Is Wikipedia Failing? 478
An anonymous reader writes "A growing number of people are concerned about where Wikipedia is heading. Some have left Wikipedia for Citizendium, while others are trying to change the culture of Wikipedia from within. A recent essay called Wikipedia is failing points out many of the problems which must be solved with Wikipedia for it to succeed in its aim of becoming a reputable, reliable reference work. How would you go about solving these problems?"
Editorial board... (Score:5, Interesting)
Now that Wikipedia has reached a critical mass, the time has come to establish a trusted editorial board that can vet articles to established experts in the field of subjects. This board could then also solicit articles by experts and find other wikis that host specialized information to link to the common Wikipedia. This will prevent much of the vandalism and uninformed disasters that seem to befall certain subjects or topics when they are edited by people who are not competent to be making edits in certain topics. As a professor in the biosciences, I've seen more than one article/entry on Wikipedia, written by an expert in that field that has been absolutely, shamefully and quite inaccurately edited or altered by well meaning individuals that absolutely have no idea what they are doing/saying.
Re:Editorial board... (Score:5, Insightful)
Agreed (Score:3, Insightful)
I predict that WIKI will become more of a 'pop-culture' database. Forget reading properly researched and documented articles on 'global warming' or 'evolution'. Rest assured though, crazed fans will document every nuance of Babylon 5 or Star Trek info that exists. Want to know how many PIPs Data has on his shirt in the last season of st
Re:Agreed (Score:5, Insightful)
Wikipedia is just like any other encyclopedia - it should not be used as evidence, but as a starting point to find out more.
Re:Agreed (Score:5, Informative)
Registration is only for pre-release. (Score:4, Informative)
Just a note: The citizendium will be opened to the public [citizendium.org] after the public launch. The pre-release registration is to keep people from happening upon it before the general release -- sort of a voluntary beta test.
While I'm rather neutral about the entire concept, this seems to be a common misconception about their model. Hope you check it out when it goes public.
Re:Agreed (Score:5, Interesting)
Generalizations are always dangerous, but IMO science articles on WP tend to be some of the worst. I've worked on a lot of the physics articles. (I teach physics at a community college.) Typically they fail to put things in context, use too much math too early, and focus on irrelevant equations and derivations rather than the important concepts. I think this is symptomatic of what's wrong with WP in general: articles tend not to rise above a certain (low) level of quality, because of random, disorganized edits. Also, although many people on WP are good writers and explainers, and many are knowledgeable about their subjects, there aren't as many people who are good at both, and the structure of WP doesn't work well to help them cooperate.
Re:Agreed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Agreed (Score:5, Insightful)
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You obviously personally feel something for the good old encycleopedia, and find them very useful. In my personally experience, a encyclopedia is full if outdated stuff, and lots of worthless history. To me, they were only marginally use, and are now only a curiosity. The difference is probably related to differences in our interests, and I do not bemoan these differences.
However, I do find arguments about Wikipedia's usefulness a bit weird. It is obviousl
Re:Agreed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Agreed (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Agreed (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm amazed it took this long for someone to point this out! Many of the articles in fields such as biology, geology, history, philosophy, etc that tend to have political/religious controversy surrounding them are often not of the highest caliber. Articles in non-controversial fields, especially computer science and mathematics (IMO), are often, as the previous poster stated, extremely well written and highly detailed. Want to learn about the traveling salesman problem? The related Wikipedia article [wikipedia.org] is almost ten pages long with graphs and detailed explanations, cites 16 qualified sources, and provides more than a dozen external links for further reading. How exactly is that trivial?
I wish I had saved some mod points for a +1 Underrated...
Re:Editorial board... (Score:5, Insightful)
-Eric
Re:Editorial board... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Editorial board... (Score:4, Insightful)
These people need to grow up, ether support your precious community so it can remain the way it is or move on and let someone who can take your place. I'm sorry but if it "pisses you off" that it requires money to run a huge public website project (that some treat as there personal playground I might add) then maybe you can make up for the money.
Besides ads on Wikipedia, given the usual high search results on Google, would be worth quite a bit of money so I doubt they would even need to put up that many.
Re:Editorial board... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Editorial board... (Score:4, Insightful)
Ads in themselves don't piss off the users, but it is the fact that many of them have already donated money in order to keep Wikipedia alive without commercial sponsorship.
Imagine the outcry if NPR or PBS started having 5 minute commercial breaks even after they had all those annoying fund raisers they do.
