First of all, a lot of money has been mis-spent. Sue Gardner herself voiced her qualms about this shortly before she left the Foundation, warning of the potential for log-rolling and corruption and spending money without benefit to the end user. In one case I have knowledge of, the entire board of a national Wikimedia organisation was flown into a city and put up in hotels for a "community consultation" where exactly one (1) community member turned up. That was $5,000 of donors' money gone right there, for nothing (although the board members all got a city stay out of it).
Secondly, some of the work done for that money has been incompetent. The VisualEditor, announced as "epically important" by Jimmy Wales, was a case in point. It was years late and so buggy and incomplete that the community switched the thing off, overriding the Foundation. It is my suspicion that this is partly a result of giving too many management and tech jobs to Wikipedia insiders selected on the basis of their enthusiasm for the Wikipedia ideal rather than their qualifications or expertise. Otherwise it's really hard to explain why jobs were done so badly. And that they were done badly is a fact that was acknowledged by Jimmy Wales, who said that Lila Tretikov was specifically hired to stop these sorts of failures and bring their house in order. And she may well do so.
But what to me is morally wrong about the banners is that they create the impression the Foundation is struggling financially to keep Wikipedia online without ads. And that's simply not the case. Wales used to boast how little it cost to keep Wikipedia online. In 2005, he said,
"So, we’re doing around 1.4 billion page views monthly. So, it’s really gotten to be a huge thing. And everything is managed by the volunteers and the total monthly cost for our bandwidth is about 5,000 dollars, and that’s essentially our main cost. We could actually do without the employee We actually hired Brion [Vibber] because he was working part-time for two years and full-time at Wikipedia so we actually hired him so he could get a life and go to the movies sometimes.”
Today, the Wikimedia Foundation attracts 21 billion page views a month – i.e. 15 times as much – but even 15 times the $5,000 a month Wales mentioned then would only be $75,000 a month, or $900,000 a year; and that's without allowing for economies of scale, and the fact that bandwidth has become cheaper since 2005. Yes, they have more images these days and so forth, but keeping Wikipedia online simply isn't their major expense, and a fraction of the money they have in hand.
By all means say that Wikipedia is ad-free and relies on donations – that's perfectly true – but don't imply that donations are needed to keep Wikipedia online and ad-free for another year, making everyone think that if not enough money comes in they'll have to pull the plug, or there will be ads by the end of next year. And that's a mainstream criticism within the Wikimedia movement. Just look at the Wikimedia mailing list discussion [gossamer-threads.com]. The person speaking there is this guy [wikipedia.org], a veteran volunteer, GLAMWiki coordinator and former vice-president of Wikimedia Australia.
> Wikimedia spending has increased by 1,000 percent in the course of a few years.
That could be a problem.
> Jimmy Wales counters complaints by saying the Foundation are merely prudent in ensuring they always have a reserve equal to one year's spending
Yes, a one year reserve on the low end of normal. You don't want Wikipedia to disappear when something bad happens, and SHIT HAPPENS. It's a top 10 web site, meaning it's in the big leagues with Google, Microsoft etc., except it's nonprofit. They may have to deal with stuff like Google is dealing with in Europe - disputes with multiple governments on the other side. You don't want Wikipedia to go bankrupt when some government or some company somewhere doe something stupid that costs the foundation $5 million to deal with and repair the damage.
> nothing to do with generating and curating Wikipedia content, a task that is handled entirely by the unpaid volunteer base.'
False. A large chunk of the budget is developing software for "generating and curating Wikipedia content". It's disingenuous to claim that developing tools for generating and curating content "have nothing to do" with generating and curating content.
That's a fair point – I meant it in the sense of actually researching and writing the text that appears in Wikipedia. And I did say "most" of these budget increases had nothing to do with that. For example, they are not using money from donations to have medical experts check the thousands of medical articles in Wikipedia for accuracy: that to me would be active content curation. Those tasks are left to volunteers, or, in one or two cases like the Cancer Research UK initiative, people funded by others.
