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.'"

Comments

Perhaps they need a team of paid editors

[Anonymous Coward]

It's clearly benefited Slashdot. The story quality and lack of dupes proves it.

Re:Perhaps they need a team of paid editors

[Jason1729]

I know this was intended as a joke, but it might be good for wikipedia.

Lately I'm finding more "missing" articles than problem ones. Topics that should be there but aren't. Maybe they could have some sort of bounty system to get people to write these missing articles. Of course, that would require paid editors to approve the entires before a payment can be made.

Re:Perhaps they need a team of paid editors

[FooAtWFU]

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!

Re:Perhaps they need a team of paid editors

[Spetiam]

Wikipedia is worthless, from anything other than a triva perspective. Silly me, I once tried to include literature citations in the entry for Julius Caesar, they were promptly deleted and someone re-entered demonstrably false information.

Re:Perhaps they need a team of paid editors

[ComputerSherpa]

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.

Re:Perhaps they need a team of paid editors

[User 956]

Silly me, I once tried to include literature citations in the entry for Julius Caesar, they were promptly deleted and someone re-entered demonstrably false information.

Yeah, no kidding.

Point 1. The system doesn't favor true information, it favors whoever can be the most obstinate, anal-retentive, vindictive prick. Take this dipshit, for example. Imagine having a flaming, bitchy drag queen editing your stuff. Not to make it better or more correct-- changing/deleting/removing content just because he didn't like edits to other, unrelated articles you'd done.

Point 2. Then you get the tools that label your factually correct additions as "vandalism". They'll delete whole paragraphs just because they consider the article to be "their" article. This is especially prevalent by the older users towards the newer users.

Point 3. Then there's the "vote for deletion" nazis. See Tverbeek, above. Again, as "revenge" for some perceived past slight, these mental giants will put your stuff up for deletion with the rationale that it belongs on uncyclopedia, this is the typical rationale for deleting topics relating to fiction or pop-culture. Why then, do certain "uncyclopedia-quality" articles (i.e. the Klingon dictionary) stick while others don't? See Point 1.

Re:Perhaps they need a team of paid editors

[Raul654]

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.

Re:Perhaps they need a team of paid editors

[User 956]

Point 1 & Point 2: Some interesting comments on Digg, mostly to the same effect as the points I was making.

i.e. "on one entry, me and several friends have inside sources (one being the entry) and when we try to correct it, or correct misinformation that has been posted, the sites owner locks it down or chooses the misinformation over what is even know as fact. starting to distrust information found on there due to personal experience."

Tverbeek was a good example, because he's a royal prick, but he's got no shortage of equivalents on Wikipedia.

And my points are reiterated by one of the Wiki admins there, as well (so no, I'm not "trolling", unless you're also accusing Wiki admins of trolling as well):
The majority of edits on large topics are decreasing the quality of those articles. This is because, for most people, the quality of the article as a whole is taking a back seat to the desire everyone seemingly has to have their imprint on articles. This is turning many articles into long lists of disparate trivia instead of naturally-flowing, high-quality encyclopedia articles. Efforts to stem this and make the encyclopedia more encyclopedic are criticized as counter to the spirit of "openness."

His User page is here.

Re:Perhaps they need a team of paid editors

[aywwts4]

"Nupedia was characterized by an extensive peer-review process designed to make its articles of a quality comparable to professional encyclopedias"

Well, at 24 articles they have Wikipedia beat.

Re:Perhaps they need a team of paid editors

[theLOUDroom]

Jimbo started by trying paid editors

What wikipedia needs to do is have both "stable" and "unstable" branches of wikipedia, like the linux kernel does.

Make searches default to the stable page, with the option to add in the more recent changes by clicking a button.

This has a number of advantages:

• Removes the immediate payback for defacing a page.
• 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).
• Still allows up-to-the-minute information to be accessed by those looking for it.
• (personal belief here) It would increase the credibility of the information. It's easier to research and verify a small set of changes to a stable page, than to check out a whole page. It's better that this research is done BEFORE some hapless individual uses incorrect information.