Re:Editorial board... (Score:5, Insightful)
As a long time NPR listener (and donator), they *do* have commercial breaks. Lots of them. I even bought some of them to advertise a speaker on our campus. Others are bought by local companies, or people who like to mention birthdays, anniversaries or the like. They tend to be low key- speech only by the announcer, no music, no screaming and I suspect that they are edited for taste, but they are most certainly ads.
Do I like it? Of course not. But the alternatives on one side (no cash = no NPR) or the other ("Y'ALL GET DOWN TO JIM BOB'S TRUCK EMPORIUM RIGHT NOW!") are so bad that I'm happy to put up with it, even though I *also* donate money every year. Rational people know that running an enormous website or paying the electricity bill for a 50k watt transmitter costs real money and that you have to find some way to pay. If the bulk of Wikipedias find this idea distasteful they are welcome to try and find some other way of getting the money, but don't be surprised if you simply can't raise enough donations.
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Re:Editorial board... (Score:4, Insightful)
It's a community project. If wikipedia pisses off too many of its contributors, the project will die. Some people would see that as a bad thing.
Do they?
For one thing. the allegation that wikipedia is failing is far from proven; there may not be a problem to fix. For another, the wikipedians opposed to advertising are probably not the ones voicing doubts about the project's long term viability.
It's also worth pointing out that the author of TFA seems to define failing as not achieving excellence as fast as he or she would like. So there doesn't seem to be any terribly compelling reason to make an unpopular change, while there are good reasons for leaving it as it is. "If it ain't broke..."
In which case, I'd expect answers.com to be making Google scale money. They're keeping awfully quiet about it if they are.
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Well it seems not unlikely to me, given that it has worked wonderfully for the last six years, donations keep increasing and traffic is leveling off [wikimedia.org]. Obviously the Wikimedia chairperson has to say things that bring in donations, but based on their own numbers, they need only $75,000 per month [wikimediafoundation.org] to pay salaries, hosting and bandwidth, so they are good to go until at least April 2008, even if donations
Re:Editorial board... (Score:4, Insightful)
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-Eric
Re:Editorial board... (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Editorial board... (Score:5, Insightful)
Publishing high quality work is simply part of the package of being a successful scholar. So the key to getting top notch scholars to work on wikipedia is to generate appropriate reputation feedback. If it is CV-able that I wrote the definitive wikipedia article in my field, there will be competition amongst scholars to do it.
In my current field of biblical studies, scholars donate literally decades of work editing the critical editions of ancient texts, generating modern translations, writing commentaries, etc. without any additional compensation beyond their base pay. In my previous fields of physics, computer science, and computer-human interaction, the vast majority of top scholars receive very little direct compensation for the many articles, books, and reference book entries that they write. But they do receive scholarly acclaim for doing so -- and there is tremendous pressure from their sponsors to produce documentably important output.
In my experience, professional drive, fame, and dedication to the scholarly field generally drive scholars more than money, after the basic bills are paid.
Re:Editorial board... (Score:5, Insightful)
It depends on your measure of success (Score:3, Insightful)
However, if the measure of Wikipedia success is "Useful, timely, and relatively correct information" then the project is in danger of failing. Numerous articles are poorly written (I like to say that "This Wikipedia is NOT English), contain outda
Re:Editorial board... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Editorial board... (Score:4, Interesting)
Even the experts often can't agree (Score:4, Insightful)
-Eric
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A related problem is the inevitable politicization of articles and their writers. If I want to read about George W. Bush, abortion, Christianity, the Democratic Party, the Republican Party, etc., etc., I'm not going to trust Wikipedia because the article will be slanted one way now and the other way an hour from now.
That being said, I find Wikipedia to be a wonderful resource for non-controversial pop culture (where there are many interested editors), all kinds of computer-related geekery (where there ar
Re:Editorial board... (Score:5, Insightful)
I actually really like this idea... A system where expertise can have a karma ranking system through either qualifications or community mediated promotion through contribution. This would allow experts in their fields to contribute without fear of having their contribution savaged by those who may not know what is going on.