What I do think is reprehensible is raising the spectre of ads in the fundraising banners. By all means say that Wikipedia is ad-free and relies on donations – that's perfectly true – but don't imply that donations are needed to keep Wikipedia online and ad-free for another year, making everyone think that if not enough money comes in they'll have to pull the plug, or there will be ads by the end of next year. And that's a mainstream criticism within the Wikimedia movement. Just look at the Wikimedia mailing list discussion. The person speaking there is this guy, a veteran volunteer, GLAMWiki coordinator and former vice-president of Wikimedia Australia.
Bof.:) It's just typical Wales bluster and misdirection. He flatters you when you agree with him, and rubbishes you when you criticise him. I have experience of both from him. Neither really mean much.
I think you may find that some or all of the Wiki Loves Monuments tools were written by people outside the Wikimedia Foundation. Have a look at this page and its edit history. (WMF staffers typically have a "(WMF)" at the end of their user name.) Similarly this page. Many of the most useful software components remain volunteer-contributed.
Have a look How pranks, hoaxes and manipulation undermine the reliability of Wikipedia. Technical info is certainly not immune when it comes to these problems with reliability. Even worse, an incredible number of people accept stuff in Wikipedia without questioning it, to the extent that it gets repeated by sources deemed authoritative. Here is Wikipedia re-writing history, and here is a journalist who discovered she had accidentally started a Wikipedia hoax when she saw a journalist from The New Yorker quote a joke on Twitter as fact – a joke which she had entered in Wikipedia five years earlier for fun, as a stoned sophomore.
Wikiwand is one of those engineering shops they are scared of, because WikiWand have been doing better work than their own programmers, and are presenting Wikipedia content in a prettier format. And if people migrate to Wikiwand, then as you rightly say, people don't see their fundraising banners.
Their new VP of Engineering, Damon Sicore (ex-Mozilla), spelt that fear out. According to Sicore, the WMF will have to “scale to a size that enables us to compete with the engineering shops that are trying to kill us. That means we need to double down on recruiting top talent, and steal the engineers from the sources they use because well they are REALLY GOOD.... I want everyone to keep this in mind: If we don’t move faster and better than google, apple, and microsoft (and their ilk and kin), they will consume us and we will go away. It’s that simple.”
Note well that what he's talking about going away there is the Wikimedia Foundation, not Wikipedia. The Wikipedia volunteers work for nothing; they are not reliant on donation money. And Wikipedia itself is also free, meaning it can be hosted by WikiWand, Google or anyone else who thinks they can present the content better than WMF. And if they managed to improve the content at the same time... As I see it, this is what this expansion is about, not about keeping Wikipedia online and ad-free. And that's not what they're telling the public.
Exactly. They could tell people what they actually want the money for, cause it ain't to keep Wikipedia online and ad-free. If they provided that info, then people could make an informed choice whether to support that effort or not. It would introduce some accountability. Two flagship projects that Wikipedia donations paid for over the past couple of years were considered abject failures by the volunteer community. The third, Wikipedia Zero, is controversial because it violates net neutrality.
It is circular if the more money they are able to take as "reserves", the more they feel they can spend. You could give them $500m, and they'd eventually expand to spend that... and would then go for a $500m reserve the year after.
Please just don't repeat the meme that a Nature study found Wikipedia to be about as reliable as Britannica.
At least say that based on a small sample of articles, a journalistic news report in Nature opined that Wikipedia's science articles were only slightly less reliable than Britannica's, but considerably less well-written, and that Britannica contested those results. That would be the truth, rather than the meme. Mkay?
Your point about the hazards of anonymous contributions is well taken.
Oh yes, they do claim that. Jimmy Wales asserts that Wikipedia is "about as accurate as traditional encyclopedias and improving all the time." Really?Really?Really?Really?Really?
First of all, the Nature piece itself found Britannica to be superior – just not by as much as expected.
Secondly, it is a matter of record that Nature only examined science articles, many of them quite specialised. It is inexcusable to omit that qualification. There simply is no evidence at all that Wikipedia is superior to Britannica in other topic areas, and copious evidence within Wikipedia itself of how often articles are biased by special interest groups (just look at the history of Wikipedia arbitration cases).