Re:Perhaps they need a team of paid editors

[amadeusb4]

Silly me, I once tried to include literature citations in the entry for Julius Caesar, they were promptly deleted and someone re-entered demonstrably false information.

That's like giving up driving because someone honked at you.

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.

Re:Perhaps they need a team of paid editors

[FirienFirien]

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.

What's scary is...

[mtec]

I'm seeing more and more people use it as their de facto source for information.

Re:What's scary is...

[Kelson]

Hey, as a starting point or casual reference, it's not bad. Your chances of finding inaccurate, incomplete, or misleading content on Wikipedia are no worse than your chance of finding it on a general Internet search. If you're doing serious research, you should be following it up with other sources -- preferably primary sources as much as possible -- which ought to help you catch any misinformation you got from a bad Wikipedia article.

The real challenge is finding the volunteers to fix all the obscure articles. I recently stumbled across an article with a typo in its outline structure that had been there for about a year, and no one had noticed it in that entire time. It's kind of like getting someone to do serious UI design or end-user documentation for an open-source project. People work on what they find interesting, and if no contributors find a topic interesting, it's not going to get fixed.

Re:What's scary is...

[julesh]

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.

Re:What's scary is...

[Chuq]

Nobody's bothered correcting it? Yes they have - you just said you did!

Re:What's scary is...

[CristalShandaLear]

The real challenge is finding the volunteers to fix all the obscure articles. I recently stumbled across an article with a typo in its outline structure that had been there for about a year, and no one had noticed it in that entire time. It's kind of like getting someone to do serious UI design or end-user documentation for an open-source project. People work on what they find interesting, and if no contributors find a topic interesting, it's not going to get fixed. Isn't that the beauty of the Wiki? If you see the occasional grammatical error or typo, you can simply hit the edit link and fix it. I'm not a Wiki editor or even a regular contributor, but I do find Wikipedia fascinating and I have done my fair share of typo/grammar correction. Even the smallest contributions to a project of this magnitude can be helpful? Why pass up the opportunity to pitch in? I think Wiki is not the quintessential encyclopedia but it can definitely give you a nudge in the right direction, especially when you want some starting details on the recent buzz. Need to know more about Rove and Plame-gate? Start at Wikipedia. Trying to figure out why your kid is going on about a "horcrux"? If you had Googled the word "horcrux" in July 16 you would have had a one-word google whack. Google that word now (starting just after July 17) and the first entry is at Wikipedia. Wiki is not just an online encyclopedia but it has been for me a great reference of what Wiki readers and contributors are really interested in and want to share. An eye into the mind of everyone.

Re:What's scary is...

[PenguiN42]

Whats truly scary is the number of people defending the use of the Wikipedia as a de facto source of information.

Where are all these people? In any conversation about wikipedia the grand majority of the comments are either:
1) wikipedia is useless!, or:
2) wikipedia is a good starting point for research but make sure to follow up!, or:
3) wikipedia is a good collaborative effort that's not finished yet!

These crazy wikipedia zealots that you're afraid of seem to be much exaggerated in your mind.

Yes, Wikipedia has accuracy issues, but.....

[ChrisGilliard]

What other encyclopedia chronicles the history of slashdot?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slashdot_history

Re:Yes, Wikipedia has accuracy issues, but.....

[Neil Blender]

The real truth:

http://www.encyclopediadramatica.com/index.php/Sla shdot

Re:Yes, Wikipedia has accuracy issues, but.....

[tktk]

Wikipedia actually has two entries about Slashdot but I hear the second one is a dupe.

i'll second that.

[CDPatten]

I've debated people here and they use wikipedia facts that were wrong as proof they were right. It drove me crazy... he wouldn't take any other source no matter how many, wikipedia was the spoken word. Yikes.