Re:Editorial board... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Editorial board... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Editorial board... (Score:5, Insightful)
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What wikipedia 'needs' and is failing to achieve, accordinging to the opinion in the link, are excellent quality articles in a few 'core' fields of knowledge that are considered necessary to be considered an encyclopedia. What does wikipedia does not need is yet another laymen with no specific area of expertise editing a lot of articles because he/she '
For acadaemia, this could be a problem (Score:3, Insightful)
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When reading Wikipedia articles on controversial topics, you also have to look at the article's history and the article's Talk page. If you do that, you are likely to get a much richer picture of the debate and the positions and rhethoric of the involved parties than you co
Re:Editorial board... (Score:4, Interesting)
In fact, why have a single editorial board? Why not let anybody set up an editorial board, and create a virtual wikipedia over the wikipedia? You could search only the RNC blessed versions if you wanted.
Making the users an editorial board (Score:4, Insightful)
Ratings could be something like
5. I'm a generally recognized expert working the field 4. I work in the field 3. I've studied the field at university/college level 2. I'm a generally interested bystander, having done self-study of the field to some depth 1. I'm a generally interested bystander having tried to follow the field for a few years
Comments could be something like what sources you have checked against, or a deeper description of qualifications.
Ratings like these would allow us to do a lot of stuff. We could turn users that seem to do a good job of voting in their particular areas (and staying off voting in other areas) into an officially sanctioned editorial board retroactively, for instance - by just giving their ratings weight. Or we could let people look at "Last version of article vouched for by a 5-authority", or show the differences from that version, or whatever we feel like.
The important thing is to start collecting the data. And that can be done NOW, trivially.
Eivind.
The problem... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:The problem... (Score:5, Insightful)
I wandered into an editorial discussion once on what a high school needed to do to qualify as "noteworthy" enough to not have an article about it deleted. I'm sorry, but any high school in the real world is more "noteworthy" than the Treaty of Algeron [wikipedia.org], Pikachu [wikipedia.org], or the E-Wing Starfighter [wikipedia.org].
I really feel like Wikipedia is a brilliant idea that's going to be killed off or crippled by the nerdy bureaucrats who seem to control the editorial process. I know I have no interest in posting content there given their criteria for deleting articles.
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Would you also rule out articles about, say, fictional myths by Homer? Wikipedia, as any decent encyclopedia, is there to suit what people care about. It shouldn't make any judgement about how justified that interest is.
High schools noteworthy? (Score:3, Insightful)
Star Wars, Star Trek and Pokemon, on the other hand, are all integrated into our culture, and we are likely to see references to them everywhere. References we might want to look up. That is noteworthy, and that is what an encyclopedia is for.
Of your three examples, the E-Wing probably shouldn't be included, it is from "the expanded universe", which has a
Edit that article... (Score:3, Funny)
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Is "community" a good thing? (Score:5, Interesting)
Another problem is edit decay, often exacerbated by Wiki-masturbation. What do I mean? Basically, edits are normally on a small scale. Lots of individual small-scale edits do not make a big article; on the contrary, I've copyedited at least one article that was fine on a sentence-by-sentence level, but messed-up, disorganised, verbose and unreadable because no-one had bothered to step back and look at the article as a whole. Thus many small edits (even if individually useful) tend to increase the structural decay of an article, and make it hard to see when something useful is being lost.
A problem occurs when minor edits are made, or an article changed several times, with little ultimate point (hence "masturbation"). It's in these sorts of pointless changes that good work gets lost for no real purpose. In such cases, it may make sense to go back to an earlier version, compare any major changes, find out why these have happened, and if there seems to have been no justifiable reason for them, to revert some or all of the article.
Should the aim of Wikipedia be change? No. The aim of Wikipedia should be changability; a subtle but very important difference. Unlike evolution in nature, we can go back as far as we like if an earlier version is better, and there's no reason we shouldn't do this. Some subjects inevitably date, necessitating change; but many do not. Changeability is about having the choice, and that includes the choice of saying "actually, the earlier version *was* better".
The WP article actually covers some similar ground to the above, but both are issues that had been on my mind for a long time beforehand.
Not really (Score:5, Insightful)
"But someone could edit that page and change it!"
Oh, right. Now I've linked to the static page. [wikipedia.org]
That part seems rather hard for some people to grasp, considering how many times I've seen that used as a justification for "thou shalt not cite" bullshit.
However, in some cases, "thou shalt not cite" is correct, not just based on reactionary BS- Wiki articles are sourced. If you cite a sourced statement from a Wiki article, you should really be citing it from the original... which is conveniently linked at the bottom of Wikipedia.
Wikipedia isn't failing at this. It's doing this remarkably well. The failing is in reactionary academics who feel threatened by Wikipedia, and the perception these people cause.
