Slashdot Mirror
Wikipedia Approaches Its Limits
Reservoir Hill writes "The Guardian reports that a study by Ed H Chi demonstrates that the character of Wikipedia has changed significantly since Wikipedia's first burst of activity between 2004 and 2007. While the encyclopedia is still growing overall, the number of articles being added has reduced from an average of 2,200 a day in July 2007 to around 1,300 today while at the same time, the base of highly active editors has remained more or less static. Chi's team discovered that the way the site operates had changed significantly from the early days, when it ran an open-door policy that allowed in anyone with the time and energy to dedicate to the project. Today, they discovered, a stable group of high-level editors has become increasingly responsible for controlling the encyclopedia, while casual contributors and editors are falling away. 'We found that if you were an elite editor, the chance of your edit being reverted was something in the order of 1% — and that's been very consistent over time from around 2003 or 2004,' says Chi. 'For editors that make between two and nine edits a month, the percentage of their edits being reverted had gone from 5% in 2004 all the way up to about 15% by October 2008. And the 'onesies' — people who only make one edit a month — their edits are now being reverted at a 25% rate.' While Chi points out that this does not necessarily imply causation, he suggests it is concrete evidence to back up what many people have been saying: that it is increasingly difficult to enjoy contributing to Wikipedia unless you are part of the site's inner core of editors. Wikipedia's growth pattern suggests that it is becoming like a community where resources have started to run out. 'As you run out of food, people start competing for that food, and that results in a slowdown in population growth and means that the stronger, more well-adapted part of the population starts to have more power.'"
Wikipedia sucks for a lot of reasons, but this isn't one.
Just cite the application's manual/help file.
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
There is nothing "Funny" about The Evangelical War On Science Look the Wikipedia gestapo may step in and stop me from explaining my very serious awareness of things like 'the back of my hand' but at least they aren't mixing pictures of Adolf Hitler and Charles Darwin as if they'd planned the Holocaust together! Conservapedia - The Trustworthy Encyclopedia must in some way just be a sick joke, a flexing of freedom of speech muscles, or as someone else said here already if a scientific person makes a non-scientific person feel silly of less informed the just might go insane and band together into an army of the living undead. Which is GREAT NEWS because we need Christian soldiers to go to Iran and get blasted to pieces thus avoiding the spread of their seed to the general god fearing population. You see people Evolution in action! (Darwin rolls in grave next to Dinosaur bones)
sense of security, like pockets jingling...