On 6/13/06, Delirium delirium@hackish.org wrote:
Where is this potentially libelous material they are supposedly "loaded" with? If you are making this claim: There have in the past existed a nonzero number of libelous claims in Wikipedia articles, that's certainly a reasonable claim. But to claim they're "loaded" with such material requires some evidence.
Nine presses of random page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torrisholme Thirty six presses: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scot_Alan_Bittinger
And it's not all libel .. there is a lot of crap... advertisements... self promotion.. and people who are just confused (i.e http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subst:image_copyright).
The fact of the is that while we are catching a lot of things what matters is what we aren't catching. With no systematic review process, no resources to build one, and a 'communitiy' which is actively hostile to the mechanisms of such a process... we are pretty much screwed. We've invested very little in automated tools, and built no strong processes for quality control. There has been a lot of *TALK* but it's just that .. talk.
The fact is that we're simply allowing a huge amount of crap to slip by while we busily congratulate ourselves for the fraction that we did find.
As for accuracy, in the first place the projects have relatively good accuracy, as confirmed for example by the _Nature_ review. However, it is widely agreed that we can do a better job labelling which of our articles are in progress and which are "ready" to various degrees, and there are a number of proposals to do so. Since this requires some coding it is indeed possible that the Foundation could help out here by, for example, hiring a coder to implement some features to help make this happen. The fact that we haven't eliminated world hunger and cured cancer all at once doesn't mean that things are being "mismanaged", merely that there remains more to be done.
The nature review was focused on a small number of scientific subjects. Our coverage on many top level things is great. It's the stuff that people don't look for where the dragons lurk. By demanding that I provide evidence here you put me in the same silly situation where we often put our critics, if I go find something it will be fixed and you'll say "see no problem". But the fact remains that we still don't have any systematic way to reduce the chances that pages we serve up are not malicious drivel.