If viewed as a whole, Wikipedia is one of the truly
great web projects and its success cannot be questioned.
However, the model by which Wikipedia operates has its
limits and for some things it doesn't work. One of the
things it cannot do is to make high quality articles on
controversial topics.
I'm writing as someone who recently decided to stop
editting Wikipedia after making about 3000 edits over
a year or so. The area I most worked in was the Middle
East, about which I have substantial expertise. The hope
I had when I started was that despite some ups and downs
articles would gradually get better; that is, the average
quality would slowly improve over time so that the
long-term benefit of one's labors would be clear. Alas,
it is not so. Sometimes a serious effort from a few
contributors with NPOV at heart can create a major
improvement in an article, but it only lasts as long
as they man the trenches to fend off the barbarians.
A moment of lapsed attention and the article is back to
where it was before.
The dynamic process is like a cup of water with some sand
in it. You can get the sand closer on average to the top
by energetic stirring, but any success in getting it closer
to the top than that average is fleeting. Stop stirring
and all your prior work is gone in an instant.
I frankly don't think this problem can be solved by making
small changes. Tweaking the rules won't help very much.
Yes, people should have to write NPOV rather than merely
accept it in principle, but who is going to enforce that
rule and who is going to stop the enforcers from becoming
a sort of star chamber which in practice is a source of POV?
Having a "latest stable edition" won't work either, because
any sort of mechanism for changing the stable edition based
on consensus will never gain that consensus. (If you doubt
this, review the history of attempts to delete truly awful
MidEast articles via VfD; it is nearly impossible.)
Of course I wish the best of luck to those willing to devote
more of their time to trying to fix the unfixable, but I have
personally had enough. I hope to return later on to edit in
an area (mathematics) where Wikipedia works pretty well.
Zero.
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