Slashdot Mirror

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/f/f7/Radi ohead.hailtothetheif.albumart.jpg

I wonder if he will publish a poster of it.

Marking "stable" versions of an articles has been much discussed, and will probably come around soo, in some form or other. Here are some links:

ReleaseArticleVersion
Anti-vandalism_ideas
Reviewed article version
Article marker feature
Article validation

I hope this is implemented in a non-intrusive manner, kind of like the threshold system here on slashdot: if you browse at level -1, you get the whole thing, raw. Default for visitors should be level 1 or something, and there may be levels 2 and 3 or "excellent" articles.

Marking "stable" versions of an articles has been much discussed, and will probably come around soo, in some form or other. Here are some links:

ReleaseArticleVersion
Anti-vandalism_ideas
Reviewed article version
Article marker feature
Article validation

I hope this is implemented in a non-intrusive manner, kind of like the threshold system here on slashdot: if you browse at level -1, you get the whole thing, raw. Default for visitors should be level 1 or something, and there may be levels 2 and 3 or "excellent" articles.

Marking "stable" versions of an articles has been much discussed, and will probably come around soo, in some form or other. Here are some links:

ReleaseArticleVersion
Anti-vandalism_ideas
Reviewed article version
Article marker feature
Article validation

I hope this is implemented in a non-intrusive manner, kind of like the threshold system here on slashdot: if you browse at level -1, you get the whole thing, raw. Default for visitors should be level 1 or something, and there may be levels 2 and 3 or "excellent" articles.

Marking "stable" versions of an articles has been much discussed, and will probably come around soo, in some form or other. Here are some links:

ReleaseArticleVersion
Anti-vandalism_ideas
Reviewed article version
Article marker feature
Article validation

I hope this is implemented in a non-intrusive manner, kind of like the threshold system here on slashdot: if you browse at level -1, you get the whole thing, raw. Default for visitors should be level 1 or something, and there may be levels 2 and 3 or "excellent" articles.

Marking "stable" versions of an articles has been much discussed, and will probably come around soo, in some form or other. Here are some links:

ReleaseArticleVersion
Anti-vandalism_ideas
Reviewed article version
Article marker feature
Article validation

I hope this is implemented in a non-intrusive manner, kind of like the threshold system here on slashdot: if you browse at level -1, you get the whole thing, raw. Default for visitors should be level 1 or something, and there may be levels 2 and 3 or "excellent" articles.

Because anonymous users do contribute to Wikipedia.

Because many of the editors started anonymously, and liked it.

Because the idea of being able to click, click, correct, click and have your change there is immediately attractive, and signing up is not.

See http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Anonymous_user s_should_not_be_allowed_to_edit_articles#Why_regis tration_is_Good

and also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pum p_(perennial_proposals)#Abolish_anonymous_users

I'd also suggest that you join the talk and community pages on wikipedia to make this suggestion.

Require voice-verified[1] accounts before allowing live edit privileges.

I can think of a few people who would strongly object to that.

Disallow Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, GMail, and other known free email providers from email verification. You want to edit at Wikipedia? You need a real email address.

What if somebody has Internet access from Yahoo! (an SBC reseller) or MSN (msn.com is often lumped with hotmail.com)? Would you really want to make somebody pay $30 per year for a second address from, say, Spamcop.net just for the privilege of editing Wikipedia? What about somebody whose only Internet access is at a public library, given that most public libraries do not provide e-mail accounts for their patrons?

Also see simulated annealing.

Also see eventualism (eg. the wiki way) versus immediatism (wikis slowly shift to this over time, as they become more mature).

Also, I wouldn't use the word "crystallization", because Jimbo has very clearly said that no article will ever be considered to be completely solidified... Users with a certain number of edits will always be able to edit articles (except for short, temporary situations where edit wars or vandalism flares up).

Also see simulated annealing.

Also see eventualism (eg. the wiki way) versus immediatism (wikis slowly shift to this over time, as they become more mature).

Also, I wouldn't use the word "crystallization", because Jimbo has very clearly said that no article will ever be considered to be completely solidified... Users with a certain number of edits will always be able to edit articles (except for short, temporary situations where edit wars or vandalism flares up).

