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.'"
I'm seeing more and more people use it as their de facto source for information.
Cake or Death? Cake Please!
What other encyclopedia chronicles the history of slashdot?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slashdot_history
No Sigs!
It's still one of the best destinations and tools on the Net. Everytime I show it to someone who has never seen it, they're blown away.
Bark less. Wag more.
It never will. And that's OK.
Wikipedia can be valuable even in mediocrity. I've used it as a "jumping off" point for knowledge about things that aren't covered in more traditional sources. Want to know the origins of "all your base are belong to us"? Wikipedia is great for that sort of trivia. Want an in-depth explanation of Relativity? You probably don't want to necessarily trust Wikipedia for the last word on it, but you might be able to find a few pointers to some good books.
Wikipedia is what it is. As long as everyone understands what it is, it'll do fine.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Step 2: Do whatever the hell you want to the whole place
True, except for the Step 1 part.
It seems like this is sort of a trend. I mean, didn't vandalism and trolling force the introduction of the moderation system here? And didn't that happen nearly everywhere on the web as discussion boards increased in size? Anyone see a trend? It seems that once it goes from a clubhouse to a gym, you start to get bad apples.
Another poster suggested a leveling system, and I agree. I think that wikipedia should establish a system whereby articles are ranked, i.e. culture - specialized - mainstream or something. That way, as you start out, you can work on culture articles, then work your way up. Or maybe base it on page views and specialization. People who just joined can make new articles (to fill the missing ones) or can work on general articles that are rarely viewed, then work their way up.
Wikipedia is an excellent online source of information. But because of its name, critics hold Wikipedia to the same standard as an encyclopedia. I certainly don't think it's the same thing as an encyclopedia, a wiki's open and collaborative nature is fundamentally different from the construct of an encyclopedia. It's not better or worse, it's just a different thing.
...write the encyclopedias that they then use to study with?
Me neither.
Easy as that.
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
The trouble is that the whacko editors have far more free time on their hands than the sensible ones, and can just keep hammering away at an article until their POV, silly as it may be, is presented on a level with a more reasoned viewpoint.
And the brethren went away edified.
By it's nature, Wikipedia is no good for academic research or as the final authority on anything. That said, if I want an overview of what something is all about, and the information doesn't have to be 100% accurate, then Wikipedia is the way to go.
Think about the information you would get by just Googling something. You're just as likely, probably more likely, to come up with garbage information. The difference at Wikipedia is that it's been reviewed by many eyes, and it's not under the sole control of some random dude with who has a web page.
Users should, of course, be aware of the potential for bad information. In fact, I'd recommend to any user who hasn't yet, you should read their What Wikipedia Is Not page.
Dissatisfaction with the quality of an article in Wikipedia is not a fatal flaw... it's the engine that makes Wikipedia work. If a user needs information on a topic, and the information is incorrect or incomplete or poorly presented, the user will, in some cases, just go out and research what they need to know using other sources...
Wikipedia does not hold to the standards of print references because it's not finished. It's a work constantly in progress, and you get to see the work in progress as well as a finished product.
Bearing that in mind, Wikipedia must not be judged by its worst entries, as those entries will be brought up to par eventually... in a few hours or a few years. Bad entries will be made into good entries as the right editor for the job steps forward.
This requires information filtering abilities on the part of the reader, and these abilities have too long been dormant in most readers... in a polished and professional publication, mistakes aren't acknowleged as such. There's even a sentiment that if it's in print, it's an absolute irrefutable fact, rather than the best information available to the publisher.
In Wikipedia, the reader knows that what they are reading is a collection of the best information available to the writers... and they can modify it if they see a mistake, or have more to add to the topic. That sort of dynamic interaction with the source material is very, very powerful, and can lead to a depth impossible in a regular encyclopedia on obscure topics... everything from Hallucigenia to Indian Clubs. Try getting that info out of your Brittanica.
