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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?"
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.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
... is that they're too busy nominating webcomic articles for deletion to bother updating anything else.
Eviscerati.Org: All Hail the Eviscerati
Just edit the Wikipedia is Failing article to say it's fixed.
Wikipedia's job is to let people look something up quickly. Need to know who the 23rd vice-president was? It's Adlai Stephenson.
"But someone could edit that page and change it!"
Oh, right. Now I've linked to the static page.
That part seems rather hard for some people to grasp, considering how many times I've seen that used as a justification for "thou shalt not cite" bullshit.
However, in some cases, "thou shalt not cite" is correct, not just based on reactionary BS- Wiki articles are sourced. If you cite a sourced statement from a Wiki article, you should really be citing it from the original... which is conveniently linked at the bottom of Wikipedia.
Wikipedia isn't failing at this. It's doing this remarkably well. The failing is in reactionary academics who feel threatened by Wikipedia, and the perception these people cause.
Care about privacy? Read this!
Well, since I have to create an account with Citizendium just to look at the articles, I'm not too worried about it overtaking the Wikipedia just yet.
-CGP
IMHO, the time has come for wikipedia to return to its origins before it's too late. What made it work was its openness, now people think it can be "saved" by closing it up?
In truth, the biggest problem with wikipedia has nothing to do with wikipedia. The problem is us, especially our greed. Article after article has become slanted by those with a special, i.e. greedy, interest. Many controversial issues have already been editoralized into one-sided oblivion.
Top down is not going to help, so I say avoid the temptation to let the "experts" decide what we should be able to freely consider.
Words to men, as air to birds.
20 Reasons not to edit Wikipedia
This is what I've come up with after a very short period of editing Wikipedia.
1. Endless arguments on Talk pages. Apparently more work on Talk pages than actual pages.
2. I'm most able to write about what I'm an expert in. That's also a conflict of interest.
3. Reverts may undo useful changes. There are no merge-based undos, no simple application of a diff between two revisions.
4. Improving free and open source software is both more visible and important.
5. Publishing articles in peer-reviewed venues is more important, although less visible.
6. Lack of a good, canonical, reference and citation system like BibTeX.
7. Popular topics end up better written than unpopular topics. Many entries on fictional worlds.
8. My work might get deleted altogether.
9. Wikipedia is generally not citable itself. Not reviewed, and contents are not constant.
10. There is no correspondance between the different language versions of a page.
11. GFDL is possibly not the best license. I doubt most people have read it.
12. Software screenshots must be low resolution unless the software is open source.
13. Certain topics are taboo, e.g. Encyclopaedia Dramatica
14. If I'm an IP address, nobody cares. If I use my real name, I have to be careful what I write. If I use a pseudonym and hide my identity, it carries less weight.
15. Decentralization. It is doubtful that even a fraction of people take the time to read the relevant guides on editing.
16. Same problems that USENET, mailing lists, and forums have.
17. Neutral point of view confounded by fact that most people here are fairly left wing.
18. Most people editing don't have any formal training in writing beyond high school. Most articles and topics need work.
19. Vandalism, and pseudo-vandalism.
20. Almost every other leisure activity I can think of is more rewarding; Wikipedia is just addictive.
2 reasons to use Wikipedia
1. It's generally better than a Google search.
2. If you're a cultural anthropologist, here's a minefield.
2 reasons to edit Wikipedia
1. It's a great place to practice your translation skills.
2. Most anything you write here appears near the top of a Google search.
Meanwhile, most people with a clue have heard about Wikipedia, but not about these others. Wikipedia is now an established brand. That status, more than any functional superiority (or even competence) defines Wikipedia as the success. Its problems will be solved (or not), but it's got its audience.
Even if the competitors are superior, they will have to compete with Wikipedia's brand. Their superiority will have to be more easily communicated than Wikipedia's (eg. a better name, like "Google" vs "AltaVista") to actually beat them. It's a meme pool, and swimming counts more than smarts.
Wikipedia is no different from any other large Website: its success is defined by its scale of users, not its quality. As if you couldn't tell that by looking at Slashdot.
--
make install -not war
Okay, maybe I missed some major shift over at Wikipedia but a little over a year ago, Slashdot reported that Nature magazine's comparison of a sample of 42 Wikipedia and Britannica articles found on average, Wikipedia had 4 errors per article while Britannica had 3, but on average, Wikipedia articles had 2.6 times as much content.
So, from that point of view, I hardly see Wikipedia as a failing endeavor. There have been other studies that show Wikipedia to generally be quite accurate. There are exceptions, particularly in controversial topics which has been covered here a number of times, and maybe that needs to be fixed, but "Is Wikipedia Failing?" What is this? Fox News?
There is of course room for other slightly more reliable web encyclopaedias, but in the end all of them have to be verified by the reader to be trusted.
I predict that WIKI will become more of a 'pop-culture' database. Forget reading properly researched and documented articles on 'global warming' or 'evolution'. Rest assured though, crazed fans will document every nuance of Babylon 5 or Star Trek info that exists. Want to know how many PIPs Data has on his shirt in the last season of stng? Go to wiki!