Maybe the desktop interface of the future should look like the NeXT UI. Although Gnome has "assimilated" many features from MacOS it would be nice to see also some features of the NeXT system in Gnome. These features include things like NeXT menu system and "spatial interface" (meaning that the windows and tear-off menus stay where the user puts them). Especially lack of the latter feature is a constant annoyance in almost all interfaces.

I think so called object oriented traditional desktop is the best one (at least the best one we can build within the next 10-20 years). The things I expect from desktop UI are simplicity, clean design and "things just work" attitude (no need to configure/adjust dozens of things to make the environment usable). The current Gnome gets many of these things (at least almost) right.

>Blu-ray Coming Out On Top?

Yes. It is called Cherenkov Radiation. You are advised NOT to jump into or swim in any pool where blue ray is coming out on the top!

See:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/68 /TrigaReactorCore.jpeg

Yeah, I'm not sure either. They're obviously hugely pro opensource, so why they've decided to make disparaging Wikipedia their mission I have no idea. Of course, much of the negative press about Wikipedia is true-- there are thousands of crappy articles there. But where the register horribly misses the point is that Wikipedia is a work in progress and nowhere claims to be authoritative and correct. The value in Wikipedia is in the process and the open license. If this current model fails, the information can still be freely used. That's what's so powerful.

Besides that I think people taking potshots at Wikipedia has just become the think to do. Wikipedia is more important than the Register and traffic stats prove it. I suppose that's not easy to take if you're a site with your income depending on drawing traffic. Wikipedia's traffic is rising at an enormous rate, and has actually made a leap since all this bad press has come out. http://noc.wikimedia.org/stats.php?period=monthly (and yes that M is million). But what everyone should reallize is that it's a work in progress, it's certainly not ready for brick and mortar publication, and as a whole, it's contributors are just fine with that for now. But trolls like the register will keep claiming as this article does that Wikipedia supporters think it is perfect in order to get people riled up.

It's the other way around. When an image is uploaded the Commons, you can instantly use it in all Wikimedia projects by specifying its filename. Anyone who is motivated to do so can watch the stream of newly uploaded images and add them to the right Wikipedia articles, Wikibooks pages, Wikinews stories, etc. This happens, which explains the redundancy you see -- the Wikimedia Commons is first of all a media archive for the Wikimedia projects. However, material is originally uploaded there, not the other way around.

With almost 350,000 files, it's shaping up to become the largest archive of free content photos, sounds and other media files (we're not too big on videos yet). I've personally uploaded reproductions of 10,000 public domain paintings that were donated by a German publisher, and I operate FlickrLickr, a collaborative project to find useful Creative Commons licensed photos on Flickr (we've uploaded over 4,000 photos already). So Wikimedia Commons very much has an identity of its own.

As for Wikibooks, I do not agree about its state. While most books are still incomplete, that doesn't make them useless. Take a look at the recently featured books of the month, such as Blender 3D: Noob to Pro. Sure, they can all still use work, but they're already useful resources for various topics. Importantly, this is the kind of Wikimedia project that is likely to see substantial outside grants in the future, because it ties into the whole "Let's help the developing world" vision that Wikimedia espouses (textbooks in developing countries are often more expensive than they are here!). It might be interesting to start paying people to edit and finalize some textbooks.

Wikinews has produced over 3,500 stories in the English version alone in a year, so while I agree that it's not an alternative to a newspaper (which primarily makes use of licensed newsfeeds), I think we've made some good progress, and I do recommend adding the English RSS feed to your favorite reader - it is often refreshingly different from other news sources in its priorities.

The projects you cite I would actually count as the most successful so far. Wikisource (which is mostly a Project Gutenberg clone) and Wikiquote (which seems very dubious in terms of being "free content") are of less interest; Wikispecies and Wiktionary are of little value without specialized software that adds structure to the data contained in these projects (incidentally, I am working on a project called "Wikidata" to change that).

It's the other way around. When an image is uploaded the Commons, you can instantly use it in all Wikimedia projects by specifying its filename. Anyone who is motivated to do so can watch the stream of newly uploaded images and add them to the right Wikipedia articles, Wikibooks pages, Wikinews stories, etc. This happens, which explains the redundancy you see -- the Wikimedia Commons is first of all a media archive for the Wikimedia projects. However, material is originally uploaded there, not the other way around.