Wikipedia is great as a point of departure for further study. It will, at the very least, provide the reader with a notion of what the scope and nature of the subject is, and the incompleteness and error of the artivle will be corrected as people who know what they're talking about step forward over time.
SoupIsGood Food
A case in point is the Wikipedia page on the village of Mellor, a small village that has languished on the edge of obscurity for 14,000 years and I'd swear it still had some of its original inhabitants walking around. The odds of there being more than two or three on Slashdot who have ever been there is virtually nil.
Because of the limited editing it gets, the accuracy is probably higher than normal. HOWEVER, any inaccuracy probably lasts longer than normal, for the same reason.
Pages that get edited frequently probably lose errors a lot faster, but gain new ones equally fast. In that sense, it is no different from computer programming, where rapid development cycles create as many (or more) bugs than they fix - although, they're usually different bugs the next time round.
I think Wikipedia would benefit from some sort of development cycle, where an "in progress" copy of the article is maintained, then occasionally snapshotted to create the "official" copy. For "non real-time" articles, I would suggest that pages not significantly edited for, say, 36 or 72 hours be treated as a "final revision". (A minor alteration would be the adding/removing of symbols such as commas and apostrophes.)
This would give you the "anyone can edit" freewheeling anarchy of the current system, the live, raw feel that some apparently crave, and yet also provide a version that has some semblance of consent behind it, something that maybe isn't perfect but is good enough for now. It's not exactly QA, in the usual sense, but it's still QA, in that you've got to not find any showstoppers within some deadline.
A "traditional"(!) wikipedia with deliberately de-synchronised mainstream version would probably not be the best solution, but I honestly can't think of a better one while keeping the current approach.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Insightful, but extremely Pessimistic
Why do you even bother posting that in the first place? Why go through the trouble of trying to convince the rest of us to consider your view?
People seek to educate and learn because it makes us feel good. If knowledge were merely a matter of cost/benefit, it wouldn't happen.
And stop it with the melodramatic persecution complex.
Every single revision is tracked by IP address and (if logged in) account name. It takes two clicks to see all of the editing that any person, logged in or not, has done on the entire site and ban them if necessary.
Ok, so we have The Register with an article "Wikipedia founder admits to serious quality problems". The article consists mostly of unsubstantiated Wikipedia bashing. There is only one sentence which discusses anything the Wikipedia founder actually said -- and that is only in reference to two specific articles, not the project as a whole. Besides, it was a comment on a Wikipedia mailing list.
Slashdot, of course, turns the headline into "Wikipedia founder sees serious quality problems", as if Zonk didn't RTFA. There's a constant dialogue about where Wikipedia is good and where it is bad on Wikipedia mailing lists. Nothing has changed.
The Register's real point in the article is a propaganda one: the concept that "an encyclopedia is only as good as its worst article". Puh-leeze. That's an insult to the intelligence of readers, as if we can't tell when we are reading gold and when we are reading crap. Then again, maybe that's a problem for regular readers of The Register.
I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
Hey, it's not like "paper" encyclopedias don't have problems. Just open up encyclopedias printed in the 60's-70's in the US and in USSR and read a few chapters on socialism and communism. :-)
Bzzt!
Wikipedia usually doesn't work on popular or controversial articles. Ever heard of edit wars? Those controversies don't go away just because the article remains stable for a week or so. Instead, the losers in an edit war continue to try and white ant the article and you end up with a hollow shell of an article.
Given that your comment is modded informative I'll assume you aren't being sarcastic. But, come on, Wikipedia works because you can work out your differences on the question of which column to put a particular effect of marijuana in? That is about as useful as the movement of a comma in the article.
