Our Love/Hate Relationship With Wikipedia

netbuzz points us to a somewhat snarky Washington Post article about the Wikipedians' work in upholding a minimum standard of "notability" for the collaborative encyclopedia. Here's his take on the Post's bemusement from a NetworkWorld blog: "The Washington Post this morning gets its snickers at the Wikipedians who do the best they can to apply the minimum 'notability' standards needed to keep the online encyclopedia's 1.5 million English entries relatively free of worthless junk. 'It's also safe to assume these are people with a lot of time on their hands,' the Post writer notes... These are people doing a truly thankless job... and they deserve a few thank-yous."

Comments

It's not thankless

[i kan reed]

Most wikipedia editors you ever interact with are really quite nice. Wikipedia has a good sense of community. There's also a bit of personal satisfaction of knowing that you're slowly helping expand the ammount of freely available public knowledge, without the cruft.

Re:It's not thankless

[Golias]

The real question here is:

Why is cruft a problem???

If somebody publishes a 15,000-word wiki on the 1970s NBC show "Cliffhangers", it's not like Wikipedia suddenly takes up more space on my bookshelf. Personally, I love that there's so much obscure crap on Wikipedia. Somebody on Fark mentioned some way-out there pop culture reference I never heard of, and Wiki has me up-to-speed in a matter of seconds. How can this possibly be a Bad Thing?

(Unless you are a journalist for a dying media with an axe to grind, that is...)

Repeating the same mistake

[dgg3565]

Didn't the MSM take something of a similar attitude toward blogs once they first emerged as a real force? And Wikipedia has been gaining "critical mass" in the same way blogs did a two or three years past. Setting all that aside, the tone of the article is somewhat unprofessional if your evaluating a new idea.

Re:slashdot entry

[interiot]

One answer is that there are many wikis out there. For almost everything that Wikipedia says it's not, there's another wiki out there that will cover the information you're interested in working on. For many of them, Wikimedia itself hosts those wikis, so it's not always a matter of DELETE DELETE, sometimes it's a matter of finding the right wiki. For instance, Wikipedia might not like to have really detailed programming guides on its site, but the content would be perfectly suitable for Wikimedia's Wikibooks. Wikipedia is a little too straight-laced sometimes, but there's Uncyclopedia if you want to add a joke to an article or otherwise go overboard with a subject. Wikibooks no longer takes game walkthroughs, but there's Strategy wiki for that.

Re:To avoid Vandalism

[squiggleslash]

Wikipedia is the 1994 USENET in 2006.

People exaggerate its flaws and underplay its usefulness, but everyone secretly knows it's the number one site on the 'net to start at if you need any kind of information.

People will propose stuff like what you've done. Some will, however, respond by pointing out that Wikipedia's fluidity and usefulness is actually directly proportional to the ease of access, and so any attempt to moderate it is doomed to failure. Others will run off and start their own forks, which will have all the heavy handed moderation supposedly necessary, and each will fail miserably.

Then, over time, the spammers and others with a commercial interest in vandalising Wikipedia will rise. Wikipedia's usefulness will start to drop. People will be turned off by it as a useful resource. And, many, hopefully many, many, years from now, it'll live on as a wasteland, a sad relic of an idealistic age.

But for now, it's the number one site on the 'net to start at if you need any kind of information, and just like Google Groups keeps the good in Usenet alive today, archives of Wikipedia will be awesome for "those in the know" in 2018.