Slashdot Mirror
Wikipedia Founder Sees Serious Quality Problems
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.'"
Too true. Only today I fixed an article that described "artex" as a type of wallpaper (it isn't, it's a fluid that sticks to walls or ceilings and dries into a solid surface, similar to plaster but much more versatile). The point is, it's an utterly dull subject. So nobody's bothered correcting the blatant error that a minute's research with google would tell you.
Jimbo started by trying paid editors; it was called Nupedia. After three years and... well, tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, I guess, they had a whole 24 articles!
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
Write a full encyclopedia from scratch in 3 years? Not on your life.
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.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
Kind of. You can flag articles up as to be deleted because it's incorrect or wrong or something like that. There's then a brief debate on what to do with it, which could end with it being updated, merged with something else, renamed, deleted or a number of things. There's an article somewhere on how to go about it and what sort of things you can flag up. Users then discuss it and a decision's made.
Wikipedia:Policies_and_guidelines
Wikipedia:Deletion_policy
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).