Among my friends and acquaintances, everybody distrusts Wikipedia and everybody uses it.

— Freeman Dyson, "How We Know" http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/mar/10/how-we-know/ *The New York Review of Books*, 10 March 2011.

(Discussing recent UK survey results.) We're trusted slightly more than the BBC. Now, that's a little scary, and probably inappropriate. ... *We* all know it's flawed. *We* all know we don't do as good a job as we wish we could do ... People trusted *Encyclopedia Britannica* - I think it was, like - 20 points ahead of us.

— Jimmy Wales, "State of the Wiki" http://new.livestream.com/wikimania/sunday2014 Wikimania speech, 10 August 2014.

The Wikimedia Foundation vision: Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. That's our commitment.

But "knowledge" of something implies confidence in its accuracy. While Wikipedia is untrustworthy, it is purveying something other than knowledge. This is a problem for the foundation, since it is failing to realise its vision - and for humankind, who deserves an encyclopaedia it can trust.

It is also a critical, existential vulnerability for Wikipedia. Google is factoring trustworthiness into its ranking algorithm. It has already stopped using Wikipedia's medical articles in its "knowledge graph". Rightly. Soon we'll see Wikipedia's medical content (rightly) demoted from (often) the top search result to 5th or 10th - or oblivion (rightly) on page two.

The recently released State of the Wikimedia Foundation 2015 Call to Action [3] lists a set of objectives. One of the items under the heading "*Focus on knowledge & community"* is "Improve our measures of community health and content quality, and fund effective community and content initiatives.

The quality parameter that most needs measuring and improving is reliability/trustworthiness - if we take the survival of Wikipedia as an important goal. Will the Foundation be *funding any staff positions* whose purpose is to measure the quality of the encyclopedia and nurture strategic initiatives specifically aimed at making Wikipedia an encyclopedia people can trust?

Five years ago the Wikimedia Movement Strategic Plan [4] resolved to measure and measurably improve the quality of our offering, and no resources were allocated and it did not happen.

1. Hal Hodson 28 February 2015 "Google wants to rank websites based on facts not links" http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22530102.600-google-wants-to-rank-websites-based-on-facts-not-links.html#.VPNoi-HQOtt *New Scientist* 2. Hal Hodson 20 August 2014 "Google's fact-checking bots build vast knowledge bank" http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22329832.700-googles-factchecking-bots-build-vast-knowledge-bank.html#.VPNqO-HQOts *New Scientist* 3. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Communications/State_of_the_Wikimedia_Founda... 4. https://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Movement_Strategic_Plan_Summar...

Anthony Cole http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Anthonyhcole