Jimmy Wales wrote:
I ask because I continue to work on a plan for a drive to Wikipedia 1.0, and a big part of that plan involves getting a realistic assessment of what a Wikipedia 1.0 will look like, relative to Britannica.
If I end up setting a 'target date' for Wikipedia 1.0 of 1 year in the future, what might we realistically expect to achieve? What if I set the 'target date' for 2 years in the future?
From this and another of your posts that suggested 'retail' (or was that someone else's post?) am I right in inferring that WP1.0 is something along the lines of the "Sifter" project that was proposed earlier? Or is it instead just a marker for the current Wikipedia? The latter would seem unsuited to freezing as a 1.0 though -- you wouldn't want to ever publish a print encyclopedia that contained even one article whose entire contents are "dskafldsafkjhdanz" or "i like ham", and the live Wikipedia invariably has a few of these. You wouldn't even really want to put that sort of thing on a CD-ROM. You wouldn't want to put blatantly factually incorrect information on a CD-ROM either, which is a bit of a problem (I've found plenty of Wikipedia articles with wrong dates and such).
Part of the advantage of Britannica is that you can be reasonably sure that when you read an article that states a fact, that fact is correct, or at least at the time of publication was believed to be correct by the experts in the field (no one can account for future discoveries, of course). If it is intended to rival Britannica, WP1.0 will have to have a similar level of reliability -- when it says someone was born on January 7, 1845, they better have actually been born on that date -- not, say, January 7, 1854. And when something is mentioned as a mainstream physics topic, it had better actually be one, not a fringe theory.
This is really what I see as the major obstacle in rivalling Britannica -- the sheer amount of information is a problem that will fix itself given some time. But to have *reliable* information is more difficult. Right now I use Wikipedia as a way to find out about topics I didn't know about, but not as an authoritative source -- I always check everything of importance (whether factual information or discussion of, say, philosophical topics) with another encyclopedia or a book before taking it as true. This is somewhat diminished on major articles -- I can be reasonably sure that the WW2 article is accurate, as it is high-profile enough and has enough people reading it. But for the articles on less high-profile topics, I'm not nearly as confident.
-Mark