Care to talk about something controversial? What about the possibility that there are long term problems with mental health? The main article it links to Health issues and the effects of cannibis seems a reasonable article on a quick scan. But the summary in this article is "The findings of earlier studies purporting to demonstrate the effects of the drug are unreliable, as the studies were flawed, with strong bias and poor methodology." This comment has absolutely no references other than a link to 'Junk Science'. Furthermore, it does not reflect the contents of the main article at all. The main article states "There has not currently been enough scientific study of the drug's effects to come to a definite conclusion." (with respect to mental health effects) - it does not state that all the research pointing to negative effects was junk science. Thus, the summary is not a useful statement for a reference work - it is a point of view. Care to try and fix that one and put something reliable in rather than a point of view?
And behind the scenes are a half million desperate nerds trying to be right about something, all while defending this exercise in social onanism as a "community" effort to provide a free educational resource to people.
Much as I'd like you to simply be a troll, there's a lot of truth in that. I've recently started contributing to Wikipedia myself, and I seriously question my motivations; am I just indulging my anal-retentive geek (or rather less flatteringly, nerd) nature when contributing information about frankly unimportant stuff?
And believe me, I don't think I'm the worst case by a very long shot. There are COUNTLESS contributors out there seemingly editing stuff, and adding stuff or making changes in for ego's sake. I don't want to go on about this, but the vandals aren't the problem. They're easily reverted and usually transparent. The problem is the anal-retentive-and-don't-get-it-or-don't-care fact-adders who will (for example), clutter up abbreviation disambiguation pages (such as 'MC' or whatever) with very poor entries. These are at best obscure uses of 'MC', where those using such an abbrevation would know what it means anyway. At worst, they simply take anything they can think of that consists of an 'M'-word then 'C'-word, and slap it in, even if it's an obscure subject and no-one actually uses that abbreviation.
Just an example, but it's dross. And it has to be said that if there is any particular tendency in such addition of inconsequential garbage, it's most noticeable in the geek/nerd manga/sci-fi/computer-gaming subject areas.
They don't get that slapping down a load of facts *isn't* the same as writing a good article; I'm not sure that they care, they're simply writing for the sake of it- if it's about anything, it's about their pet interest. It's this stuff that justifies (in part at least) the "social onanism" tag given in the parent post.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
Jimmy Wales runs Wikipedia from the profits that come from Bomis and from donations. Bomis.com is a porn directory network with an innocent-looking front end, and a huge number of ads and paid links.
Wikipedia is straining under the load from a massive increase in traffic. This is due to the buzz from the media, as well as impressive rankings in Yahoo and Google.
Most of the insider administrators are anonymous, and they can use their editing privileges to stomp on any initiatives from the unwashed masses that they find objectionable. The word "cult" comes to mind. Recently there is a move on to require footnote citations for most assertions, in order to make the articles appear neutral. However, in my experience last week with Jimmy and one of his top anonymous admins, SlimVirgin, it seems to me that if the citation itself looks like an opposing opinion, then that's good enough. No one over there actually reads the stuff they cite -- no time for that.
The only defense the unannointed have is to put together their own list of CGI proxies, and give them a hard time for a couple of days. But the admins have many more "rollback" weapons to make it easy to "revert" any changes, which makes this too much trouble for any single unprivileged person.
I predict that before Wikipedia breaks under the traffic load, Jimmy will start running AdSense or Yahoo ads. At that point a lot of editors will probably leave, since their work is volunteer and they might now see Wikipedia as something quite different. Look at what the Google tie-in did for Mozilla Foundation, for example. Potentially millions per year would be generated by ads on Wikipedia.
Then he'll bank most of the money, buy some more bandwidth to keep it going as long as he can, but ultimately let it run down. I don't for a minute believe that Jimmy is motivated by this:
"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." -Jimmy Wales, July 2004
In fact, throughout all my years of education, I can never remember a single instance in which it would have been acceptable to cite, for example, the Encyclopedia Britannica as a reference source.
Anyone who is citing Wikipedia as a source is a fool -- not for citing Wikipedia instead of a more expensive bound volume, but for citing an encyclopedia at all.
