Please just don't repeat the meme that a Nature study found Wikipedia to be about as reliable as Britannica.

At least say that based on a small sample of articles, a journalistic news report in Nature opined that Wikipedia's science articles were only slightly less reliable than Britannica's, but considerably less well-written, and that Britannica contested those results. That would be the truth, rather than the meme. Mkay?

Your point about the hazards of anonymous contributions is well taken.

Oh yes, they do claim that. Jimmy Wales asserts that Wikipedia is "about as accurate as traditional encyclopedias and improving all the time." Really? Really? Really? Really? Really?

First of all, the Nature piece itself found Britannica to be superior – just not by as much as expected.

Secondly, it is a matter of record that Nature only examined science articles, many of them quite specialised. It is inexcusable to omit that qualification. There simply is no evidence at all that Wikipedia is superior to Britannica in other topic areas, and copious evidence within Wikipedia itself of how often articles are biased by special interest groups (just look at the history of Wikipedia arbitration cases).

Third, Nature chose to penalise Britannica for information that was omitted, but contained in Wikipedia: that was counted as an "error". As Britannica themselves pointed out, "Nature accused Britannica of 'omissions' on the basis of reviews of article excerpts, not the articles themselves. In a number of cases only parts of the applicable Britannica articles were reviewed." In other words, they butchered Britannica articles and then penalised Britannica for the fact that the remaining stump failed to contain some item of information that the full article would have contained.

Fourth, Nature noted, but chose not to penalise Wikipedia for, confusing presentation and bad style, essentially proposing that a haphazardly compiled jumble of facts should be considered equal to a well-structured, easy-to-understand introduction to a topic written by a world-renowned expert.

Lastly, there is by now a very long list of journalists and writers found to have copied spurious facts from Wikipedia. Where is a similar list of writers embarrassed for having gotten their information from Britannica? If Lord Leveson had looked up the founders of the Independent newspaper in Britannica, he would not have ended up ascribing that achievement to some unknown Californian student.

Beyond simple errors, there is very copious evidence of bias and covert paid editing in Wikipedia. The Croatian Wikipedia was taken over by right-wing extremists, to the point where the country's education minister warned students not to rely on it, as the country's history was thoroughly falsified by fringe groups. Those are all problems Britannica has never had.

I could go on. I have been a Wikipedian for nigh on ten years. I have seen the problems first-hand.

The 2005 "study" comparing Britannica and Wikipedia was not a rigorous peer-reviewed study, and they only looked at articles on relatively obscure science topics – a fact that no one seems to remember these days. The average Wikipedia vandal would not even know how to find an entry on a topic like the “kinetic isotope effect” or “Meliaceae” (two of the articles they looked at).

The assertion that Wikipedia is as reliable as Britannica is ludicrous. Granted, it's a lot bigger than Britannica, and has articles on breaking news stories, but as reliable? Of the English Wikipedia's nearly 5 million articles, at least 10% are on no Wikipedia editor's watchlist – a result of the continuous increase in the number of articles combined with the continuous decrease in the number of active editors – and those articles are sitting ducks for subtle vandalism.

Britannica may have had errors, but it did not contain false information inserted by anonymous people for fun or for financial gain; it contained no anonymous hatchet jobs written by people's rivals, and was not full of puff-pieces written by the biography subjects themselves.

Repeating this false "Wikipedia is as reliable as Britannica" meme only contributes to future cases like this one here, or this one.

That was part of Hill & Shaw's assertion (see endnote in the original article). I'm not sure I'm entirely convinced.

I guess this page wouldn't be complete without a reference to WP:Clubhouse? An Exploration of Wikipedia’s Gender Imbalance, a 2011 paper which contains a lot of interesting data related to all of this.

Anonymous editor surveys asking the question: Are you male or female?

Heh. The large gender imbalance has been reported by the Wikimedia Foundation for years. The survey-based estimates (sources are the UNU survey and a WMF survey) are not corrected in the footnote (which is about which statistics to use to estimate the percentage of mothers). The gender imbalance of Reddit is cited to Huffpost, it's 72% male (which is less male-dominated than Wikipedia), and the most extreme of all the major social media sites listed there. There are multiple citations for effect on content, including New York Times, Atlantic and a recent Guardian editorial. 1 in 50 relates to survey respondents, not contributors (which some have claimed may have a *slightly* higher proportion, based on sampling bias). For participation dropping after age 20 see UNU survey (linked). WMF efforts to address the gender gap are well publicised, Sue Gardner talked about it to the press until she was blue in the face. Women aged 18-34 in Facebook and Pinterest: sources linked. The surveys were commissioned by the Wikimedia Foundation itself, and comparison to social media is relevant in relation to the argument that women have no time to be online. Relevance of anonymity on women's participation per quoted text from Wiley Handbook. User interface impact is a hypothesis, based on recent discussions on Wikipedia's Gender Task Force page.

If your post is representative of Wikipedians' ability to read sources, Wikipedia is not destined for greatness.

It's exactly the other way round, according to this Huffpost piece. There are 99 million more monthly female visitors to the various social media sites (included in the analysis were Facebook, Yelp, Twitter, Myspace, Pinterest, YouTube, LinkedIn, Flickr, last.fm, deviantART, Google+, Digg, Bebo, Reddit and many others). Even in gaming, the largest demographic are now adult women.

I do think paid crowdsourcing is the future. All the talk about "sharing" is hypocritical spin, given that Google and other scrapers are using Wikipedia content to make money from ads, while unpaid volunteers do all the work. See Wall Street's internet darlings require an endless supply of idiots – Sharing Economy? Mug Economy, more like.

In terms of social development, the internet currently compares to the darkest age of the industrial revolution. So, more power to you.

Many academics have said the same thing to me. No desire, and not enough time, to argue endlessly with nincompoops. There is currently an initiative underway, focused on medical articles, to get funding for experts to peer-review Wikipedia articles. Once an article is up to scratch, there would then be a permanent link to the peer-reviewed version displayed on the article page. This might be a more promising approach, and it could scale to other topic areas as well. Experts would (1) be paid, (2) have the guarantee that their work will have some permanence, (3) derive a degree of kudos from their having been appointed to do this work. Funding would, in this case, come from charities interested in making reliable medical info available online. Currently, for example, there is a Wikipedian-in-Residence at Cancer Research UK, who is working with CRUK experts on Wikipedia's articles on cancer. The position is funded by the Wellcome Trust.