On Wednesday, September 14, 2005, at 12:28 PM, Delirium wrote:
JAY JG wrote:
One of Wikipedia's biggest issues has always
been getting taken
seriously as an encyclopedia, or being accepted by educators as a
reliable (or even acceptable) source. Credibility is also the thing
other encyclopedias (i.e. Britannica) harp on. Credibility also
brings donations and other kinds of support and funding.
We can pretend it doesn't matter what people think of us, but if we
do I think we're sticking our heads in the sand.
I think this is an issue better solved by the validation project
that's being planned for some time now.
That process is called FAC :). You could have something like "Featured
Article Review" that periodically goes over the FAs to make sure they
meet the standard etc...
Well, I meant the broader validation project that's been discussed on
and off. FAC is a somewhat high standard; there are plenty of other
Wikipedia articles not up to that standard that are still good and
reliable (but incomplete) sources of information. Ideally we could have
a few grades ("unreviewed", "not crap", "pretty good",
"featured" or
something). In addition, it'd be nice to tag particular
revisions---there's currently no guarantee that the current version of a
featured article isn't filled with recently-inserted errors.
-Mark