In a perfect world wikipedia would work, but people aren't perfect, and people have agendas... that is why it will never be taken seriously with anyone outside the community.

Re:i'll second that.

[croddy]

The earliest memory I have of writing a research paper was in fifth grade. We were instructed that using an encyclopedia could be useful for learning more about a topic, such as related issues or questions to investigate, but that it was not a viable reference source suitable for citation in the research itself.

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.

Love it or leave it ...

[ubrgeek]

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.

Still not the top zealot

[Junior J. Junior III]

'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.'

These people still can't hold a candle to Jack Thompson.

Wikipedia generally works

[benna]

Wikipedia usually works, in my experience, especially on popular or controversial articles. Just within the last hour, another editor and I had a dispute over whether "dry mouth" is a negative or neutral effect of marijuana. We went back and forth a few times but we eventually agreed to combine that postive and negative effect lists, and now it is all settled. Such compromise is not always possible but it is much of the time and the system usually works.

Re:Wikipedia generally works

[CaptainCarrot]

In my experience it's exactly the controversial issues that Wikipedia handles least best. Your example is one where it worked, but very often such disputes force the inclusion of some far-out whacko idea with no credibility that an encyclopedia with a more controlled editorial policy wouldn't even consider worthy of mention.

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.

Re:Wikipedia generally works

[Skippy_kangaroo]

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?

Re:Wikipedia generally works

[Koushiro]

You mean the controversial articles like, oh, the ones on abortion, or evolution, or apartheid, or the Israli-Palestinian conflict, or same-sex marriage, or alleged cults...

You have it exactly the wrong way around. These articles are some the best of Wikipedia, not the worst.

Re:Wikipedia generally works

[sco08y]

We went back and forth a few times but we eventually agreed to combine that postive and negative effect lists, and now it is all settled.

What really happened was you all went out to gather empirical evidence and everyone forgot where the article was.

Re:Wikipedia generally works

[CaptainCarrot]

This necessarily reflects the areas where I do the most editing myself.

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.

I think we've talked about this before.

[bersl2]

A solution I liked was to make the publicly-editable entries into an unstable branch, and to promote versions of pages that have been fact-checked and have been agreed to be up to Wikipedia standards into a stable branch. Redirect anonymous viewers to stable pages if available, and mark each version as to which branch it belongs to.

Of course it has problems

[Reality Master 101]

Who actually think Wikipedia is going to replace various standard sources of knowledge, and will eventually be the greatest and most accurate repository of knowledge in human existence?

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.

Commercial opportunity?

[AJ_Levy]

Could there be a commercial opportunity in forking Wikipedia, and then having an advertising-supported business hire some editors and professionals to verify Wikipedia articles, perhaps in conjunction with other content? Or perhaps having a university fork Wikipedia and then flag which edits have been verified, or edited, by students or professors of the subjects covered by a particular article? Or perhaps introducing a Slashdot-style moderation system (where you can by default, for instance, only see edits which are rated 5*'s or higher?)

Re:Of course there's a lack of quality

[abh]

Actually there's only one step. You don't need an account. Gee, what other site do I know that allows anonymous random folks to spout off nonsense... *looks around*

Trend?

[ZachPruckowski]

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.

What's in a name...

[p2sam]

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.

Ah, from a rag with accuracy issues...

[nweaver]

It's not like the Register doesn't have accuracy issues either.

There's bad information, but it still rules.

[dslauson]

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.

Hitchhiker's Guide to Planet Earth

[jd]

The articles may be wrong, but where they are, they are DEFINITIVELY wrong. On the other hand, there are many articles that are genuinely accurate, very readable and thoroughly researched. Usually, these are for arcane subjects, obscure villages and hamlets, etc. In other words, stuff that only a very self-selecting few would ever know enough to discover the page on, never mind edit!

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.

