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Happy 18th Birthday, Wikipedia (washingtonpost.com)
This week, Wikipedia celebrates its 18th birthday. If the massive crowdsourced encyclopedia project were human, then in most countries, it would just now be considered a legal adult. But in truth, the free online encyclopedia has long played the role of the Internet's good grown-up.
From a story: Wikipedia has grown enormously since its inception: It now boasts 5.7 million articles in English and pulled in 92 billion page views last year. The site has also undergone a major reputation change. If you ask Siri, Alexa or Google Home a general-knowledge question, it will likely pull the response from Wikipedia. The online encyclopedia has been cited in more than 400 judicial opinions, according to a 2010 paper in the Yale Journal of Law & Technology.
Many professors are ditching the traditional writing assignment and instead asking students to expand or create a Wikipedia article on the topic. And YouTube Chief Executive Susan Wojcicki announced a plan last March to pair misleading conspiracy videos with links to corresponding articles from Wikipedia. Facebook has also released a feature using Wikipedia's content to provide users more information about the publication source for articles in their feed.
Many professors are ditching the traditional writing assignment and instead asking students to expand or create a Wikipedia article on the topic. And YouTube Chief Executive Susan Wojcicki announced a plan last March to pair misleading conspiracy videos with links to corresponding articles from Wikipedia. Facebook has also released a feature using Wikipedia's content to provide users more information about the publication source for articles in their feed.
Are you kidding? This is a better use of everyone's time. Do you honestly think asking students to write a paper they know that you're going to skim and then bin is a better use of time?
At least here there's a chance what they write about will be read by more than one hurried, not-so-interested professor or TA. The traditional way is a ridiculous waste. We're not talking in lieu of published research here. This is instead of an essay.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
You realize Wikipedia is only one part of the larger Wikimedia network? If you want to read a public domain book, WikiSource is for that. If you want a textbook, WikiText is for that. Videos, images, audio, etc, can all be hosted on the Wikimedia back end, if they are useful for one of the front end projects like Wikipedia or WikiText.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
Yah, that one. The one that all students use as their first point of reference anyway, because it's so much faster and clearer than looking at reliable sources. Of course, having done that, there's no substitute for getting reliable information from reliable sources -- same thing is true whether you start with Wikipedia, or the Wall Street Journal, the BBC, or Fox news or CNN or Time magazine. All are useful, all are biased, all make mistakes -- sometimes glaring ones.
Only one out of all these that I've mentioned lets you see how the text evolved over time, or lets you correct obvious errors, or produces the thing you want ("tell me about Quercus Suber!") without launching any popups or playing any videos. Wikipedia, as unreliable as it is, does all three and is remarkably useful. It's worth commemorating.
Notability and popularity are mildly correlated, but functionally orthogonal.
What you are proposing is Wankerpedia, where all knowledge amounts to having no knowledge at all.
The Library of Babel
The notability and citation guidelines are the only reasons the entire project hasn't degenerated into a giant emporium of fake news.
What else do you propose? Ten different primary articles on every subject under the sun, because ten different editorial camps exist for every possible subject? I don't know what that project would be, but it certainly wouldn't contain the suffix "-pedia", not even a little bit.
Let's descend one more level in the High-Rise of Five Whys: the reason why Wikipedia didn't go in your proposed direction in the first place is that kind of people who want to be all things to all people tend to sit around blowing smoke out their ass (after trying to be anything to anybody, they'd soon discover this mission is not nearly so easy as it first appears, and promptly change their asinine stripes).