Third, Nature chose to penalise Britannica for information that was omitted, but contained in Wikipedia: that was counted as an "error". As Britannica themselves pointed out, "Nature accused Britannica of 'omissions' on the basis of reviews of article excerpts, not the articles themselves. In a number of cases only parts of the applicable Britannica articles were reviewed." In other words, they butchered Britannica articles and then penalised Britannica for the fact that the remaining stump failed to contain some item of information that the full article would have contained.
Fourth, Nature noted, but chose not to penalise Wikipedia for, confusing presentation and bad style, essentially proposing that a haphazardly compiled jumble of facts should be considered equal to a well-structured, easy-to-understand introduction to a topic written by a world-renowned expert.
Lastly, there is by now a very long list of journalists and writers found to have copied spurious facts from Wikipedia. Where is a similar list of writers embarrassed for having gotten their information from Britannica? If Lord Leveson had looked up the founders of the Independent newspaper in Britannica, he would not have ended up ascribing that achievement to some unknown Californian student.
Beyond simple errors, there is very copious evidence of bias and covertpaid editing in Wikipedia. The Croatian Wikipedia was taken over by right-wing extremists, to the point where the country's education minister warned students not to rely on it, as the country's history was thoroughly falsified by fringe groups. Those are all problems Britannica has never had.
I could go on. I have been a Wikipedian for nigh on ten years. I have seen the problems first-hand.
Back in 2005, Wikipedia was studied for accuracy against the Encyclopaedia Britannica. And they were found to be about the same. Since then Wikipedia has improved a lot, and they've stopped printing the Encyclopedia Britannica.
The assertion that Wikipedia is as reliable as Britannica is ludicrous. Granted, it's a lot bigger than Britannica, and has articles on breaking news stories, but as reliable? Of the English Wikipedia's nearly 5 million articles, at least 10% are on no Wikipedia editor's watchlist – a result of the continuous increase in the number of articles combined with the continuous decrease in the number of active editors – and those articles are sitting ducks for subtle vandalism.
Britannica may have had errors, but it did not contain false information inserted by anonymous people for fun or for financial gain; it contained no anonymous hatchet jobs written by people's rivals, and was not full of puff-pieces written by the biography subjects themselves.
Repeating this false "Wikipedia is as reliable as Britannica" meme only contributes to future cases like this one here, or this one.
Heh. The large gender imbalance has been reported by the Wikimedia Foundation for years. The survey-based estimates (sources are the UNU survey and a WMF survey) are not corrected in the footnote (which is about which statistics to use to estimate the percentage of mothers). The gender imbalance of Reddit is cited to Huffpost, it's 72% male (which is less male-dominated than Wikipedia), and the most extreme of all the major social media sites listed there. There are multiple citations for effect on content, including New York Times, Atlantic and a recent Guardian editorial. 1 in 50 relates to survey respondents, not contributors (which some have claimed may have a *slightly* higher proportion, based on sampling bias). For participation dropping after age 20 see UNU survey (linked). WMF efforts to address the gender gap are well publicised, Sue Gardner talked about it to the press until she was blue in the face. Women aged 18-34 in Facebook and Pinterest: sources linked. The surveys were commissioned by the Wikimedia Foundation itself, and comparison to social media is relevant in relation to the argument that women have no time to be online. Relevance of anonymity on women's participation per quoted text from Wiley Handbook. User interface impact is a hypothesis, based on recent discussions on Wikipedia's Gender Task Force page.
If your post is representative of Wikipedians' ability to read sources, Wikipedia is not destined for greatness.
It's exactly the other way round, according to this Huffpost piece. There are 99 million more monthly female visitors to the various social media sites (included in the analysis were Facebook, Yelp, Twitter, Myspace, Pinterest, YouTube, LinkedIn, Flickr, last.fm, deviantART, Google+, Digg, Bebo, Reddit and many others). Even in gaming, the largest demographic are now adult women.
