferocious blend of irrationality and vigor that's almost unprecedented in our experience: if you thought Apple, Amiga, Mozilla or OS/2 fans were er, ... passionate, you haven't met a wiki-fiddler.'"
revenge (Score:2, Informative)
Slashdot is often criticized for posting story summaries that are inaccurate and/or misspelled, and for intentionally posting articles that many find highly biased, and/or defamatory and often incite flamewars, while ignoring news or commentary on issues which outsiders may consider more serious or important (see Slashdot subculture). It is also infamous for the Slashdot effect, when thousands of Slashdot readers read an article and connect to the linked website, flooding it with unexpected traffic, and at times bringing the site down in a manner similar to a Denial of Service attack. The use of "slashdot" as a verb refers to this effect.
Well I don't see any problems with the quality of that article
Jokes aside for most things I've used wikipedia for, it has been a good help and is pretty accurate too. Might be just because I normally read at geeky/nerdy type of articles.
Re:What's scary is... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Perhaps they need a team of paid editors (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Orlowski rant (Score:2, Informative)
The Register has gotten more and more snarky in it's reporting. I don't know if it's a change in writers or tightening due to the Recession in Tech since '00. It's gotten so rough IMO that I don't go there anymore.
Orlowski is terrible, when I've corrected him or commented to him I've gotten crappy responses when I was civil.
Re:Wikipedia generally works (Score:3, Informative)
You have it exactly the wrong way around. These articles are some the best of Wikipedia, not the worst.
Re:Perhaps they need a team of paid editors (Score:5, Informative)
Britannica's various editions are typically the previous year's version, repackaged and slightly updated. Rewriting it all from scratch they typically only do about once in a lifetime. They did it (rewrote it from scratch) in 1911, and they did it again in 1976 --- to my knowledge, 1976 was the last time they completely rewrote it.
Re:Or they could rate... (Score:4, Informative)
Wikipedia:Policies_and_guidelines [wikipedia.org]
Wikipedia:Deletion_policy [wikipedia.org]
If the problem's a factual error it relies on someone coming along, noticing it and correcting it... that perhaps does not reviewing more as it assumes the reader will spot the error. They probably won't though, as the most likely reason they are reading the page is they don't know about the subject yet.
People *can* also watch articles so that when anyone edits it if they're an expert in the field they can read it over and see if it's correct or not. There's an option to watch it when you edit it, probably so that previous contributors can help maintain it.
I think one good feature to add would be to stop Anonymous users editing (it's a simple policy change in the MediaWiki configuration file so is easily possible)... if you have an account they can at least attempt to track how trustworthy you are. (I'm ignoring the problem of people opening fake accounts just to muck articles up).
Prob. is article is wrong and useless. (Score:3, Informative)
The real issue here is the repeated attacks by this reporter: Remember Andrew Orlowski is the same reporter who wrote about Wikipedia :
""""It's the Khmer Rouge in diapers,"
Clearly Andrew has found that Wikipedia bashing is an easy meal ticket and that is the actual source of his over-exaggerated headline writing. Orlonski needs to get paid and he needs his editors to view him as a positive asset, drawing lots of eyeballs to the Register website. A quick Google for Orlowski and Wikipedia shows a long, slanted history for our boy Andy.
There is a verb for this: "Dvoraking" "To Dvorak"
"The act of trolling by a supposedly 'professional' journalist in order to draw visitors to a webpage generating hits for the paid advertisements."
In fact, given this background information Andrew Orlowski has less real credibility than, say, your average slashdot poster.
Orlowski isn't a total waste of time however. After all he has noted that: "Segway's brains head for toy robot", "Microsoft FAT patent rejected - again", and the incredible "Police stake out bar, hoping to catch man drunk"
Wow, Andrew! Whats next? I wait in breathless anticipation.
(What, proofread this? not worth the time, Andrew.)
Re:Wikipedia generally works (Score:3, Informative)
Featured articles (Score:4, Informative)
I don't think that's true. Wikipedia's featured articles [wikipedia.org] come from all categories. That's certainly not a perfect proof of my point, but an indication.
I ban it from student papers (Score:2, Informative)
Re:They need to smarten the F up! (Score:2, Informative)
You write some content, they delete it. You put it back. They come back through a different internet connection and delete it. You put it back. They come back a week later and delete it. You put it back. They come back six months later. You don't put it back because you aren't still watching it because you aren't an anal-retentive so and so who obsessively manipulates an online encyclopedia article using tactics gleaned from Goebbels. And when you try to restore it a year later when you finally notice, the person responsable is a popular editor or even an admin and sucessfully maintains their status quo in their favorite articles with a mixture of subtle abuse and social engineering.
This does happen. Many of us have seen it happen. The Wiki process is not perfect enough to stop this happening when someone with a brain larger than the average Goatse troll is going out of their way to break it.