Hey, it's not like "paper" encyclopedias don't hav

[melted]

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. :-)

Re:Of course there's a lack of quality

[PingPongBoy]

Just hold on for a minute!

Wikipedia is far from a thousand monkeys pounding on typewriters. Yes, some contributors are not the most experienced, but if many contributors, even those ignorant about a particular aspect of knowledge, try to self edit and get the details right, over time the result will be so positive that conductive breakdown will occur and lightning will happen.

Consider this. When Hardy saw Ramanujan's for the first time, he figured that "a single look at them is enough to show that they could only be written down by a mathematician of the highest class. They must be true, for if they were not true, no one would have had the imagination to invent them". Similarly, Wikipedia info is no joke - there are so many serious articles that people put enormous effort into. This should encourage anyone who really cares about any shortcoming to put some work into making the marginal improvements that ultimately benefit us all.

A message to people who have poor communications skills - just express yourself. Do not give in to embarrassment. Put in your knowledge and take a look at other articles. Even copying someone else's style will enable you to enhance your input. If someone edits your work, that's supposed to be a good thing, as long as you maintain the attitude of writing with higher and higher quality.

How to do this story for a newspaper.

[SEE]

Register: Wikipedia Inaccurate, Badly-Written
Pots, kettles war over who's the blackest

[Story body here]

Re:Wikipedia is instant geek cred

[Dogtanian]

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.

General problems with Wikipedia

[Dogtanian]

The real challenge is finding the volunteers to fix all the obscure articles. People work on what they find interesting, and if no contributors find a topic interesting, it's not going to get fixed.

The problem is that a lot of the obscure stuff that *is* there is in areas where geek (or rather nerd) types have interests, and it's not always that well-written. In fact, I think this is arguably at the top of the (otherwised unordered) list of problems with Wikipedia:-

(1) The anal-retentive "fact"-adding tendency. Those who'll add obscure/unused abbrevs to a *disambiguation* page. They don't get that some facts are more important than others, or that simply adding information to an article doesn't necessarily make it more helpful. They'll create lots of small stub articles, when they'd be better combined in a single article (placing them in context). If there's one thing I've learned as I get older, it's that leaving stuff out is *hard* but very important. You can't include everything. And you have to order that information well. The self-indulgent factoid geeks don't know or care about this.

(2) Change for change's sake. I'd be interested to see the amount of "churn" that goes on in some articles simply caused by people changing stuff for the sake of it. It's not necessarily a bad thing; it's just pointlessly wasted effort over a minor issue.

(3) *Potential* subversion by those with an agenda, including professionals. I've seen at least one instance of what appeared to be a PR person editing anonymously. This is dangerous, because most zealots with an agenda are transparent; PR and the like are professionals, and more likely to slip under the radar.

(4) Vandalism; annoying, but usually pretty obvious

(5) Lack of citation. This is very rare, and whilst normal encyclopedias don't normally include citations, Wikipedia's credibility would be much enhanced with more of them.

There are probably more, but my brain is full; that's enough to be going on with...

Or they could rate...

[ShimmyShimmy]

Why not have a rating system? They should make a rating system, so you could add Informative, Incomplete, Biased, etc, and have articles with particularly low ratings flagged for review (do they do something like this already?).

I think they should lock a lot more articles that are known to be complete and accurate. The definition of, say, orange juice hasn't changed all that much in the last 10 years and probably won't in the next 10.

Working these two concepts in together, I think they should have the 'modifiability' of the article be based on how high it's rated. For just a stub, or no article at all, then anyone should be able to modify it. But if the article is long (enough) and complete, then say maybe only a register with many high-rated articles can change it.

I think the main idea here is to promote and protect good content, but I seriously think they should not do anything to restrict an average joe from exlpicitly adding content.

Anyone else there think I'm on the right track?

Re:Or they could rate...

[SteveAyre]

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).

Re:Or they could rate...

[glowworm]

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.

Re:In defence of Wikipedia

[tooyoung]

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.

