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

Editorial board...

[BWJones]

What can be done to change the system?

Now that Wikipedia has reached a critical mass, the time has come to establish a trusted editorial board that can vet articles to established experts in the field of subjects. This board could then also solicit articles by experts and find other wikis that host specialized information to link to the common Wikipedia. This will prevent much of the vandalism and uninformed disasters that seem to befall certain subjects or topics when they are edited by people who are not competent to be making edits in certain topics. As a professor in the biosciences, I've seen more than one article/entry on Wikipedia, written by an expert in that field that has been absolutely, shamefully and quite inaccurately edited or altered by well meaning individuals that absolutely have no idea what they are doing/saying.

Re:Editorial board...

[ronanbear]

Karma would be doled out by an algorithm that would assess your edits based on how much, how often and by whom (their karma) your edits get edited in turn. If you troll you end up with karma in the toilet and your edits are brought to the attention of other editors who "metamod" your down. If other people who watch the page give positive feedback on your edits then your karma improves and other editors will be quicker to trust you. The system wouldn't be foolproof but it wouldn't need to be. All it would need to be is more efficient at correcting bad edits and retaining good edits than the current system. Trolls would be caught quicker and it would take them longer to do less damage. At the moment a large number of trolls just replace entire articles with a single line. This sort of edit could be fixed automatically so editors don't have to waste their time doing it. As articles become more "mature" it should become harder to make big edits to them.

Is "community" a good thing?

[Dogtanian]

Just edit the Wikipedia is Failing article to say it's fixed. You're obviously joking, but it's my sincere belief that one of the dangers facing Wikipedia is where the community, and the defence of Wikipedia from criticism becomes more important than the integrity of Wikipedia itself. This is an inherent risk with anything community-based; superficially, the effort is to support and protect the project (and those taking part may well still believe this), but in reality the loyalty is to the community or team, even at the risk of the stated aims of the project.

Another problem is edit decay, often exacerbated by Wiki-masturbation. What do I mean? Basically, edits are normally on a small scale. Lots of individual small-scale edits do not make a big article; on the contrary, I've copyedited at least one article that was fine on a sentence-by-sentence level, but messed-up, disorganised, verbose and unreadable because no-one had bothered to step back and look at the article as a whole. Thus many small edits (even if individually useful) tend to increase the structural decay of an article, and make it hard to see when something useful is being lost.

A problem occurs when minor edits are made, or an article changed several times, with little ultimate point (hence "masturbation"). It's in these sorts of pointless changes that good work gets lost for no real purpose. In such cases, it may make sense to go back to an earlier version, compare any major changes, find out why these have happened, and if there seems to have been no justifiable reason for them, to revert some or all of the article.

Should the aim of Wikipedia be change? No. The aim of Wikipedia should be changability; a subtle but very important difference. Unlike evolution in nature, we can go back as far as we like if an earlier version is better, and there's no reason we shouldn't do this. Some subjects inevitably date, necessitating change; but many do not. Changeability is about having the choice, and that includes the choice of saying "actually, the earlier version *was* better".

The WP article actually covers some similar ground to the above, but both are issues that had been on my mind for a long time beforehand.

Agreed: "Stable" version should be default version

[cyclomedia]

Like in software there's usually a Stable version, even if it's quite old and a Beta version, i'd go so far as to suggest that Wikipedia pages should have three versions

1. The Stable Page - and THIS should be the default at .../wiki/The_Page
2. The Candidate Page - The candidate to become the next stable page
3. The Current Page - Up to the minute revert war free for all

Both [1] and [2] are essentially historic versions of the page but linked to from handy labelled tabs and some kind of moderation/voting system can elevate a page from current to beta to stable.

obviously newly created articles would only have one or three versions and these would filter across all three until a moderator/vote decides to split the article into the aforementioned modus operandi

Re:Agreed

[bcrowell]

in fact the science articles are some of the best.
Generalizations are always dangerous, but IMO science articles on WP tend to be some of the worst. I've worked on a lot of the physics articles. (I teach physics at a community college.) Typically they fail to put things in context, use too much math too early, and focus on irrelevant equations and derivations rather than the important concepts. I think this is symptomatic of what's wrong with WP in general: articles tend not to rise above a certain (low) level of quality, because of random, disorganized edits. Also, although many people on WP are good writers and explainers, and many are knowledgeable about their subjects, there aren't as many people who are good at both, and the structure of WP doesn't work well to help them cooperate.

Re:Agreed

[jpflip]

I'm a physicist as well, and I'd say that Wikipedia's science articles are generally quite good, though not always very pedagogical. I find that Wikipedia is among the best places to get an up-to-date introduction to (or at least the basic gist of) to some topic that I'm not fully familiar with, even a very technical one. I agree that far more work is needed to make Wikipedia's science articles as complete and pedagogical as they should be and that authors sometimes get a little too pedantic or sidetracked. Nonetheless extensive contributions from experts make it a surprisingly good starting point for real science. Again, in general - there are certainly plenty of exceptions.

Re:Agreed

[0rionx]

I'm amazed it took this long for someone to point this out! Many of the articles in fields such as biology, geology, history, philosophy, etc that tend to have political/religious controversy surrounding them are often not of the highest caliber. Articles in non-controversial fields, especially computer science and mathematics (IMO), are often, as the previous poster stated, extremely well written and highly detailed. Want to learn about the traveling salesman problem? The related Wikipedia article is almost ten pages long with graphs and detailed explanations, cites 16 qualified sources, and provides more than a dozen external links for further reading. How exactly is that trivial?

I wish I had saved some mod points for a +1 Underrated...