Many academics have said the same thing to me. No desire, and not enough time, to argue endlessly with nincompoops. There is currently an initiative underway, focused on medical articles, to get funding for experts to peer-review Wikipedia articles. Once an article is up to scratch, there would then be a permanent link to the peer-reviewed version displayed on the article page. This might be a more promising approach, and it could scale to other topic areas as well. Experts would (1) be paid, (2) have the guarantee that their work will have some permanence, (3) derive a degree of kudos from their having been appointed to do this work. Funding would, in this case, come from charities interested in making reliable medical info available online. Currently, for example, there is a Wikipedian-in-Residence at Cancer Research UK, who is working with CRUK experts on Wikipedia's articles on cancer. The position is funded by the Wellcome Trust.
Quite. I think the whole discussion about what turns women off once they're there addresses only the smaller half of the problem. The main question is, why don't women come to begin with.
If you take things on people's say-so, you end up with this. Reliability is bad as it is – looking at an article, you can never be sure, without checking the references, whether it is a bunch of nonsense or a well-researched, accurate article. But if you allow everyone – well-intentioned, knowledgeable people like yourself as well as pranksters and hoaxers – to add stuff without citations, the site would quickly be corrupted altogether. No one can tell if you are sincere or making stuff up out of whole cloth.
Kozierok's First Law: "The apparent accuracy of a Wikipedia article is inversely proportional to the depth of the reader's knowledge of the topic."
Yup. And of course, you are looking at the English Wikipedia, which is the most-developed language version of Wikipedia. Yet Wikipedia claims to be available in over 280 languages, when in many of them, coverage is really, really rudimentary. See e.g. the "Mind the zombies" slide from a recent Wikimania presentation – basically, only 125 language versions of Wikipedia have more than 5 editors. The others are, to all intents and purposes, dead.
Note also that even English Wikipedia contributor numbers (as opposed to reader numbers, which are immense) are really quite small. (Someone else has pointed this out above.) If you look at this table, you'll see that there are only about 3,000 regular editors in the English Wikipedia, i.e. people who make more than 100 edits a month (i.e. about three a day). That number has shrunk considerably over the past few years, from a March 2007 high of 4785. At the same time, of course, the number of articles continues to increase constantly (now at 4.6 million). There are fewer contributors, and more articles to be watched over.
So Wikipedia has many articles that it does not have the (wo)manpower to curate adequately. In the early days, of course, everyone thought that "eventually" all these articles that someone started would become little masterpieces, but it's becoming clear that this will not happen. Little-watched biographies in particular are a problem, as the only people interested in them are usually the subjects and/or people who hate them for some reason, so they turn either into puff-pieces or hatchet jobs, with no one really noticing (there are well over half a million articles that no one has on their watchlist). Yet they are the top search hit when someone Googles the name online.
This reminds me of Newslines.org, a news-based crowdsourcing project that overlaps to a certain extent with Wikipedia, with the difference that they *do* pay their contributors. They report that their gender split is reversed: they have more women contributors than men, and also have more contributors from ethnic minorities than Wikipedia (in fact, their two leading contributors are black women).
The comparison is relevant in response to the argument that women simply don't have time to spend online and edit Wikipedia. They clearly do have time to spend online, but are spending it elsewhere.
Yes indeed. Well done for pointing it out. While Wikipedia is a top-ten website, the vast majority of people using it never edit it. With men, it's a minuscule proportion, and with women an even more minuscule proportion. Still, the disparity has an effect on the content.
Slashdot Mirror
First of all, a lot of money has been mis-spent. Sue Gardner herself voiced her qualms about this shortly before she left the Foundation, warning of the potential for log-rolling and corruption and spending money without benefit to the end user. In one case I have knowledge of, the entire board of a national Wikimedia organisation was flown into a city and put up in hotels for a "community consultation" where exactly one (1) community member turned up. That was $5,000 of donors' money gone right there, for nothing (although the board members all got a city stay out of it).
