Can Wikipedia Ever Make the Grade?

swestcott writes to mention an article at the Chronicle of Higher Education site, wondering if Wikipedia will ever 'make the grade'? Academics are split, and feuding, about how to handle the popular collaborative project. Due to the ease of editing correct information into nonsense, many professors are ignoring it. Others want to start contributing. From the article: "As the encyclopedia's popularity continues to grow, some professors are calling on scholars to contribute articles to Wikipedia, or at least to hone less-than-inspiring entries in the site's vast and growing collection. Those scholars' take is simple: If you can't beat the Wikipedians, join 'em. Proponents of that strategy showed up in force at Wikimania, the annual meeting for Wikipedia contributors, a three-day event held in August at Harvard University. Leaders of Wikipedia said there that they had turned their attention to increasing the accuracy of information on the Web site, announcing several policies intended to prevent editorial vandalism and to improve or erase Wikipedia's least-trusted entries."

Actually, in the last few days...

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, in the last few days a few hundred thousand things have changed:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Recentchanges [wikipedia.org]

It's a LOT harder to vandalize Wikipedia...

[Anonymous Coward]

... than people think. I don't encourage anyone to try, but if you do, your edit will typically be reverted in a couple of hours. There are a LOT of people who do nothing with their lives but keep an eye on recent edits. /former Wikipedia troll, retired

Re:Can Wikipedia Ever Make the Grade?

[From A Far Away Land]

The last time I used Wikipedia, I looked up Chewbacca because I couldn't remember the name of his species [I know, revoke my geek license]. Well the first paragraph gave me the answer, but it also said something like, "And Chewie is a real live person who is my god and saviour, and is coming to marry me one day." Before I had a chance to fix it, someone had already removed the vandalism. It had been repeatedly altered by kids, making fun of each other's Moms. It's easy to see why someone new to online forums, would find the site distressing at times. However, it's a valuable resource, of which there is nothing to compare to it [aside from the publicly traded Google].

Re:An idea

[Koushiro]

Here's an idea to make Wikipedia more reliable: show the time of the last edit for pages [...]

It does; through the History for each page, obviously, but also at the bottom of the article (below the categories for that page).

As for showing the last modified information for each section of a page, that is slightly more difficult within the current structure of Wikipedia. It's an interesting idea, though.

Re:Wikipedia = Crappiest Search, Anywhere

[interiot]

Seriously, it's 2006, and you're still using anything other than google and site: to search for something?

Okay okay, that is a bit of a cop-out (though it's mostly true). There are some cases where multiple articles exist, separated only by case [1] [sosdg.org]. Though in the most normal case, you're right, case insensitive search would be helpful. Don't quote me on this, but I heard that the devs might be working on it [2] [wikipedia.org] [3] [wikimedia.org], but that there might be some DB indexing issue that they need to figure out before they're able to do this efficiently?

Re:Citations: a moving target

[interiot]

By clicking on the history tab, you can generate a URL for a specific article version, and you cite that specific URL [wikipedia.org] in your references. Special:Cite [wikipedia.org] is a tool that helps with this (it used to be linked from every page, I'm not sure why it went away)