There are about 1,300 featured articles. There are also about 1,700 good articles. However, there are currently 1,637,703 articles on Wikipedia. This means that slightly more than 99.8% of all the articles on Wikipedia are not considered well written, verifiable or broad or comprehensive in their coverage.
This to me seems like the old most-blogs-are-terrible argument. I would wager that those 3,000 good/featured articles make up the bulk of what people who go to wikipedia read about.
-CGP
Oops, looks like I offended some people who have nothing better to do with their time than create accounts on every single website on the internet.
...that Wikipedia is dying.
No statement is true, not even this one.
This essay seems to be fixed on featured articles and big entries. To me the real advantage of wikipedia seems to be the huge number of small, concise leaf articles that aren't featured, and maybe rarely accessed, but provide a short, in-depth punch about a particular topic, typically an obscure one. You can look up obscure topics like the Dry Tourgas or As Easy As and get the gist. Typically, small articles are written by an expert and ignored in terms of editing, but very useful for research. If you type certain strings into google, you get the wikipedia entry and not much else worthwhile. Wikipedia is sort of a common repository of knowledge. I'd rather have an article written by someone who knows something about an obscure topic than nothing. No one can grasp or deal with the entirety of wikipedia. There's too much there. But if you need to look up something obscure, you can go directly to that article.
What bothers me the most is all the web sites which clone wikipedia articles and add advertising. Ususually a google hit for a wikipedia entry turns up three or four other sites that just include the wikipedia article. This poisons the search engine, crowding out other hits. There ought to be a GPL version for wikipedia that allows people to mirror it only for nonprofit purposes. Down with leeches!
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.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
-Eric
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
But is there anyone here who can name one source where we would not be able to find a glaring error or even something that would be considered a flat out lie by a lot of people ?
I mean even stuff like the BBC, that used to be the definition of reliable has been shown to flat-out lie about some topics. So maybe the problem is not with wikipedia, but with people demanding reliable sources.
There aren't any reliable sources. Wikipedia, like the Britannica, like the Bible, like Muhammad's sayings like Shinto's roll's and like anything else is just a human's opinion. It is fallible, corruptible, incomplete, and potentially for sale.
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.
Don't get me wrong but that really misses the point. Take, for example, Voltron. I can plug that into Britannica and Wikipedia. Britannica doesn't know who or what Voltron is. Wikipedia has a fairly detailed explanation. Accurate? Well written? I'd be shocked if that article fell in to the 2000 or so "well written" articles. I doubt it's verifiable in any credible way. Also, I don't see Britannica ever having an article that talks about Voltron. It's not a scholarly article because it's not a scholarly subject. That doesn't change the fact that when I couldn't remember the names of the pilots of the lions and for whatever reason I wanted to remember them, wikipedia provided an answer and a whole lot more where most other sources wouldn't provide anything. That's the beauty of it.
I don't know that you should read a candidates wikipedia article and decide off of that alone if you will vote for them. I don't know any single sources that you should use for that. I also don't know that I'd read about global warming on wikipedia and use it as an exclusive guide to your own beliefs on it; again, there is no good single source on such an important subject. However if you do want to look up who's driving for each F1 team next season or Voltron, or what looks like well over a million other articles, wikipedia is probably ok. The alternative is either nothing or you scour the web for some hobbiest that cares enough about Voltron or whatever to put up a webpage of his own and provide a detailed document on it.
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
.../wiki/The_Page
1. The Stable Page - and THIS should be the default at
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
If you don't risk failure you don't risk success.
On the other hand, on the other end of the spectrum are the categories History and Society. Wikipedia is horrible at such articles. You have two conflicting sides fighting over an article. Let's take a look at the current protected pages. "2006 Israel-Lebanon conflict" and "Taba Summit" are both protected. Semi-protected is "1972 Summer Olympics", "Zionism" and other similar articles. Israelis and Palestinians are shooting each other over there, and such a thing spills over onto Wikipedia. It even spills over onto Slashdot - the last time I said this about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict on Slashdot, in a pretty neutral and moderate tone, someone lambasted me for "taking sides".
Jimbo Wales is not politically neutral. He ran the Ayn Rand mailing list for years. His appointees to the Arbitration Committee are people like JayJG, who could not get voted in and who had over 100 votes against them during elections (including me). He says he uses Friedrich Hayek's theories as a model of how to run Wikipedia. He has personally harrassed people like Secretlondon. He is not a fanatic, or Wikipedia would have never taken off, but he is biased, and his bias is reflected. The Wikipedia "cabal" is sort of cultish - check out the Criticism of Wikipedia page and how obsessed the "cabal" is with criticism they can not control. Dozens of people have tried to link to the Wikipedia Review web site and the link is removed over and over. It is really cultish behavior, the idea that criticism of Wikipedia can happen which they can't control drives them crazy.