Secondly, some of the work done for that money has been incompetent. The VisualEditor, announced as "epically important" by Jimmy Wales, was a case in point. It was years late and so buggy and incomplete that the community switched the thing off, overriding the Foundation. It is my suspicion that this is partly a result of giving too many management and tech jobs to Wikipedia insiders selected on the basis of their enthusiasm for the Wikipedia ideal rather than their qualifications or expertise. Otherwise it's really hard to explain why jobs were done so badly. And that they were done badly is a fact that was acknowledged by Jimmy Wales, who said that Lila Tretikov was specifically hired to stop these sorts of failures and bring their house in order. And she may well do so.
But what to me is morally wrong about the banners is that they create the impression the Foundation is struggling financially to keep Wikipedia online without ads. And that's simply not the case. Wales used to boast how little it cost to keep Wikipedia online. In 2005, he said,
"So, we’re doing around 1.4 billion page views monthly. So, it’s really gotten to be a huge thing. And everything is managed by the volunteers and the total monthly cost for our bandwidth is about 5,000 dollars, and that’s essentially our main cost. We could actually do without the employee We actually hired Brion [Vibber] because he was working part-time for two years and full-time at Wikipedia so we actually hired him so he could get a life and go to the movies sometimes.”
Today, the Wikimedia Foundation attracts 21 billion page views a month – i.e. 15 times as much – but even 15 times the $5,000 a month Wales mentioned then would only be $75,000 a month, or $900,000 a year; and that's without allowing for economies of scale, and the fact that bandwidth has become cheaper since 2005. Yes, they have more images these days and so forth, but keeping Wikipedia online simply isn't their major expense, and a fraction of the money they have in hand.
By all means say that Wikipedia is ad-free and relies on donations – that's perfectly true – but don't imply that donations are needed to keep Wikipedia online and ad-free for another year, making everyone think that if not enough money comes in they'll have to pull the plug, or there will be ads by the end of next year. And that's a mainstream criticism within the Wikimedia movement. Just look at the Wikimedia mailing list discussion [gossamer-threads.com]. The person speaking there is this guy [wikipedia.org], a veteran volunteer, GLAMWiki coordinator and former vice-president of Wikimedia Australia.
> Wikimedia spending has increased by 1,000 percent in the course of a few years.
That could be a problem.
> Jimmy Wales counters complaints by saying the Foundation are merely prudent in ensuring they always have a reserve equal to one year's spending
Yes, a one year reserve on the low end of normal. You don't want Wikipedia to disappear when something bad happens, and SHIT HAPPENS. It's a top 10 web site, meaning it's in the big leagues with Google, Microsoft etc., except it's nonprofit. They may have to deal with stuff like Google is dealing with in Europe - disputes with multiple governments on the other side. You don't want Wikipedia to go bankrupt when some government or some company somewhere doe something stupid that costs the foundation $5 million to deal with and repair the damage.
> nothing to do with generating and curating Wikipedia content, a task that is handled entirely by the unpaid volunteer base.'
False. A large chunk of the budget is developing software for "generating and curating Wikipedia content". It's disingenuous to claim that developing tools for generating and curating content "have nothing to do" with generating and curating content.
That's a fair point – I meant it in the sense of actually researching and writing the text that appears in Wikipedia. And I did say "most" of these budget increases had nothing to do with that. For example, they are not using money from donations to have medical experts check the thousands of medical articles in Wikipedia for accuracy: that to me would be active content curation. Those tasks are left to volunteers, or, in one or two cases like the Cancer Research UK initiative, people funded by others.
What I do think is reprehensible is raising the spectre of ads in the fundraising banners. By all means say that Wikipedia is ad-free and relies on donations – that's perfectly true – but don't imply that donations are needed to keep Wikipedia online and ad-free for another year, making everyone think that if not enough money comes in they'll have to pull the plug, or there will be ads by the end of next year. And that's a mainstream criticism within the Wikimedia movement. Just look at the Wikimedia mailing list discussion. The person speaking there is this guy, a veteran volunteer, GLAMWiki coordinator and former vice-president of Wikimedia Australia.
It also gives anyone the ability to break things. Whatever you fix today, someone else can (and most likely will) break tomorrow.
