Is Wikipedia Failing?

An anonymous reader writes "A growing number of people are concerned about where Wikipedia is heading. Some have left Wikipedia for Citizendium, while others are trying to change the culture of Wikipedia from within. A recent essay called Wikipedia is failing points out many of the problems which must be solved with Wikipedia for it to succeed in its aim of becoming a reputable, reliable reference work. How would you go about solving these problems?"

Comments

We will be launching as soon as possible

[Larry Sanger]

Hey, we badly want to be open to the world! But it's expensive!

I can make a little announcement. Wikis are huge resource hogs, so to grant just read access to wiki pages indiscriminately will require more resources than the big souped-up but single server we have at present. Quite frankly we have been holding out for an infusion of funds for sixteen servers. It's clear now that we can launch with less than that, with a number that we can afford with our very limited present budget. So we'll be bravely forging ahead with an only temporarily adequate number of servers!

The Citizendium wiki will be launching for public read access as soon as (1) we get a few new servers set up (it'll be a small enough number to be within our budget), and (2) we make a few technical changes (e.g., change the "Citizendium Pilot" namespace to "Citizendium"; and lots of other stuff).

Now, when will that be? Not sure; now it's a matter of getting and setting up the equipment and making those software changes, and it's impossible to predict how long it will take to do this, as we are mostly relying on volunteers (and one part-time contracter) to work on our software. But on the order of weeks, not months. If you want to help us with the software stuff, I bow to your geekiness and invite you to our forge.

Hope that clarifies our situation anyway.

Re:Agreed

[infaustus]

While wikipedia articles on evolution and global warming aren't actually that bad, you're ignoring the huge number of non-controversial science and mathematics articles on wikipedia. Non-controversial!=trivial. These articles tend to be very thorough and reliable.

Re:Agreed

[DJCacophony]

This "citizendium" is nothing like Wikipedia, specifically because it does not allow anonymous editing. It doesn't even allow anonymous viewing. They made people register just to SEE the site, simply because they wanted to boost their registered user count to look like they are actually a notable website, instead of just another wiki.