With almost 350,000 files, it's shaping up to become the largest archive of free content photos, sounds and other media files (we're not too big on videos yet). I've personally uploaded reproductions of 10,000 public domain paintings that were donated by a German publisher, and I operate FlickrLickr, a collaborative project to find useful Creative Commons licensed photos on Flickr (we've uploaded over 4,000 photos already). So Wikimedia Commons very much has an identity of its own.

As for Wikibooks, I do not agree about its state. While most books are still incomplete, that doesn't make them useless. Take a look at the recently featured books of the month, such as Blender 3D: Noob to Pro. Sure, they can all still use work, but they're already useful resources for various topics. Importantly, this is the kind of Wikimedia project that is likely to see substantial outside grants in the future, because it ties into the whole "Let's help the developing world" vision that Wikimedia espouses (textbooks in developing countries are often more expensive than they are here!). It might be interesting to start paying people to edit and finalize some textbooks.

Wikinews has produced over 3,500 stories in the English version alone in a year, so while I agree that it's not an alternative to a newspaper (which primarily makes use of licensed newsfeeds), I think we've made some good progress, and I do recommend adding the English RSS feed to your favorite reader - it is often refreshingly different from other news sources in its priorities.

The projects you cite I would actually count as the most successful so far. Wikisource (which is mostly a Project Gutenberg clone) and Wikiquote (which seems very dubious in terms of being "free content") are of less interest; Wikispecies and Wiktionary are of little value without specialized software that adds structure to the data contained in these projects (incidentally, I am working on a project called "Wikidata" to change that).

It's the other way around. When an image is uploaded the Commons, you can instantly use it in all Wikimedia projects by specifying its filename. Anyone who is motivated to do so can watch the stream of newly uploaded images and add them to the right Wikipedia articles, Wikibooks pages, Wikinews stories, etc. This happens, which explains the redundancy you see -- the Wikimedia Commons is first of all a media archive for the Wikimedia projects. However, material is originally uploaded there, not the other way around.

With almost 350,000 files, it's shaping up to become the largest archive of free content photos, sounds and other media files (we're not too big on videos yet). I've personally uploaded reproductions of 10,000 public domain paintings that were donated by a German publisher, and I operate FlickrLickr, a collaborative project to find useful Creative Commons licensed photos on Flickr (we've uploaded over 4,000 photos already). So Wikimedia Commons very much has an identity of its own.

As for Wikibooks, I do not agree about its state. While most books are still incomplete, that doesn't make them useless. Take a look at the recently featured books of the month, such as Blender 3D: Noob to Pro. Sure, they can all still use work, but they're already useful resources for various topics. Importantly, this is the kind of Wikimedia project that is likely to see substantial outside grants in the future, because it ties into the whole "Let's help the developing world" vision that Wikimedia espouses (textbooks in developing countries are often more expensive than they are here!). It might be interesting to start paying people to edit and finalize some textbooks.

Wikinews has produced over 3,500 stories in the English version alone in a year, so while I agree that it's not an alternative to a newspaper (which primarily makes use of licensed newsfeeds), I think we've made some good progress, and I do recommend adding the English RSS feed to your favorite reader - it is often refreshingly different from other news sources in its priorities.

The projects you cite I would actually count as the most successful so far. Wikisource (which is mostly a Project Gutenberg clone) and Wikiquote (which seems very dubious in terms of being "free content") are of less interest; Wikispecies and Wiktionary are of little value without specialized software that adds structure to the data contained in these projects (incidentally, I am working on a project called "Wikidata" to change that).

Creating an account takes before creating an article adds about 5 seconds for a user. I can't see how this will help prevent this scenario again. However, I could imagine that this idea ("Best approach?") would help a lot.

Isn't it a bit ironic that Wikipedia (supposedly a reliable encyclopedia) has less advanced moderation than Slashdot (famously unreliable)? Perhaps it's time they got a bit more structure.

Actually, a new feature called article validation is about to go live on wikipedia. See the article from this week's signpost. The feature will hopefully help adress some of the issues being raised in this story.


I do also notice that Wikipedia has a lot of entries for stuff that might not otherwise be considered important enough to be in an encyclopedia - open source software that is not yet out of beta, cars in video games etc.

