On Saturday 28 August 2004 19:26, Christopher Mahan wrote:
He also told us which articles he modified and claimed that none of the mistakes was detected by now.
Could it perhaps be that he was trusted to not do that (misplaced trust if you ask me).
no, he created a new user account for every new "contribution".
A real peer review is done by people who are paid.
In science reviewers are often not paid for their work. Which btw in many cases means that the scientist who wrote the paper is paid by the public and the two other scientists who are doing the review for free (free for the journal) are paid by the public too. For the resulting journal, libraries have to pay huge amounts of (public) money. Which is a great system for the publishing company. Additionally the publishing companies even claim copyright for their "work".
At least my experience is that the probability for finding a mistake in Wikipedia is by far higher than for Britannica.
And britannica has been around what, 100+ years?
right, this surely makes a difference. But if it is possible to introduce bugs into Wikipedia that easily then I have little doubt that Wikipedia will always contain more mistakes per sentence than Britannica etc.
Marco, tell your friend next time he wants to experiment, to use the sandbox.
And if you like Britannica so much, then, it's there for you to use. Oh, and I forgot, you have to pay to read Britannica articles. (look up Blade Runner, the movie)
???
Neither is this guy my friend, nor did I say that I like Britannica more than Wikipedia. As you can easily find out I am contributing to the German as well as to the English Wikipedia.
If Jens challenges the author of the article it is perfect legitim to tell Jens what happended to "de" in a similar case.
Wikipedians are very enthusiastic about Wikipedia and I still am a big fan of this project and tell everyone about it (whether s/he wants to hear about it or not ;-). But in our enthusiasm we should not forget that there are areas, were Wikipedia can improve. I believe that factual correctness still is such an area where Wikipedia can and should become better and the example from "de" makes that even clearer.
It is perfect to counter my arguments, or if you tend to agree to think about what we can improve. For instance I consider Tomasz response usefull. His idea can certainly help with dealing with the overwhelming amount on "recent changes" and therefore could make Wikipedia better.
On the other hand the last part of your comment reads "go away and use Britannica instead", which I don't find too helpfull.
best regards, Marco