[Wikipedia-l] in response to your article "Librarian: Don't use Wikipedia as source" in the Post-Standard

[Marco Krohn]

On Saturday 28 August 2004 06:06, Jens Ropers wrote:

Hi,

> If you doubt the standards of our editorial review mechanisms, go try
> and introduce some decidedly un-encyclopaedic (unproven, contentious
> and/or unacademic, etc.) information into an article of your choice.
> Then check back and see how long your contribution will remain in the
> article. My confidence is high that -- depending on how much this
> contribution falls short of encyclopedic standards -- you will find
> your contribution challenged on the respective article's discussion
> page (where you will likely be asked to provide references for your
> claims) or outright removed.

we just had someone on the de mailinglist who purposely modified four articles 
and introduced a mistake in each of them. He also told us which articles he  
modified and claimed that none of the mistakes was detected by now. I checked 
three of the articles he was right with his claim.

In the german article about "consumer surplus" the error was there for about 9
(!) days before I removed the nonesense. In other articles the errors were 
there for more than 9 days.

I agree with most of what you wrote, but I think it is a mistake to believe 
that we have any kind of review system which is on par (wrt error 
elimination) with a real peer review. At least my experience is that the 
probability for finding a mistake in Wikipedia is by far higher than for 
Britannica.

best regards,
  Marco