To say that Wikipedia is not suitable for citation in a formal argument or research paper is not really a criticism of its quality... that's just something that's common to anything of the "-pedia" persuasion.
I will no longer read the register. I have been too annoyed by 'articles' I read in the register that I found quite bitchy and immature. Yes, I'm annoyed when in dispute with someone else they try to prove their point by linking to wikipedia, which I consider to be of little value as a proof, BUT, it's nonetheless useful, and here's why - wikipedia, and I have RTFA on the register and here's where I disagree, does NOT need to replace the web. It does NOT need to be authoritative and conclusive; it only needs to be a *starting point* to introduce a topic and its range to someone. Accuracy, as far as I'm concerned, is a far lesser concern. In real life an encyclopedia would be the first thing you read when you research something, NOT the last! It should be no different for wikipedia.
Who the hell uses encyclopedia brittanica or any other encyclopedia for mission critical anything. You use it for what are the names of the beatles or the seven dwarves or where is liberia. Ususally it is pretty on for such things. If you need to be sure you can then multiply reference your results somewhere else to verify your source. LIKE YOU SHOULD if it is important. This is acutally a topic my girlfriend and I got into a fight about. Having never looked at it she stated that it couldn't be usefull because it wasn't peer reviewed. Well Brittanica isn't peer reviewed like a journal either but that's irrelevant. I understand the issues and value of style, professionalism and accountablility that you get in a traditional encyclopedia. Still accesibility and speed are not irrelevant. Multiple "voices" and viewpoints are a definite advantage over traditional encyclopedias. Also if you are reasonably sophisticated reading the editing arguements on highly subjective topics can be very enlightening more so than the "facts" in the article. Sure rely on it as a only source at your own risk but used intelligently with an awareness of it's pitfalls it is a very useful and valuable resource. It is neither as great as it's best article or as bad as it's worst. Someone else did a comparison recently and on three out four topics it had more information, was more up to date and accurate than the traditional encyclopedia on the fourth in the reviewers opinion was awful. I can live with that.
And who exactly would be doing this fact checking?
Demonstrating one amazing advantage for wikipedia. The ability to link directly to "expert" resources.
That plus the fact that one can see how entires change over time. Giving insight into controversial aspects and changing views over time that are completely missing in a normal encyclopedia.
Both are good starting points, the wikipedia has the advantage in getting the reader past the starting point to more definitive/authoritative information IMO.
Wikipedia works best for geeky subjects. Take a look at the articles (well, more like article hierarchies) for Star Trek and World of Warcraft - you won't find a more thorough or more carefully woven source of information anywhere else.
Wikipedia will never replace Britannica or Encarta. That's not what it's good at. Its strength is in compiling information from hundreds of opinions to present a (mostly) cohesive article. If the type of information it presents is "trivia" to you, then use a different encyclopedia.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized!
See, whereas the GP provided an example which you acknowledge, you provide no examples and hope we'll also acknowledge. Do you see where that goes wrong?
Lets test this theory out and take a look at the wikipedia entry for a British band that was popular in the early 80's, Theatre of Hate.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theatre_of_Hate
Led by singer/songwriter Kirk Brandon, the original group also consisted of: guitarist Simon Werner, bassist Jonathan Werner and drummer Jim Walker.
Incorrect, Simon and Jonathan were in a previous band with Kirk Brandon, The Pack.
Theatre of Hate garnered much early attention as a live act and in 1981 made their debut with the concert LP "He Who Dares Wins Live at the Warehouse Leeds".
Incorrect, the album was "He Who Dares Wins Live in Berlin".
Shortly after the album's release however, Brandon fired the remainder of the band an assembled a new line-up consisting of: guitarist Billy Duffy, bassist Stan Stammers, saxophonist John Lennard and drummer Nigel Preston (who was soon after replaced by Luke Rendle).