Bof. :) It's just typical Wales bluster and misdirection. He flatters you when you agree with him, and rubbishes you when you criticise him. I have experience of both from him. Neither really mean much.
I think you may find that some or all of the Wiki Loves Monuments tools were written by people outside the Wikimedia Foundation. Have a look at this page and its edit history. (WMF staffers typically have a "(WMF)" at the end of their user name.) Similarly this page. Many of the most useful software components remain volunteer-contributed.
Have a look How pranks, hoaxes and manipulation undermine the reliability of Wikipedia. Technical info is certainly not immune when it comes to these problems with reliability. Even worse, an incredible number of people accept stuff in Wikipedia without questioning it, to the extent that it gets repeated by sources deemed authoritative. Here is Wikipedia re-writing history, and here is a journalist who discovered she had accidentally started a Wikipedia hoax when she saw a journalist from The New Yorker quote a joke on Twitter as fact – a joke which she had entered in Wikipedia five years earlier for fun, as a stoned sophomore.
Wikiwand is one of those engineering shops they are scared of, because WikiWand have been doing better work than their own programmers, and are presenting Wikipedia content in a prettier format. And if people migrate to Wikiwand, then as you rightly say, people don't see their fundraising banners.
... I want everyone to keep this in mind: If we don’t move faster and better than google, apple, and microsoft (and their ilk and kin), they will consume us and we will go away. It’s that simple.”
... As I see it, this is what this expansion is about, not about keeping Wikipedia online and ad-free. And that's not what they're telling the public.
Their new VP of Engineering, Damon Sicore (ex-Mozilla), spelt that fear out. According to Sicore, the WMF will have to “scale to a size that enables us to compete with the engineering shops that are trying to kill us. That means we need to double down on recruiting top talent, and steal the engineers from the sources they use because well they are REALLY GOOD.
Note well that what he's talking about going away there is the Wikimedia Foundation, not Wikipedia. The Wikipedia volunteers work for nothing; they are not reliant on donation money. And Wikipedia itself is also free, meaning it can be hosted by WikiWand, Google or anyone else who thinks they can present the content better than WMF. And if they managed to improve the content at the same time
Exactly. They could tell people what they actually want the money for, cause it ain't to keep Wikipedia online and ad-free. If they provided that info, then people could make an informed choice whether to support that effort or not. It would introduce some accountability. Two flagship projects that Wikipedia donations paid for over the past couple of years were considered abject failures by the volunteer community. The third, Wikipedia Zero, is controversial because it violates net neutrality.
It is circular if the more money they are able to take as "reserves", the more they feel they can spend. You could give them $500m, and they'd eventually expand to spend that ... and would then go for a $500m reserve the year after.
Please just don't repeat the meme that a Nature study found Wikipedia to be about as reliable as Britannica.
At least say that based on a small sample of articles, a journalistic news report in Nature opined that Wikipedia's science articles were only slightly less reliable than Britannica's, but considerably less well-written, and that Britannica contested those results. That would be the truth, rather than the meme. Mkay?
Your point about the hazards of anonymous contributions is well taken.
Oh yes, they do claim that. Jimmy Wales asserts that Wikipedia is "about as accurate as traditional encyclopedias and improving all the time." Really? Really? Really? Really? Really?
First of all, the Nature piece itself found Britannica to be superior – just not by as much as expected.
Secondly, it is a matter of record that Nature only examined science articles, many of them quite specialised. It is inexcusable to omit that qualification. There simply is no evidence at all that Wikipedia is superior to Britannica in other topic areas, and copious evidence within Wikipedia itself of how often articles are biased by special interest groups (just look at the history of Wikipedia arbitration cases).
Third, Nature chose to penalise Britannica for information that was omitted, but contained in Wikipedia: that was counted as an "error". As Britannica themselves pointed out, "Nature accused Britannica of 'omissions' on the basis of reviews of article excerpts, not the articles themselves. In a number of cases only parts of the applicable Britannica articles were reviewed." In other words, they butchered Britannica articles and then penalised Britannica for the fact that the remaining stump failed to contain some item of information that the full article would have contained.