Re:Terrible journalism going on here

[malsdavis]

I don't agree with the article (or the other article The Register article refers to) either. In particular I find it slightly cooincidental that the first of two "random articles" he looked up just happened to be one on Bill Gates.

Although upon reading it I find the article is pretty much a fair, balanced and informative article. It is undoubtably an article about one of the most despised persons from the point of view of internet people.

The fact that he "just happened to randomly look it up" I find dubious. Its like opening a Jewish Encyclopedia and "randomly" looking up an article about Hitler.

WIkipedia is the ragedy of the commons in reverse

[minkie]

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.

Madam, we're merely haggling over price.

[jbn-o]

The "tortured prose" of this Register article is apparent in their lack of details on how the Bill Gates and Jane Fonda Wikipedia entries are "unreadable crap" (in Jimmy Wales' words). We're merely told this repeatedly, but the Register never backs their argument (or Wales'). Also, one sees another instance of the double-standards which are tolerated for judging Wikipedia and Encyclopedia Britannica.

"Wikipedians point to flaws in the existing dead tree encyclopedias, as if the handful of errors in Britannica cancels out the many errors, hopeless apologies for entries, and tortured prose, of Wikipedia itself."

If "[s]omething that aspires to be a reference work ought to be judged by the quality of the worst entry" then why are we only allowed to judge one encyclopedia—Wikipedia—on that basis? With such a ridiculously high bar, it's easy to hand-pick articles one knows a great deal about and see if the encyclopedia in question measures up.

• When I look up "gnu", "free software", or "free software movement" on Encyclopedia Brittanica's website I expect to find at least some stub article telling me that if I pay them I can read their complete entries on these topics. Instead, I learn that they have no such entries. Their substitutes are simply inadequate to explain the past 20 years of history, what philosophical differences exist, and who are the main players involved. The closest I can come to learning about the GNU operating system is to look up "linux" where EB talks about "Linux" as an operating system. But Linux isn't and never was an operating system. Linux is properly credited as a part of an operating system called a kernel. Such a view of history has no role for GNU, which predates the Linux kernel by years.
• EB has an article on "open source" but its description uses the term "public domain" in a way that is, at best, ill-advised. I saw no mention of the differences between the free software and open source movements—the kind of information that would help one understand why one movement is mentioned by name in the most important free software licenses, what these licenses say, and how these licenses came to be.
• EB apparently has nothing to offer about "GNU" in the context of an operating system or operating system project.

Which brings me to the next problematic criticism of these encyclopedias: drawing conclusions by weighing too small a sample. I recall that EB's former editor used exactly one entry to conclude that Wikipedia is akin to filth one is likely to find in a public bathroom (or words to that effect). The Register article's critique centers on reviews of two Wikipedia articles—Bill Gates and Jane Fonda's entries. The only way to reach the conclusion that EB has a "handful of errors" (as the Register says) is to do a survey; you can't judge articles you've never read. It seems to me that a proper review of a large encyclopedia would require a far larger sample size than a "handful" of articles in order to justify any reasonable conclusions about quality, no matter what those conclusions were.

Finally, the Register article mentions a few "respon[ses] to criticism" but doesn't actually critique these responses with a proper explanation. Just because one is told something like "this is what my critics will tell you" doesn't mean you have reason to dismiss the criticism. If one is interested in learning what's really going on, one has an obligation to think about the critique and weigh it on its merits. I "welcome the candour" as well the Register does, but I certainly want my candour to come with examples to back up points. When I evaluate EB using the guidelines I'm told to evaluate Wikipedia by, I come up with the conclusion that EB is merely different from, not better than, Wikipedia. And this conclusion I arrive at without giving any credit to Wikipedia for being free (as in the freedom to share and modify) which EB most certainly isn't. So, if I happen to be a victim of EB's "HUAC", I can't do anything to improve EB without going through the gatekeepers that registered their unwillingness to examine the above topics at all.