Yeah, so? Jimmy Wales:"Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing." ... That includes obscure topics like video games that you might not care about.

If it was discovered that one of Ford's vehicles had faulty seat belts, dealers would certainly not continue selling the affected vehicles before having the problem addressed. Why is it permissible for retailers to continue offering these tainted discs? It makes me wonder if retailers could also be held responsible to some degree in the upcommming lawsuits against Sony.

Always remember to look for this logo before purchasing audio compact discs. It ensures that the disc follows the Red Book standard which does not permit anything but music.

Can be found at Wikipedia.

There's an image of the Falcon 1 launch site. Let's hope this prospect is as promising as SpaceX's last endeavour.

Wouldn't it be a good idea to cooperate with Wikimedia Commons, a "repository of free content images, sound and other multimedia files"? The goals seem to overlap quite a lot...?

YHBT. YHL. HAND. ;o)
(lol)
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9e /DoNotFeedTroll.jpg

Database servers are not always CPU-intensive. They are usually disk-intensive. Consider the CPU use of the Wikipedia database servers. Each has 6 15,000 RPM SCSI drives and is running either dual Opterons or dual dual core Opterons. These servers need more disks, not more CPU. With 16GB of RAM in the biggest, they aren't short of that either. They do use MySQL so that might explain them being more CPU-efficient that you expect. (Alder has high system CPU use because of the kswapd bug in late FC2/early FC3. Hasn't been upgraded yet because there's been no great need to take it down to do it)

Here's to another 200 years of "well enough."

... insensitive clog!

I think you mean:
Since the industrial revolution the amount of atmospheric carbon dioxide has increased to about 1.5 times the level it was in the early 1800s.

The point the GP was making was that global warming is happening, and increased CO2 in the atmosphere is the likely cause, but the jury is still out on whether mankind has any part in that increase.

As someone else pointed out:

400 thousand year C02 cycle

And in this sort of trial the expert witnesses are more important than what the jury thinks.

It was a hard time, and every country involved in the war is responsable for lots of deads, but please consider this photography: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/f/ff/Big_ 3.jpg , and think what each of the people on it did to others and what each did for their country.

Stalin industrialized Russia and positionated it as a world leader, and the only nation that could actually compete with the USA for half a century.

PS3 has the same old controllers..? http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/d/de/Imag ePs305.jpg I think this is a bit of a change, even if it is not a final design.

-and there is photo evidence of the infraction online, than why can't that evidence be admissable?

Seems like the bottom line of expected profit will determine whether a bubble will burst. Besides, what more is an economic bubble than an overvalued profit making mechanism?
Profits don't seem to go too well with the open source definition shown here:
http://www.opensource.org/docs/definition.php
Do and should people profit from Open Source? If so, who? and how? Why does Open Source need investment? Why do people/companies need to profit from Open Source projects? Is it inherently wrong to look at profit as a desired end result for Open Source projects? If someone owns and patents an Open Source project or related project derived from Open Source, is it really Open Source?

Another interview with David Skok:
http://www.developer.com/java/other/article.php/62 6991
A bubble cartoon from 1875.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/ad/The_ Way_to_Grow_Poor%2C_The_Way_to_Grow_Rich_--_Currie r_%26_Ives_1875.jpg

http://www.wikipedia.org/ is not a comprehensive list of Wikipedias--only the larger ones.

The full list appears to be
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedias

where Setswana is given to be at
http://tn.wikipedia.org/

though it appears that Setswana speakers havnt been able to find it yet either.

Secondly - backward (e.g. "third world") countries do not, by and large, speak English. What language is Wikipedia largely written in...?

Most of it is not english, at the moment.

This is rediculous because, as you state, a non-existant soccer player gets ZERO questions

Actually, the non-existant soccer player got unanimously deleted as soon as it was discovered. I simply saved a copy because it was one of the more unique examples of vandalism I'd seen (most are almost exactly the same).

VfD's can be stressful, especially for new editors. It's hard to not take it as a personal afront.

What's the BBS, by the way?

Yes, there are a lot of gray areas in terms of what should be included in Wikipedia. Notability is especially contentious.

Then you have to also note the number of other articles that are totally pointless in terms of cultural relevance to anything - less than the BBS in question was.