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Surely there is a second part to that - to let people look something up quickly and get accurate information. Wikipedia itself says that high quality is one of its goals [wikipedia.org], so your assessment of Wikipedia's function does not match what the Wikipedia community itself claims to be attempting. It is the quality, not the quickness of access, that is coming under question.
Simplify it! (Score:2)
Seriously. Everyone knows how to find the "live" article on wikipedia and send links to it to their friends. It takes two non-obvious clicks from there to to get to the permanent, static link. (You have to click history, and then the most recent version.) There should be a big, shiny, flaming, "Permanent link to this version" button, or every "live" page should auto-redirect to the most recent static page (so the url in the address bar is a static page), or something.
Agreed: "Stable" version should be default version (Score:5, Interesting)
1. The Stable Page - and THIS should be the default at
2. The Candidate Page - The candidate to become the next stable page
3. The Current Page - Up to the minute revert war free for all
Both [1] and [2] are essentially historic versions of the page but linked to from handy labelled tabs and some kind of moderation/voting system can elevate a page from current to beta to stable.
obviously newly created articles would only have one or three versions and these would filter across all three until a moderator/vote decides to split the article into the aforementioned modus operandi
Well... (Score:5, Insightful)
-CGP [colingregorypalmer.net]
We will be launching as soon as possible (Score:5, Informative)
I can make a little announcement. Wikis are huge resource hogs, so to grant just read access to wiki pages indiscriminately will require more resources than the big souped-up but single server we have at present. Quite frankly we have been holding out for an infusion of funds for sixteen servers. It's clear now that we can launch with less than that, with a number that we can afford with our very limited present budget. So we'll be bravely forging ahead with an only temporarily adequate number of servers!
The Citizendium wiki [citizendium.org] will be launching for public read access as soon as (1) we get a few new servers set up (it'll be a small enough number to be within our budget), and (2) we make a few technical changes (e.g., change the "Citizendium Pilot" namespace to "Citizendium"; and lots of other stuff).
Now, when will that be? Not sure; now it's a matter of getting and setting up the equipment and making those software changes, and it's impossible to predict how long it will take to do this, as we are mostly relying on volunteers (and one part-time contracter) to work on our software. But on the order of weeks, not months. If you want to help us with the software stuff, I bow to your geekiness and invite you to our forge [citizendium.org].
Hope that clarifies our situation anyway.
Best of luck with that. (Score:3, Insightful)
I kid, I kid. Honestly, variety is good (insert Gnome/KDE flamewar here); we already have enough problems with Wikipedia articles being replicated around the internet so that it becomes hard to find anything else. There's a serious free-encyclopedia vacuum out there, and it can only help to have another batch of people doing work independently of Wikipedia.
I thin
What does that have to do with anything? (Score:3, Interesting)
This new project (Citizendium) is being developed on a fast server which hinders the ability to optimize code. Smart people start with low cost equipment and optimize the heck out of it to make it work for as long as possible. Only then do you start spending more on faster systems and more bandwidth. You don't spend rediculous amounts of money up front for resources you have no use for. You first
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scrap editorial boards (Score:5, Insightful)
In truth, the biggest problem with wikipedia has nothing to do with wikipedia. The problem is us, especially our greed. Article after article has become slanted by those with a special, i.e. greedy, interest. Many controversial issues have already been editoralized into one-sided oblivion.
Top down is not going to help, so I say avoid the temptation to let the "experts" decide what we should be able to freely consider.
reasons (not )to (edit|use) wikipedia (Score:4, Insightful)
This is what I've come up with after a very short period of editing Wikipedia.
1. Endless arguments on Talk pages. Apparently more work on Talk pages than actual pages.
2. I'm most able to write about what I'm an expert in. That's also a conflict of interest.
3. Reverts may undo useful changes. There are no merge-based undos, no simple application of a diff between two revisions.
4. Improving free and open source software is both more visible and important.
5. Publishing articles in peer-reviewed venues is more important, although less visible.
6. Lack of a good, canonical, reference and citation system like BibTeX.
7. Popular topics end up better written than unpopular topics. Many entries on fictional worlds.
8. My work might get deleted altogether.
9. Wikipedia is generally not citable itself. Not reviewed, and contents are not constant.
10. There is no correspondance between the different language versions of a page.
11. GFDL is possibly not the best license. I doubt most people have read it.
12. Software screenshots must be low resolution unless the software is open source.
13. Certain topics are taboo, e.g. Encyclopaedia Dramatica
14. If I'm an IP address, nobody cares. If I use my real name, I have to be careful what I write. If I use a pseudonym and hide my identity, it carries less weight.
