[WikiEN-l] Slipping quality as Wikipedia gets bigger (formerly Can you trust Wikipedia?)

[Tom Cadden]

--- Puddl Duk <puddlduk at gmail.com> wrote:

> >
> > I'd actually give Wikipedia an 8-8.5 on
> trustworthiness. Writing quality
> > is another thing entirely.
> >
> 
> Lets not delude ourselves. We have a long way to go.
>  I was just
> looking at some old EB articles the other day;
> Guerrilla [warfare],
> written by   ..........  T. E. Lawrence.  And
> Space-time, written by 
> ..........  Albert Einstein.
> 
> EB has literally tens of thousands of superb, first
> rate articles
> written by the world's leading experts and polished
> by an editorial
> staff. Yet we enjoy make fun of a handful of
> embarrassing errors or
> shortcomings that have.
> 
> Conversely, Wikipedia has literally thens of
> thousands of piles of
> festering crap, a huge amount of unverified, uncited
> information and
> only a handful of first rate articles. We've been
> the media's little
> darling for a long time, not because we are great,
> but because
> Wikipedia works _at all_. The media honeymoon won't
> last forever.
> 
> Article validation might help some, but we also need
> a check valve to
> keep the good stuff and reject the bad. Experts and
> great writers
> aren't going to stick around and watch their work
> perpetually
> degraded.
> 
> Lest I sound too harsh, remember that the OED, also
> written with the
> help of volunteers, took over fifty years to fully
> publish.

One problem is that as Wikipedia gets bigger, the odds
are that some articles will get substandard edits but
no-one will notice, because the people who previously
worked on the articles will be working on newer
articles. I was off Wikipedia for a month and when I
came back I noticed that a host of articles I had
keeping an eye on because they were in my area of
expertise had had some appalling edits done. Most of
the people who had brought the articles up to a very
high standard had either left Wikipedia (some driven
away from the frustration of trying to maintain
quality, or because they had other commitments
elsewhere), were working elsewhere on Wikipedia, or
were simply fed up constantly proofing edits in those
articles. 

We need to be able to in effect save articles that
achieve a high encyclopædic quality as a form of
permanent template, with subsequent edits perhaps
being worked on and discussed elsewhere before
inclusion. Otherwise the danger is that articles,
having climbed to high quality will slip down to
drivel. I noticed that a couple slipped from an A
standard to D through a series of poor edits that
weren't noticed by people who knew the facts on the
topic. Articles that were better than equivalent
articles in Brittanica, etc suddenly were reduced
through a handful of edits to third rate high school
essay standard. 

The real danger is that the bigger Wikipedia gets the
more poor edits will slip through. In terms of quality
we may go backward rather than forward. This is likely
to become a bigger problem, and Wikipedia's
credibility may well rest on how we deal with it. 

Thom Cadden 



		
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