Wikipedia is the perfect example of pitifully poor organizational structure marred by populist tendencies and groupthink.

Wikipedia is also different from things like Slashdot and such because the goal is to have one big, cohesive database of human knowledge. On Slashdot, comments are only read for a couple days. On Wikipedia, I might think something should be phrased a certain way, but someone else might think it would be better phrased another way, and we have to actually settle those disagreements.

The fact that everyone has to cooperate on Wikipedia a lot more means that things won't always go my way. And that's not something that will ever change.

See Article validation feature and En validation topics - which would put a "Rate this page" tab at the top of every page. The feature is currently waiting on a version of the code that won't overload the database if it's put into production ;-)

See also my plan for 1.0 (I dashed this off about a year ago and it's still the best working plan we have) and Category:Wikipedia 1.0 (a bunch of writings on producing a stable version).

See Article validation feature and En validation topics - which would put a "Rate this page" tab at the top of every page. The feature is currently waiting on a version of the code that won't overload the database if it's put into production ;-)

See also my plan for 1.0 (I dashed this off about a year ago and it's still the best working plan we have) and Category:Wikipedia 1.0 (a bunch of writings on producing a stable version).

How does Canadian look different than American?

Tuques

The author, Sterling D. Allan, has been spamming Wikimedia sites with links to his wiki and clone news sites.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk%3 ASpam_blacklist&diff=225451&oldid=224684

You're also right that 20 inserts per second is nothing compared to some application needs. Just happens to be what it is for this one. The selects aren't all extremely simple but none are extremely complex and we've tuned most of the problematic ones by now; most of the remaining slow ones were improved by a schema change in the most recent MediaWiki software release. For us, they are denial of service attack vulnerability, so we have to be careful with anything which is really slow.

5.0 has a new greedy query optmiser, limits on search depth and the ability to use more than one index per table alias in a query, so it's a major step forward and should help the 20 table cases quite a bit. But probablly still needs work in that area.

The total data set is around half a terrabyte to a terrabyte. Pretty small compared to serious warehousing and some serious corporate or data collection applications. Pretty big compared to most other things, but nowhere near MySQL's limits.

We take a lot of load off the database servers with caching of various sorts. Not that it would be a problem to add more databse servers to scale read rates. Writes are tougher. Doable, of course but not necessary for us yet. We happen to have a data set which can be partitioned at the application level moderately well, so that offers a convenient way to deal with write load without getting too fancy. We're just starting to do that now, since it's more cost-effective than not doing it. But it's certainly the case that not all applications are so easy to partition at the application level.

Yes, it could be a problem. I have ~7000 edits (which puts me roughly in the top 500 editos), many of which are enourmous, spread over 2400 different articles. http://kohl.wikimedia.org/~kate/cgi-bin/count_edit s?user=marudubshinki&dbname=enwiki

And: "Not to spoil your fun, but you have already licensed all your edits under the GFDL, and can't retract them as such."

Oh noes! Since you obviously are a lawyer with mad l33t legal skillz, you better go edit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_domain#Revocab ility_where_no_consideration so it is right. But according to this gullible editor, this means I/other contributors can legally withdraw our contributions. Which would make the subsequent editions of the articles with edits so retracted derivative works- of a nonlicensed work. In other words, a copyright violation. This could be a problem.

--maru dubshinki
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Marudubshinki

Here's a deal of unknown value (for answers.com it obviously has value, market cap went up $8m on annoucement).

Folks like google offer to host, but don't seem to be taken up on the offer:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Google_hosting

Does the board just want more $$ to play with (in other words, hosting doesn't give them the money they want to have the pleasure of spending)?

This comment is simply untrue. Both Google and Yahoo have offered to host Wikipedia content without requiring advertising. Also, your claim that Jimmy Wales pays for Wikipedia hosting is untrue too. In the latest fundraising drive, over $200,000 was raised. This is how they pay for hosting.

It looks like that'l probably happen in some way or other. The problem is how to decide what's stable or factual in an open and wikiesque way.

There have been a couple of proposals:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Article_validation_ proposals

Here's one I came up with myself. It's not hard, but the answer is surprising.