15. Decentralization. It is doubtful that even a fraction of people take the time to read the relevant guides on editing.
16. Same problems that USENET, mailing lists, and forums have.
17. Neutral point of view confounded by fact that most people here are fairly left wing.
18. Most people editing don't have any formal training in writing beyond high school. Most articles and topics need work.
19. Vandalism, and pseudo-vandalism.
20. Almost every other leisure activity I can think of is more rewarding; Wikipedia is just addictive.
2 reasons to use Wikipedia
1. It's generally better than a Google search.
2. If you're a cultural anthropologist, here's a minefield.
2 reasons to edit Wikipedia
1. It's a great place to practice your translation skills.
2. Most anything you write here appears near the top of a Google search.
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Really, why is this so? I'm not questioning you, I've seen the same thing, there, on Digg, and elsewhere?
I wonder why it's the case when the US population seem to be quite evenly split.
( note: I'm a foreigner so if this is "obvious" knowledge to any American, please excuse me
Too Late to Fail (Score:5, Insightful)
Even if the competitors are superior, they will have to compete with Wikipedia's brand. Their superiority will have to be more easily communicated than Wikipedia's (eg. a better name, like "Google" vs "AltaVista") to actually beat them. It's a meme pool, and swimming counts more than smarts.
Wikipedia is no different from any other large Website: its success is defined by its scale of users, not its quality. As if you couldn't tell that by looking at Slashdot.
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The question "why not create a perfect reliable encyclopedia that no one uses" is a corollary that might shed more light on the dynamics here.
I don't get it.... (Score:5, Insightful)
So, from that point of view, I hardly see Wikipedia as a failing endeavor. There have been other studies that show Wikipedia to generally be quite accurate. There are exceptions, particularly in controversial topics which has been covered here a number of times, and maybe that needs to be fixed, but "Is Wikipedia Failing?" What is this? Fox News?
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Who would want anything reliable? (Score:5, Insightful)
There is of course room for other slightly more reliable web encyclopaedias, but in the end all of them have to be verified by the reader to be trusted.
From the Essay (Score:5, Insightful)
This to me seems like the old most-blogs-are-terrible argument. I would wager that those 3,000 good/featured articles make up the bulk of what people who go to wikipedia read about.
-CGP [colingregorypalmer.net]
Netcraft confirms... (Score:4, Funny)
Too many leaves to grasp the tree (Score:5, Insightful)
This essay seems to be fixed on featured articles and big entries. To me the real advantage of wikipedia seems to be the huge number of small, concise leaf articles that aren't featured, and maybe rarely accessed, but provide a short, in-depth punch about a particular topic, typically an obscure one. You can look up obscure topics like the Dry Tourgas or As Easy As and get the gist. Typically, small articles are written by an expert and ignored in terms of editing, but very useful for research. If you type certain strings into google, you get the wikipedia entry and not much else worthwhile. Wikipedia is sort of a common repository of knowledge. I'd rather have an article written by someone who knows something about an obscure topic than nothing. No one can grasp or deal with the entirety of wikipedia. There's too much there. But if you need to look up something obscure, you can go directly to that article.
What bothers me the most is all the web sites which clone wikipedia articles and add advertising. Ususually a google hit for a wikipedia entry turns up three or four other sites that just include the wikipedia article. This poisons the search engine, crowding out other hits. There ought to be a GPL version for wikipedia that allows people to mirror it only for nonprofit purposes. Down with leeches!
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It's biased anyway and useless (Score:3, Interesting)
No (Score:3, Interesting)
Wikipedis is failing to be exactly what the article writer wants it to be. It's succeeding perfectly in being what it is.
The article writer values his opinion more than reality. He's undoubtedly disappointed a lot.
Everybody keeps talking about reliable sources (Score:3, Insightful)
I mean even stuff like the BBC, that used to be the definition of reliable has been shown to flat-out lie about some topics. So maybe the problem is not with wikipedia, but with people demanding reliable sources.
There aren't any reliable sources. Wikipedia, like the Britannica, like the Bible, like Muhammad's sayings like Shinto's roll's and like anything else is just a human's opinion. It is fallible, corruptible, incomplete, and potentially for sale.