Incorrect. Stammers, Lennard, and Rendle were already in the band. Rendle was fired and replaced with Preston.
Another concert recording, "Live at the Lyceum", followed in 1982 before Theatre of Hate entered the studio with producer Mick Jones of the Clash to record their first non-live album debut, "Westworld", which went on to reach the UK Top 20. The album also spawned the Top 40 single "Do You Believe in the Westworld?".
The only correct sentences, although Westworld made the top 10.
In late 1982, Theatre of Hate released another live album entitled "He Who Dares Wins: Live in Berlin."
Incorrect, see the above correction.
In early 1983 the Theatre of Hate disbanded. Brandon went on to front Spear of Destiny and guitarist Billy Duffy formed the group Southern Death Cult, which would later become enormously successful after shortening their name to The Cult.
Incorrect, Billy Duffy joined The Death Cult, along with Ian Astbury, the singer for disbanded Southern Death Cult.
So, out of 7 sentences, only 2 were correct. Why was it again that I should trust Wikipedia as a source of information?
Just because the website exists, doesn't mean that I am obligated to correct misinformation.
The time to make a small, fine-grained update to a Wikipedia entry is short compared to the time it would take for someone to actually fact check it. Furthermore, the number of individuals making these changes would far exceed the number of people designated as fact-checkers who could promote an entry to the fact-checked area. Those to inherent ratios likely make this process unviable.
Also, how are you going to fact check? Accessing a primary source is often difficult and time-consuming. Cross-checking multiple secondary sources is not that much easier. Of course, you could always go to one of the encyclopedia vendors, but is that what we want?
Take this entry, for example. Is a fact-checker going to watch each of the referenced episodes to fact-check each word?
One of the biggest problems with Wikipedia is that they give special preferences to anonymous vandals who use America Online to carry out their misdeeds. The Wikipedia block user interface specifically suggests to "keep blocks in these ranges to 15 minutes or less" when blocking a vandal within AOL's IP range. No other ISP in the world receives this sort of favoritism from Wikipedia; repeat agitators from all other internet service providers are blocked for hours, weeks, days, months, and, if necessary, indefinitely.
Wikipedia works best for geeky subjects.
Yes, Wikipedia reflects the interests of its readership, that's why it needs to attract people from different backgrounds, and I think that this is slowly happening, that's why the quality is improving en other areas.
I've heard people say, "Wikipedia is like a public toilet; when you need, you're glad it's there, but you never know who was there before you".
I've been editing Wikipedia for about a year now, and while I find some of the utopian aspects (i.e. allowing anybody, even anonymous users, to edit) to be intellectually appealing, the result is, without a doubt, mostly crap. Instead of spending my time improving quality, I spend my time fighting blatant vandals, well-intentioned idiots, and clueless newbies. And what time is left over gets eaten up in silly beaurocracy.
Like many /.'ers, I do software development for a living. No software development project (or any big project, be it buiding a space ship or digging ditches) would survive with the attitude that anybody can do anything they want. People need to both be educated as to the right way to do things and prove themselves trustworthy.
Wikipedia is a great resource. I turn to it often to get background, or find out interesting facts about almost anything. But I wouldn't trust it for anything important.
Uh, if it was just some nobody who rolled back the changes why don't you just reinstate them?
Why on earth would you blame Wikipedia?
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Last year, I tried to put in some information about John Kerry - negative information. Whoever was god of that page took it back out with the comments that it had no references and was probably nonsense, also stating that the book reference I did give probably didn't exist (of course, a few seconds spent at Amazon would have allowed that to be checked).
Being too busy to meet an imposible standard of references to satisfy a clearly biased wikipedia crowd, I just gave up. I knew that the internet world was largely anti-Bush, so it didn't surprise me that this happened and would continue to happen.
I believe that partisans can easily skew Wikipedia, and of course are more likely to do so on controversial subjects.