I know the society and history articles will always be crap, unless it's something like 1755 Lisbon Earthquake or something which no one cares much about any more. But by and large they are junk and not encyclopedic. The solution I think is for these types of articles to move onto other wiki encyclopedias. This has already happened. I've written a number of articles elsewhere that people put back into Wikipedia. Some of the ones I have done I know could never be put back because they are of the "Taba Summit" type. There is only one wiki encylopedia now, which makes sense, but this will not continue and in fact Wikipedia already has some minor competition in Demopedia, dKosopedia, Internet Encyclopedia (Wikinfo), Red Wiki, Anarchopedia and so forth. This trend will continue.
Wikipedia is at best flawed, at worst dangerous.
It rejects "experts" in favor of consensus. Finding facts is not a democratic process. It is often an intrusive and offensive process. "Facts" have to be protected from people with ulterior motives.
Most people think they are safe in a car from lightening because of the rubber tires. General consensus where critical thinking and science are involved is typically wrong.
Ratings could be something like
5. I'm a generally recognized expert working the field 4. I work in the field 3. I've studied the field at university/college level 2. I'm a generally interested bystander, having done self-study of the field to some depth 1. I'm a generally interested bystander having tried to follow the field for a few years
Comments could be something like what sources you have checked against, or a deeper description of qualifications.
Ratings like these would allow us to do a lot of stuff. We could turn users that seem to do a good job of voting in their particular areas (and staying off voting in other areas) into an officially sanctioned editorial board retroactively, for instance - by just giving their ratings weight. Or we could let people look at "Last version of article vouched for by a 5-authority", or show the differences from that version, or whatever we feel like.
The important thing is to start collecting the data. And that can be done NOW, trivially.
Eivind.
Doubting the existence of evolution is like doubting the existence of China: It just shows that you're uninformed.
An article about why Wikipedia is failing...that is posted in Wikipedia? So if Wikipedia is not accurate, that means that the article that says it is not accurate is not accurate, which means that it is accurate, which means......Oww, my head is going to explode!
Well, its use is phenomenally widespread, and in many fields it is one of the best places to look for a general survey -- even in highly technical fields (for example, there are many times I've gotten better explanation of some topic in higher mathematics from Wikipedia than from my textbooks). I'm almost certain some of these were not included in the count of 1700 "good articles," just because if you only have 1700, having dozens of them on areas of math that 99.99% of people will have no interest or need for seems unlikely (how many people do you know who need to read about higher cohomology?). Thus, the "good article" status is almost certainly not a real measure of how many good (in the English sense, i.e. the opposite of bad) articles there are on Wikipedia. While having the "good article" distinction is useful since it can direct people to especially polished material, it is not at all a good idea to make the logical leap and conclude that all the other articles are bad.
There, that's a (credible, I hope) argument that Wikipedia is not failing, followed by a partial refutation of the article that it is (I don't have time for a more thorough discussion). So the answer to your question is yes -- now let's get back on topic and leave aside the FUD :-P
I am the man with no sig!
Just a note: The citizendium will be opened to the public after the public launch. The pre-release registration is to keep people from happening upon it before the general release -- sort of a voluntary beta test.
While I'm rather neutral about the entire concept, this seems to be a common misconception about their model. Hope you check it out when it goes public.
I [may] disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.
Wikipedia needs to realize that it's not going to be a reputable source, ever. There is just no way you can be a good source of research and maintain public user submisssions. Not gonna happen.
There is nothing wrong with that though.
Wikipedia right now is a great resource that you have to take with a grain of salt, that is fine. It's great the way it is. If I want to know some bit of trivia then Wikipedia is the place, if someone makes a reference to something I'm ignorant about in a conversation for instance, or if I'm just mildly curious about something I read in a news article, I can at least find out what's going on with a quick check to Wikipedia. These are things that in the past I might have to search Google for and then possibly wade through a few pages of the things before I get to the bottom of it, now with Wikipedia my questions are usually answered much faster, easier, and more in depth than if I had just used Google.
Now I realize that what I'm reading might be biased, someones opinion, and in a lot of cases just flat wrong, but that's okay because that would have been even more true with Google searches. I realize that if I really need hard information about a subject then Wikipedia is little more than a lead to actual references at best, but it still serves a purpose.
If you ask me, the thing Wikipedia can do to improve would be to stop deleting articles because they aren't "notable enough". Seriously. Why the hell should there not be an entry for my local highschool in there? I know few people would want to read it, but so what? If Joe Johnson down at Johnsons gas station wants to write about the history of his family gas station, let him! Who is it hurting? Besides, I might know Joe and be interested in reading it.
Sigs are awesome huh?
A lot of the Wikipedia bashers and nay-sayers have one unique problem: they don't get it. They want academic rigor and precise accuracy in something that is not edited exclusively by academics, experts and elites. Wikipedia is a look in to the hive mind of humanity - and reflects the daily winds of change in the common consensus and the fact that people perceive reality differently.
Wikipedia isn't broke and I hope it stays donation supported for a long time.
-- $G