Letting the original mission get in the way (Score:2)
But that's clearly not what Wikipedia has become. It's become a strong source for pop-culture knowledge and trivia, as well as everything else under the sun. The thing that draws people to it is not its original openness, but the fact that it's a microcosm of what people are actually interested in.
But try telling that to some of the people wh
One of Wikipedia's failings (Score:2)
The one thing I'd do to improve Wikipedia would be to require you to create an account and activate it. It would remove a large chunk of the vandalism very quickly.
Sum greater than its parts (Score:2, Insightful)
Citizendium? What's changed ... ? (Score:2, Insightful)
Too much democracy (Score:3, Insightful)
Public perception (Score:2)
I know of two kids who in the same week both got downgraded on papers because they referenced wikipedia as a source, with the comment (2 different teachers, same school) "Wikipedia is not considered a factual reference" and "Perhaps you should look for a more reliable source than Wikipedia".
These were not for deeply controversial facts. One referenced wiki as a source for the factual statement "Plants need CO2 to live", and the other referenced it for
Different kind of reference (Score:4, Interesting)
Don't get me wrong but that really misses the point. Take, for example, Voltron. I can plug that into Britannica and Wikipedia. Britannica doesn't know who or what Voltron is. Wikipedia has a fairly detailed explanation. Accurate? Well written? I'd be shocked if that article fell in to the 2000 or so "well written" articles. I doubt it's verifiable in any credible way. Also, I don't see Britannica ever having an article that talks about Voltron. It's not a scholarly article because it's not a scholarly subject. That doesn't change the fact that when I couldn't remember the names of the pilots of the lions and for whatever reason I wanted to remember them, wikipedia provided an answer and a whole lot more where most other sources wouldn't provide anything. That's the beauty of it.
I don't know that you should read a candidates wikipedia article and decide off of that alone if you will vote for them. I don't know any single sources that you should use for that. I also don't know that I'd read about global warming on wikipedia and use it as an exclusive guide to your own beliefs on it; again, there is no good single source on such an important subject. However if you do want to look up who's driving for each F1 team next season or Voltron, or what looks like well over a million other articles, wikipedia is probably ok. The alternative is either nothing or you scour the web for some hobbiest that cares enough about Voltron or whatever to put up a webpage of his own and provide a detailed document on it.
Wikipedia is good for some things but not all (Score:5, Insightful)
On the other hand, on the other end of the spectrum are the categories History and Society. Wikipedia is horrible at such articles. You have two conflicting sides fighting over an article. Let's take a look at the current protected pages. "2006 Israel-Lebanon conflict" and "Taba Summit" are both protected. Semi-protected is "1972 Summer Olympics", "Zionism" and other similar articles. Israelis and Palestinians are shooting each other over there, and such a thing spills over onto Wikipedia. It even spills over onto Slashdot - the last time I said this about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict on Slashdot, in a pretty neutral and moderate tone, someone lambasted me for "taking sides".
Jimbo Wales is not politically neutral. He ran the Ayn Rand mailing list for years. His appointees to the Arbitration Committee are people like JayJG, who could not get voted in and who had over 100 votes against them during elections (including me). He says he uses Friedrich Hayek's theories as a model of how to run Wikipedia. He has personally harrassed people like Secretlondon. He is not a fanatic, or Wikipedia would have never taken off, but he is biased, and his bias is reflected. The Wikipedia "cabal" is sort of cultish - check out the Criticism of Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] page and how obsessed the "cabal" is with criticism they can not control. Dozens of people have tried to link to the Wikipedia Review web site and the link is removed over and over. It is really cultish behavior, the idea that criticism of Wikipedia can happen which they can't control drives them crazy.
I know the society and history articles will always be crap, unless it's something like 1755 Lisbon Earthquake or something which no one cares much about any more. But by and large they are junk and not encyclopedic. The solution I think is for these types of articles to move onto other wiki encyclopedias. This has already happened. I've written a number of articles elsewhere that people put back into Wikipedia. Some of the ones I have done I know could never be put back because they are of the "Taba Summit" type. There is only one wiki encylopedia now, which makes sense, but this will not continue and in fact Wikipedia already has some minor competition in Demopedia, dKosopedia, Internet Encyclopedia (Wikinfo), Red Wiki, Anarchopedia and so forth. This trend will continue.