To partisans, Wikipedia can be a very good propaganda tool, since it appears on the surface to be authoritative. On the other hand, for non-controversial issues, it is very useful.
The only good weather is bad weather.
Easter, where far more verbiage than otherwise necessary has been introduced to oppose the views of a tiny minority of ultra-fundamentalists. This is a good example of another problem: much of the writing is substandard, and new substandard text is added faster than the existing work can be corrected.
Nikolai Velimirovi, which has been slapped with an NPOV tag because it dares to suggest that a speech made from a window at Dachau while an inmate there just maybe does not express his honest personal opinion.
Religion, and indeed any religious topic at all, is a virtual battlefield. It's almost impossible to get a True Believer who is not naturally introspective to realize that his beliefs are not universally accepted and can't be described as objective fact.
These are just some examples I could put my hands on quickly. I run across others very often.
And the brethren went away edified.
A rating system is interesting, but it could descend into a clone of the really faulty and biased /. mod system if they didn't design it properly.
With open moderation it would be too easy for a vocal group to rig the results so their views were pushed and otherwise valid results were trivialised.
Take for example any Creation vs Evolution page! Or maybe a politically motivated page?
I think that moderation WITHIN a closed membership would probably work though.
Orationem pulchram non habens, scribo ista linea in lingua Latina
I'm not flaming here - but I don't think it's that big of a deal if an article on Bill Gates or Jane Fonda is inaccurate. I'll bet the one on Evolution isn't too great, either - but this is what Wikipedia is about. Let me explain:
To hear EB talk about it, you would think that the only good encyclopedia entry on Bill Gates would include factual information about his birth, life, finances, etc. That's fine if you are writing a history book for schoolchildren, but what Wikipedia does is actually captures the cultural moment around an issue - the fact that Bill Gates' article is inaccurate is because there is so much contention surrounding him.
To my eyes, Britannica is enforcing a cultural imperialism that the only right information is Politically Correct whitewashed facts. While that certainly is important, for instance, if you are really looking for the best definition of "evolution" or an impartial recounting of facts about Jane Fonda, that's not what Wikipedia does.
It captures the fullest dimension of the issues - the facts (as they are percieved) and all the culturally significant alternate views as well. Imagine what value future anthropologists might glean from a snapshot of Wikipedia - they wouldn't care who Bill Gates was in any kind of factual way - they would want to see what the world thought of him. Or the WTO, the World Bank, Greenpeace - you get the idea.
Wikipedia has quality issues?
I don't believe it. Next thing you'll be telling me that there's pornography on the internet.
OK, some have argued well that an Encyclopedia is really not a valid source of information for writing an article worth publishing. So, in that sense, both Wikipedia and other Encyclopedias (Britannica, etc.) offer starting points to point you in the direction of other more relevant sources of information.
Experts, including dead-tree encyclopedia authors, are definitely biased despite their voluminous amount of knowledge. They will *refuse* to look into some areas of study any further because they don't want to do so. The "peer reviews" may simply be a group of people patting each other on the back and not seriously attempting to counter the bias. The advantage of Wikipedia is not that it is unbiased, but that, given some time and effort, you can use the diff tool to find out what else each other has written and determine the bias. In other words, authors can't necessarily hide behind their biases.
Wikipedia of course has its stronger areas and weaker areas, but it is one resource among many that can be useful when doing research. As some have mentioned, it is kind of like running a Google search on something.
This sig donated to Pater. Long live
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Demonstrably false? Did you demonstrate that it was false then?
The same thing happened to me last week. A technical article incorrectly stated that something was introduced in a particular version. I corrected the version. Then somebody "corrected" it back. Instead of complaining about it on Slashdot, I fixed the article again and included an authoritative link on the discussion page.
The end result is that, although I had to correct the article twice, that article is now both correct and corroberated, thus raising the quality overall.
If you can demonstrate that something is false, then do so. But if you can't, then why should Wikipedia trust you over another person?
