[WikiEN-l] Re: Wikipedia in the news

[Sheldon Rampton]

Stan Shebs wrote:

>Jimbo is being a little too modest when he says that scholars haven't
>picked articles for fact-checking - we have a number of scholars and
>other authorities who are WPers, the articles in their areas get pretty
>thoroughly fact-checked, and they watch those articles closely to see
>that new errors don't get in. The only thing that hasn't happened yet
>is a large-scale systematic review.

But that wasn't the question. The article asked if Wikipedia had 
tested its reliability by taking a number of RANDOMLY-SELECTED 
articles and submitting them to scholars for fact-checking, to which 
Jimbo admitted that they hadn't.

It's certainly true that some individual articles in the Wikipedia 
have been carefully vetted for accuracy by "scholars and other 
authorities," but that doesn't mean that all or even most articles 
meet that standard.

Just out of curiosity, I clicked the "Random page" link a few times. 
Out of ten articles, I found five stubs, two of which had frequent 
grammatical errors. The remaining five included one article that 
seemed strongly opinionated about the [[Nintendo Seal of Quality]], 
and four articles of varying length that appear from what I can tell 
to be accurate and appropriate for their topics. (Of course, I'm not 
really qualified to judge the accuracy of some of the articles which 
discuss topics outside my areas of interest.)

My little experiment isn't sufficient to serve as the basis for any 
conclusions, but if two out of ten articles are grammatically-flawed 
stubs, it would seem to support the article's contention that 
Wikipedia doesn't yet meet the quality-control standards of a 
commercial encyclopedia like Encyclopedia Britannica.

On the other hand, Wikipedia beats Britannica with regard to sheer 
NUMBER of articles.

--Sheldon Rampton