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Happy 10th Birthday To Wikipedia
Greg writes "Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia that anyone can edit, first launched on January 15, 2001. Today, the website is thus 10 years old. To celebrate its 10th anniversary, Wikipedia is hosting some 400 conferences and parties across the globe. In traditional Wikipedia style, the events are being organized by its community of users. After a decade of growth, Wikipedia is an important source of information for millions of topics and remains among the Internet's top 10 most visited sites. It has over 400 million readers each month and has a very small budget for a website its size: just $20 million. Almost all its revenue comes from donations. In its last fundraising push, the organization saw 500,000 users donate $16 million."
Wikipedia may be an important source but it's rarely 100% correct on any given subject.
I've seen plenty of articles that contained correct information. That said, it would be absurdly difficult for you to find a book/website that is 100% correct in every way.
Sure. 90% correct would do fine but you can't be sure if any article really is 10% or 100% correct without doing a whole load of research. If I'm doing that kind of research anyway what use is wikipedia? Sure it's great on subjects You know nothing about because any knowledge will be an improvement.
I've seen shocking bias, inconsistancy, and lawyering on wikipedia and would not fully trust it for anything.
What's stopping you from fixing it?
Edit wars and editors pushing an agenda. Administrators who go off the deep end at anything they perceive as a 'personal attack'.
And spelling and grammer nazi's who revert entire passages for one misspelling. And a lack of time and frankly interest in dealing with their bureaucracy.
Did I mention administrators who delete new pages without even trying to read or improve them?
And the assumption that if you don't react to something within a few minutes you agree with it.
Updating even small details can become a huge time drain.