Wikipedia Gets State Funding in Germany

tmk writes "How can Wikipedia be improved? The German government started a project today to train experts to contribute to Wikipedia. The goal is to write or improve several hundred articles about renewable resources in the Internet encyclopedia. The project is funded by the German Ministry of Nutrition, Agriculture, and Consumer Protection. The German chapter of the Wikimedia Foundation is hiring a Wikipedian to coordinate the efforts. 'The challenge will be to motivate experts who have done good work in other projects to get involved in the community lexicon. As project director Florian Gerlach told heise online, "Such expert reports are usually written, edited, and published in the normal newspapers or even on other websites. But Wikipedia is radically different: articles there continually grow with input from numerous authors, who often remain anonymous. The end product is constantly changing, and third parties can publish their own texts or even change yours." The future authors will therefore receive some training to help them work with Wikipedia.'"

Comments

Backlash

[kerohazel]

While this project does have good intentions, I can't help but wonder if it might do more harm than good for the green movement. I don't know how things are in Germany, but here in the States, global warming is considered by many to be disputable. As is Wikipedia. Right now one of the strongest things the global warming awareness campaign has going for it is the huge number of scientific articles which support the findings. That's pretty hard to argue against. But if they start pushing information onto anyone-can-edit-Wikipedia, some of the authority is lost.

I can hear them now:
"These pinko liberals would have us believe that the Earth is warming up, because of human activity! And what sources do they have to support this? Wikipedia! Oh, that's right, the website that ANYONE can edit! How convenient!"

Re:So this is where that extra 3% VAT is going to

[WilliamSChips]

Germany started World War II under the leadership of a party that is banned in Germany today, and Germany did not start WWI--to tell the truth, the gears of war were prepped up long before even Gavrilo Princip shot the Austrian archduke. Comparing modern Germany to Nazi Germany is much, much worse than comparing modern Germany to the modern US.