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
Check your ego at the door. Wikipedia, like the society around you, suffers from politics, the process of decision making that tries to exclude violence.
That said, perhaps what everyone's bitching at here is that for all the mostly technical progress, we seem to be right where our prehistoric ancestors were in terms of group concensus. A good alien invasion would probably resolve that in a jiffy, but lacking that we seem stuck.
This is a really terrific idea, as it allows for the wiki ideal to continue, while at the same time reducing the possibility of defacement, errors slipping in.
You could allow articles to move from unstable to stable, allowing stuff to move when it has been moderated by two people with the wikipedia equivilent of good karma (100 accepted changes, or something like that). You could even be relatively smart about this, pushing moderation of pages in the physics area to people who edited other physics pages. (Although never to people who have produced significant edits on the same page, as this could perpetuate the problem of new information not been reflected in pages.)
--- My dad's political betting
Why does every project like this have to be "the next big thing". Why do we have to compare to the E. Britanica and rabidly defend Wikipedia with ever more elaborate answers? Wikipedia is an interesting project, and extremely useful as a starting point for research. That's good enough for me - leave the "Wiki-religion" outside.
Makes it possible to cite a stable version of a wikipedia page in an academic work without it being completely screwed up at a later date. (They should be archived quarterly/yearly/whatever).
You can do this anyway. You click 'history', you click the most recent version, and it gives you a capture of the page at time of reading.
Yes, it's two clicks rather than one; but in the same way as citing a normal web page runs the risk of having that page change later. Google's cache is similar to this system but will be lost the next time the crawler crosses the page; in this way citing Wikipedia is more reliable than citing the web.
In response to your last point, it is the fault of the 'hapless individual' if they rely dogmatically on an editable webpage; more so since it's so easy to cross-check facts on the web once you know what they are. If you search for a fact from wikipedia, it should - other than in the most obscure areas - be findable on the web, as simply as googling for the fact. I'm a researcher myself, and I know damn well that if you only get one version it's fairly likely to be biased (whether by simple wording, by author viewpoint, or wherever the author read it from), missing small bits of information, and so on; if you're going to present ANY data as fact then more fool you if you didn't verify it first.
Browsing with +2 to insightful posts and a higher threshold makes the average post seen seem a lot more ingenious
I'd love to have a crack at designing a peer review system for wikipedia, with reputation (karma). It seems to me the more edits a page has gotten, the closer to "right" it should be. So maybe a new article, anyone can write. But an article that has been around for a while, your edit goes into a reivew queue and needs 1 vote (meta mod) to become the live version. An established article, maybe 2 votes. maybe it's (number of edits/5)+1 votes, or some formula. The point is, established article should change more slowly, and need increasing amounts of review before they go live.
The purpose of wikipedia moderators is not to decide what is fact or not, it's to help organize efforts and oversee conflict resolution. The problem with appointing people to make official rulings on articles is that there's no good way to establish whether they're qualified to make a judgement about a particular issue. Someone who has contributed nothing but rich, objective, researched information to the Feudal European Castles pages is not neccessarily qualified to make a reliable ruling on the accuracy of an article on Russian satellites. For that matter, they may not be qualified to make a ruling on feudal religious artists, if that's an area their knowledge isn't concentrated in.
I suspect that the problem you'd run into when implementing a system like you suggested is that really only the individual themselves knows whether they're qualified to revise or approve of a particular article. As we've seen through Wikipedia, folks sometimes have distorted estimations of their own knowledge of a given topic. Unless you want to elect "experts" individually for each page, you're always going to get people who think they know best, but don't really. The way Wikipedia deals with this is by refusing to give anyone special power or the ability to impose their estimation of the truth on everyone else, effectively requiring everyone to come to a reasonable consensus.
That said, Wikipedia's approach is just one out of many, and I would be very interested to see how an encyclopedia using a method like you proposed turns out. After all, experimentation is what it's all about, right?