Re:They need to smarten the F up!

[Trogre]

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?

Prob. is article is wrong and useless.

[geohump]

All Jimmy Wales actually said was that two articles were terribly written. Wales has always had a goal of high quality in Wikipedia. Having two poorly written articles out of over three quarters of a million is hardly an admission of "Quality problems" except for the two particular articles cited. (yes, there are other articles that need work as well.)

The real issue here is the repeated attacks by this reporter: Remember Andrew Orlowski is the same reporter who wrote about Wikipedia :

""""It's the Khmer Rouge in diapers," ... which seems as good a description as any to us."""

Clearly Andrew has found that Wikipedia bashing is an easy meal ticket and that is the actual source of his over-exaggerated headline writing. Orlonski needs to get paid and he needs his editors to view him as a positive asset, drawing lots of eyeballs to the Register website. A quick Google for Orlowski and Wikipedia shows a long, slanted history for our boy Andy.

There is a verb for this: "Dvoraking" "To Dvorak"
"The act of trolling by a supposedly 'professional' journalist in order to draw visitors to a webpage generating hits for the paid advertisements."

In fact, given this background information Andrew Orlowski has less real credibility than, say, your average slashdot poster. :-).

Orlowski isn't a total waste of time however. After all he has noted that: "Segway's brains head for toy robot", "Microsoft FAT patent rejected - again", and the incredible "Police stake out bar, hoping to catch man drunk"

Wow, Andrew! Whats next? I wait in breathless anticipation.

(What, proofread this? not worth the time, Andrew.)

EB, the Register dont' get it.

[HerbanLegend]

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.

Featured articles

[harmonica]

Wikipedia works best for geeky subjects.

I don't think that's true. Wikipedia's featured articles come from all categories. That's certainly not a perfect proof of my point, but an indication.

6 - The "funny" idiot

[Moraelin]

(6) The idiot who thinks he's funny. In fact, so funny, that _everyone_ should find his stand-up comedy act when seriously searching for information. In fact, heck, everyone should be mandated by law to read his jokes, but finding them instead of actual info is almost an acceptable substitute.

I still remember one article in the German wikipedia... about cloning didgeridoos. Complete with a picture of tiny little digeridoos in test tubes, and a paragraph about how they live longer than the ones born naturally. About a year later, it was still there. (Now it's finally gone, though.)

OK, so it's a sorta the bastard child of your points 3 and 4. Except while the PR professional knows they're subverting and polluting a resource for profit, and the vandal knows they're defacing, the "funny" idiot might actually think he's doing a public service.

Why the hype?

[BenjyD]

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.

Trivia (Clarification)

[ComputerSherpa]

Different things are "trivia" to different people. From my perspective, the birthdate and biography of someone who lived hundreds of years ago (except for someone historically significant, e.g. Shakespeare or Caesar) is trivia, while a rundown of the features in the latest World of Warcraft patch is not. I imagine the opposite is true for you. My interests are a closer match to Wikipedia than yours, so I'll use that (bearing in mind that it's constantly in motion and checking the Talk and Article History pages as necessary). You have more historical interest, and so a more conventional encyclopedia is probably a better fit for you. It's no shame to Wikipedia that they lack good information in some areas--simply a matter of specialization.

I suspect that this trend will continue. Wikipedia will continue to expand in geek-friendly and pop-culture areas, while articles one would expect to find in Encyclopedia Britannica will be left mostly empty. If you're looking for the title of a Star Trek episode or a comic book supervillain, check Wikipedia; for articles on Ancient Greece, use Encarta. Most teachers don't accept Wikipedia as a bibliographic source anyway, due to the possibility of students editing a Wikipedia article and then quoting themselves authoritatively. I think that as long as people (including Jimmy Wales, the founder) compare Wikipedia to Britannica and expect it to measure up, they'll continue to be disappointed--they're simply different things with different strengths. That's all there is to it.