Fourth, Nature noted, but chose not to penalise Wikipedia for, confusing presentation and bad style, essentially proposing that a haphazardly compiled jumble of facts should be considered equal to a well-structured, easy-to-understand introduction to a topic written by a world-renowned expert.
Lastly, there is by now a very long list of journalists and writers found to have copied spurious facts from Wikipedia. Where is a similar list of writers embarrassed for having gotten their information from Britannica? If Lord Leveson had looked up the founders of the Independent newspaper in Britannica, he would not have ended up ascribing that achievement to some unknown Californian student.
Beyond simple errors, there is very copious evidence of bias and covert paid editing in Wikipedia. The Croatian Wikipedia was taken over by right-wing extremists, to the point where the country's education minister warned students not to rely on it, as the country's history was thoroughly falsified by fringe groups. Those are all problems Britannica has never had.
I could go on. I have been a Wikipedian for nigh on ten years. I have seen the problems first-hand.
Back in 2005, Wikipedia was studied for accuracy against the Encyclopaedia Britannica. And they were found to be about the same. Since then Wikipedia has improved a lot, and they've stopped printing the Encyclopedia Britannica.
The 2005 "study" comparing Britannica and Wikipedia was not a rigorous peer-reviewed study, and they only looked at articles on relatively obscure science topics – a fact that no one seems to remember these days. The average Wikipedia vandal would not even know how to find an entry on a topic like the “kinetic isotope effect” or “Meliaceae” (two of the articles they looked at).
The assertion that Wikipedia is as reliable as Britannica is ludicrous. Granted, it's a lot bigger than Britannica, and has articles on breaking news stories, but as reliable? Of the English Wikipedia's nearly 5 million articles, at least 10% are on no Wikipedia editor's watchlist – a result of the continuous increase in the number of articles combined with the continuous decrease in the number of active editors – and those articles are sitting ducks for subtle vandalism.
Britannica may have had errors, but it did not contain false information inserted by anonymous people for fun or for financial gain; it contained no anonymous hatchet jobs written by people's rivals, and was not full of puff-pieces written by the biography subjects themselves.
Repeating this false "Wikipedia is as reliable as Britannica" meme only contributes to future cases like this one here, or this one.
That was part of Hill & Shaw's assertion (see endnote in the original article). I'm not sure I'm entirely convinced.
I guess this page wouldn't be complete without a reference to WP:Clubhouse? An Exploration of Wikipedia’s Gender Imbalance, a 2011 paper which contains a lot of interesting data related to all of this.
Anonymous editor surveys asking the question: Are you male or female?
Heh. The large gender imbalance has been reported by the Wikimedia Foundation for years. The survey-based estimates (sources are the UNU survey and a WMF survey) are not corrected in the footnote (which is about which statistics to use to estimate the percentage of mothers). The gender imbalance of Reddit is cited to Huffpost, it's 72% male (which is less male-dominated than Wikipedia), and the most extreme of all the major social media sites listed there. There are multiple citations for effect on content, including New York Times, Atlantic and a recent Guardian editorial. 1 in 50 relates to survey respondents, not contributors (which some have claimed may have a *slightly* higher proportion, based on sampling bias). For participation dropping after age 20 see UNU survey (linked). WMF efforts to address the gender gap are well publicised, Sue Gardner talked about it to the press until she was blue in the face. Women aged 18-34 in Facebook and Pinterest: sources linked. The surveys were commissioned by the Wikimedia Foundation itself, and comparison to social media is relevant in relation to the argument that women have no time to be online. Relevance of anonymity on women's participation per quoted text from Wiley Handbook. User interface impact is a hypothesis, based on recent discussions on Wikipedia's Gender Task Force page.
If your post is representative of Wikipedians' ability to read sources, Wikipedia is not destined for greatness.
