--- Puddl Duk puddlduk@gmail.com wrote:
I'd actually give Wikipedia an 8-8.5 on
trustworthiness. Writing quality
is another thing entirely.
Lets not delude ourselves. We have a long way to go. I was just looking at some old EB articles the other day; Guerrilla [warfare], written by .......... T. E. Lawrence. And Space-time, written by .......... Albert Einstein.
EB has literally tens of thousands of superb, first rate articles written by the world's leading experts and polished by an editorial staff. Yet we enjoy make fun of a handful of embarrassing errors or shortcomings that have.
Conversely, Wikipedia has literally thens of thousands of piles of festering crap, a huge amount of unverified, uncited information and only a handful of first rate articles. We've been the media's little darling for a long time, not because we are great, but because Wikipedia works _at all_. The media honeymoon won't last forever.
Article validation might help some, but we also need a check valve to keep the good stuff and reject the bad. Experts and great writers aren't going to stick around and watch their work perpetually degraded.
Lest I sound too harsh, remember that the OED, also written with the help of volunteers, took over fifty years to fully publish.
One problem is that as Wikipedia gets bigger, the odds are that some articles will get substandard edits but no-one will notice, because the people who previously worked on the articles will be working on newer articles. I was off Wikipedia for a month and when I came back I noticed that a host of articles I had keeping an eye on because they were in my area of expertise had had some appalling edits done. Most of the people who had brought the articles up to a very high standard had either left Wikipedia (some driven away from the frustration of trying to maintain quality, or because they had other commitments elsewhere), were working elsewhere on Wikipedia, or were simply fed up constantly proofing edits in those articles.
We need to be able to in effect save articles that achieve a high encyclopædic quality as a form of permanent template, with subsequent edits perhaps being worked on and discussed elsewhere before inclusion. Otherwise the danger is that articles, having climbed to high quality will slip down to drivel. I noticed that a couple slipped from an A standard to D through a series of poor edits that weren't noticed by people who knew the facts on the topic. Articles that were better than equivalent articles in Brittanica, etc suddenly were reduced through a handful of edits to third rate high school essay standard.
The real danger is that the bigger Wikipedia gets the more poor edits will slip through. In terms of quality we may go backward rather than forward. This is likely to become a bigger problem, and Wikipedia's credibility may well rest on how we deal with it.
Thom Cadden
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