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It was hardly "the" Ayn Rand mailing list--in fact it was small and hated by most of the "objectivist" community, to the extent that IIRC members were banned from some other fora. In contrast to those closed-minded groups, Jimmy's MDOP list was the only forum available at the time where Rand's work was discussed intelligently by people who knew something about philosophy. It spawned a number of fruitful discussions and coll
Wikipedia is flawed at best (Score:5, Insightful)
It rejects "experts" in favor of consensus. Finding facts is not a democratic process. It is often an intrusive and offensive process. "Facts" have to be protected from people with ulterior motives.
Most people think they are safe in a car from lightening because of the rubber tires. General consensus where critical thinking and science are involved is typically wrong.
what about a "sphere of peers" (Score:3, Informative)
Please comment with any constructive criticism you may have.
The basic problem is how to know if an article is trustworthy or not. This solution is based on the philosophy that respect is a personal choice, not an authoritarian decree.
In my opinion this can be solved with a system that is not terribly different than the slashdot friend/foe idea.
Basically you just create a system that is capable of tracking your "friends" opinion of a particular state of an article, and maybe your friends friends to a specifiable distance.
In a Nut Shell: Abe looks at an article and votes that it is accurate. Betty looks at the same article at a later time and also thinks it is accurate, then Betty is given the option to include Abe in her list of peers. repeat for users C. D. E.
Once this is set up, users can subscribe to "peer clusters" with a given radius of friends of peers. Eventually you will have well recognized and respected groups of friend/peer/editors that are then the de facto authority on any set of articles. As an arbitrary user you can view the article in either the latest edit or the latest reviewed edit and determine for yourself if you agree with any changes.
Now, there is the possibility of waring peer clusters, in which case the user simply determines which faction they agree with and no further action by an oversight committee is required. In short, since this is user based content, let the users decide who they trust. "Of the People, by the people, and for the people".
Oh the Irony (Score:5, Funny)
Wikipedias problem is that they want to be more (Score:4, Insightful)
There is nothing wrong with that though.
Wikipedia right now is a great resource that you have to take with a grain of salt, that is fine. It's great the way it is. If I want to know some bit of trivia then Wikipedia is the place, if someone makes a reference to something I'm ignorant about in a conversation for instance, or if I'm just mildly curious about something I read in a news article, I can at least find out what's going on with a quick check to Wikipedia. These are things that in the past I might have to search Google for and then possibly wade through a few pages of the things before I get to the bottom of it, now with Wikipedia my questions are usually answered much faster, easier, and more in depth than if I had just used Google.
Now I realize that what I'm reading might be biased, someones opinion, and in a lot of cases just flat wrong, but that's okay because that would have been even more true with Google searches. I realize that if I really need hard information about a subject then Wikipedia is little more than a lead to actual references at best, but it still serves a purpose.
If you ask me, the thing Wikipedia can do to improve would be to stop deleting articles because they aren't "notable enough". Seriously. Why the hell should there not be an entry for my local highschool in there? I know few people would want to read it, but so what? If Joe Johnson down at Johnsons gas station wants to write about the history of his family gas station, let him! Who is it hurting? Besides, I might know Joe and be interested in reading it.
No change required (Score:3, Interesting)
If anything, the wikipedia community should take a break and relax for a while.
Stephan
References
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encyclop%C3%A6dia_Br
http://www.answers.com/topic/encyclop-dia-britann
Total Misundersanding (Score:4, Insightful)
Wikipedia isn't broke and I hope it stays donation supported for a long time.
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Re:Uhh... (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:Argument to the contrary? (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, its use is phenomenally widespread, and in many fields it is one of the best places to look for a general survey -- even in highly technical fields (for example, there are many times I've gotten better explanation of some topic in higher mathematics from Wikipedia than from my textbooks). I'm almost certain some of these were not included in the count of 1700 "good articles," just because if you only have 1700, having dozens of them on areas of math that 99.99% of people will have no interest or need for seems unlikely (how many people do you know who need to read about higher cohomology?). Thus, the "good article" status is almost certainly not a real measure of how many good (in the English sense, i.e. the opposite of bad) articles there are on Wikipedia. While having the "good article" distinction is useful since it can direct people to especially polished material, it is not at all a good idea to make the logical leap and conclude that all the other articles are bad.
There, that's a (credible, I hope) argument that Wikipedia is not failing, followed by a partial refutation of the article that it is (I don't have time for a more thorough discussion). So the answer to your question is yes -- now let's get back on topic and leave aside the FUD :-P