It's exactly the other way round, according to this Huffpost piece. There are 99 million more monthly female visitors to the various social media sites (included in the analysis were Facebook, Yelp, Twitter, Myspace, Pinterest, YouTube, LinkedIn, Flickr, last.fm, deviantART, Google+, Digg, Bebo, Reddit and many others). Even in gaming, the largest demographic are now adult women.
I do think paid crowdsourcing is the future. All the talk about "sharing" is hypocritical spin, given that Google and other scrapers are using Wikipedia content to make money from ads, while unpaid volunteers do all the work. See Wall Street's internet darlings require an endless supply of idiots – Sharing Economy? Mug Economy, more like.
In terms of social development, the internet currently compares to the darkest age of the industrial revolution. So, more power to you.
Many academics have said the same thing to me. No desire, and not enough time, to argue endlessly with nincompoops. There is currently an initiative underway, focused on medical articles, to get funding for experts to peer-review Wikipedia articles. Once an article is up to scratch, there would then be a permanent link to the peer-reviewed version displayed on the article page. This might be a more promising approach, and it could scale to other topic areas as well. Experts would (1) be paid, (2) have the guarantee that their work will have some permanence, (3) derive a degree of kudos from their having been appointed to do this work. Funding would, in this case, come from charities interested in making reliable medical info available online. Currently, for example, there is a Wikipedian-in-Residence at Cancer Research UK, who is working with CRUK experts on Wikipedia's articles on cancer. The position is funded by the Wellcome Trust.
Quite. I think the whole discussion about what turns women off once they're there addresses only the smaller half of the problem. The main question is, why don't women come to begin with.
If you take things on people's say-so, you end up with this. Reliability is bad as it is – looking at an article, you can never be sure, without checking the references, whether it is a bunch of nonsense or a well-researched, accurate article. But if you allow everyone – well-intentioned, knowledgeable people like yourself as well as pranksters and hoaxers – to add stuff without citations, the site would quickly be corrupted altogether. No one can tell if you are sincere or making stuff up out of whole cloth.
Kozierok's First Law: "The apparent accuracy of a Wikipedia article is inversely proportional to the depth of the reader's knowledge of the topic."
Yup. And of course, you are looking at the English Wikipedia, which is the most-developed language version of Wikipedia. Yet Wikipedia claims to be available in over 280 languages, when in many of them, coverage is really, really rudimentary. See e.g. the "Mind the zombies" slide from a recent Wikimania presentation – basically, only 125 language versions of Wikipedia have more than 5 editors. The others are, to all intents and purposes, dead.
Note also that even English Wikipedia contributor numbers (as opposed to reader numbers, which are immense) are really quite small. (Someone else has pointed this out above.) If you look at this table, you'll see that there are only about 3,000 regular editors in the English Wikipedia, i.e. people who make more than 100 edits a month (i.e. about three a day). That number has shrunk considerably over the past few years, from a March 2007 high of 4785. At the same time, of course, the number of articles continues to increase constantly (now at 4.6 million). There are fewer contributors, and more articles to be watched over.
So Wikipedia has many articles that it does not have the (wo)manpower to curate adequately. In the early days, of course, everyone thought that "eventually" all these articles that someone started would become little masterpieces, but it's becoming clear that this will not happen. Little-watched biographies in particular are a problem, as the only people interested in them are usually the subjects and/or people who hate them for some reason, so they turn either into puff-pieces or hatchet jobs, with no one really noticing (there are well over half a million articles that no one has on their watchlist). Yet they are the top search hit when someone Googles the name online.
This reminds me of Newslines.org, a news-based crowdsourcing project that overlaps to a certain extent with Wikipedia, with the difference that they *do* pay their contributors. They report that their gender split is reversed: they have more women contributors than men, and also have more contributors from ethnic minorities than Wikipedia (in fact, their two leading contributors are black women).
The comparison is relevant in response to the argument that women simply don't have time to spend online and edit Wikipedia. They clearly do have time to spend online, but are spending it elsewhere.
Yes indeed. Well done for pointing it out. While Wikipedia is a top-ten website, the vast majority of people using it never edit it. With men, it's a minuscule proportion, and with women an even more minuscule proportion. Still, the disparity has an effect on the content.