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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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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!
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.
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.
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