What is the angle at the point of the "wide" version of the seven pointed star? This is the figure you would create if you start with a circle and draw 7 equally spaced dots, then connect every dot to the 2nd one following. Express the answer in degrees as a mixed fraction (e.g. 23 1/3 degrees).

The number seven is considered lucky, and you might find the answer surprisingly lucky!

Genetically modified foods: traditional cross-breeding/cross-pollinization theory applied with more advanced tools on a wider scope.

Bullshit. No amount of cross-breeding is going to get a plant to express animal genes. So get your dick out of that pumpkin.

As a non-scientist, the images I was exposed to growing up were always spheres orbiting spheres, which inevitably led to the 'realization' of everyone I knew (including myself) at some point in their life that atoms were just like the solar system, and what if we are in just a big atom, and atoms really are just little solar systems...? This image, showing the electron 'cloud' around a hydrogen nucleus, is very enlightening for someone who is terrible at math. Totally destroys the 'recursing solar system' theory ;)

Which is exactly what the watchlist and three-revert rule are for. With the watchlist, every edit can be reviewed by many previous editors. Everyone acts like adults, but if legitimate conflicts come up, then they discuss it on the Talk page. If they still can't resolve the problem, they can escalate the discussion to higher arbitration.

(Dislaimer - I'm a wikipedia administrator, arbitrator, and the "featured article director" -- I choose the featured articles you see on the main page every day)

Last week I was a guest speaker for a group of education graduate students about Wikipedia (the course was on technology use in education; wikipedia was part of the curriculum). Before the lecture, sent them a few items I thought they should read - objective studies of Wikipedia's accuracy done by impartial, outside organization. Here's what I sent them:

----------
1) "A group of students in the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois has published a paper entitled "Information Quality Discussions in Wikipedia" (PDF format). The focus of the paper was on assessing the IQ of Wikipedia featured articles -- in this case, IQ stands for "information quality" -- when compared to other samples from the project, including featured article removal candidates, pages marked as NPOV disputes, and a selection of random pages. According to the paper, the study showed how seriously the Wikipedia project views issues of article quality. The authors concluded that as a quality standard, the featured article process "is not ideal, but it does seem relatively rigorous." They also noted that the process is not as resource-intensive as other possibilities, such as blind judging." - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_S ignpost/2005-08-01/Featured_content
PDF of research paper can be found at: http://www.isrl.uiuc.edu/~stvilia/papers/qualWiki. pdf

2) An article comparing the WP to Brockhaus and Encarta has appeared in issue 21/04 of C't, a major German computer engineering magazine. It is titled /Lexika: Wikipedia gegen Brockhaus und Encarta/, starting on p. 132 - http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_vs_Brockh aus_and_Encarta
Full survey results can be found at: http://mail.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/20 04-October/035339.html

3) "As publicly editable sites, Wikis are vulnerable to vandalism. We've examined many pages on Wikipedia that treat controversial topics, and have discovered that most have, in fact, been vandalized at some point in their history. But we've also found that vandalism is usually repaired extremely quickly--so quickly that most users will never see its effects." - IBM study of Wikipedia - http://researchweb.watson.ibm.com/history/results. htm

4) Computer Science professor (and minor geek rockstar) Ed Felton (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Felten) posted in his blog about a
small-scale survey he did of Wikipedia: http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/?p=674
-----------------

As far as my personal interactions - as featured article director, I can say first-hand that we've been hitting really hard on the need to have inline cited sources in the article text. It's been an explicit requirement for featured articles for some time now (9-12 months or so). In many ways, this makes our content much more trustworhty than most other information sources.

Furthermore, purely from personal experience, I can say there's something to be said for the expert-hobbyist. For example, the "best" writer on wikipedia (in terms of number of featured articles written) is a 17 year old from New Jersey who writes long, thorough, well referenced, accurate articles on, erm, British and the Bri

(Dislaimer - I'm a wikipedia administrator, arbitrator, and the "featured article director" -- I choose the featured articles you see on the main page every day)

Last week I was a guest speaker for a group of education graduate students about Wikipedia (the course was on technology use in education; wikipedia was part of the curriculum). Before the lecture, sent them a few items I thought they should read - objective studies of Wikipedia's accuracy done by impartial, outside organization. Here's what I sent them:

----------
1) "A group of students in the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois has published a paper entitled "Information Quality Discussions in Wikipedia" (PDF format). The focus of the paper was on assessing the IQ of Wikipedia featured articles -- in this case, IQ stands for "information quality" -- when compared to other samples from the project, including featured article removal candidates, pages marked as NPOV disputes, and a selection of random pages. According to the paper, the study showed how seriously the Wikipedia project views issues of article quality. The authors concluded that as a quality standard, the featured article process "is not ideal, but it does seem relatively rigorous." They also noted that the process is not as resource-intensive as other possibilities, such as blind judging." - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_S ignpost/2005-08-01/Featured_content
PDF of research paper can be found at: http://www.isrl.uiuc.edu/~stvilia/papers/qualWiki. pdf

2) An article comparing the WP to Brockhaus and Encarta has appeared in issue 21/04 of C't, a major German computer engineering magazine. It is titled /Lexika: Wikipedia gegen Brockhaus und Encarta/, starting on p. 132 - http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_vs_Brockh aus_and_Encarta
Full survey results can be found at: http://mail.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/20 04-October/035339.html

3) "As publicly editable sites, Wikis are vulnerable to vandalism. We've examined many pages on Wikipedia that treat controversial topics, and have discovered that most have, in fact, been vandalized at some point in their history. But we've also found that vandalism is usually repaired extremely quickly--so quickly that most users will never see its effects." - IBM study of Wikipedia - http://researchweb.watson.ibm.com/history/results. htm

4) Computer Science professor (and minor geek rockstar) Ed Felton (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Felten) posted in his blog about a
small-scale survey he did of Wikipedia: http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/?p=674
-----------------

As far as my personal interactions - as featured article director, I can say first-hand that we've been hitting really hard on the need to have inline cited sources in the article text. It's been an explicit requirement for featured articles for some time now (9-12 months or so). In many ways, this makes our content much more trustworhty than most other information sources.

Furthermore, purely from personal experience, I can say there's something to be said for the expert-hobbyist. For example, the "best" writer on wikipedia (in terms of number of featured articles written) is a 17 year old from New Jersey who writes long, thorough, well referenced, accurate articles on, erm, British and the Bri

I'm probably in the minority, being a librarian a with a good opinion of Wikipedia. Many (mostly older) librarians, for example, relish their roles as gatekeepers to information. I suppose it comes from the old warden-style approach to protecting books, or some sort of warped view of taking "information is power" as a need to hoard and protect its distribution.

There is this sometimes misguided need to teach "information literacy," with exaggerated assumptions about "kids believing everything they read online." Recent library conferences have covered this alongside how students learn and use technology -- often with the same sort of bemused condescension that 19th century anthropologists exhibited toward alien cultures. It's unnerving. But teaching others to evaluate information themselves, rather than thinking it's our job to do it for them, is on the right track. History as shown a path towards direct and open access to information, and I see wiki publishing as a direct extension of this trend.

Librarians, in general, seem stuck on the "omg you can vandalize Wikipedia so it's worthless" argument. Jimbo even got asked, at the last ALA conference, essentially, "What's to stop me from distrupting information in Wikipedia?," by a librarian. And this is the profession so disturbed by book bannings? I just don't see libraries staying relevant if we don't acknowledge the value of blogs, wikis, and other new information formats (and we're not quite there yet).

Of course, those story links are nitpicks themselves. Library stuff (if it exists on your topic) is of better quality than what you'll find via Google. As for Wikipedia, content zealots -- both snobs and censors -- threaten the open encyclopedia's mission at least as much as the cranks. But there's no need to exaggerate the problems of Wikipedia. Sure, it can get messy, but the benefits far outweigh the costs.

As another frontiersman was warned, "If you can't take a little bloody nose, maybe you ought to go back home and crawl under your bed. It's not safe out here. It's wondrous, with treasures to satiate desires both subtle and gross. But it's not for the timid."

So anyway, all of these comments are a bit of a hyperbolism. As a piece on peak libraries I started shows (oh yeah, that's a library science Wiki btw), I'm something of a provocateur at times. It's just that, after spending my early career trying to educate everyone that librarians are "with it", I've discovered that there's just as much of a need to convince librarians to get with the times.