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Wikipedia and quality problems

So the cat is out of the bag: Wikipedia head honcho Jimbo Wales has acknowledged that Wikipedia has quality problems! Of course it has problems -- what did you think? Did you think that the entire Encyclopedia Britannica was written in 5 years? Of course not -- I'm sure it took many more years and I doubt that EB looked as good as Wikipedia did after 5 years.

Ok, Wikipedia critics, listen up: Wikipedia sucks, don't use it! Jimbo has said so himself. Go buy another encyclopedia and talk about that. Dig into your paid-for encyclopedia and start complaining about it. I'm sure the authors of that encyclopedia will be very receptive to your feedback and will fix your problems post haste. And they'll be glad to sell you another copy with the improvements you suggested.

I'm hoping that since the cat is out of the bag now, people will shut up about Wikipedia -- I'm sick of hearing the constant bickering about how it does not measure up. Wikipedia will never be complete, never fully accurate. It will always be catching up, given that information that should be in the wiki is created everyday and cannot be captured as fast. The Wikipedians will carry on their work and in another 5 years time it will be better than encyclopedia britannica -- its only a matter of time.

For everyone else, especially poor people and people from developing nations of the world, Wikipedia will be an awesome resource. These people don't care about evil Mr. Bill Gates' entry. They will care about topics like water purification or housing, where Wikipedia can bring knowledge to places that can't afford a real encyclopedia.

Wikipedia's bottom-up approach gives top-down university stiffs like Larry Sanger the willies. People like him don't understand how the unwashed masses could possibly create something of worth without a proper university education. Lack of quality is Wikipedia's greatest recruiting tool -- when someone who possesses more knowledge on a topic than a current article, it motives people to help out. This process is pervasive until all the experts are contributing to the project and it can truly rival real encyclopedias. But guess what? Its a different model from writing a traditional encyclopedia and it will take a massive amount of time -- and 5 years is not nearly enough to judge if Wikipedia is a successful or failed model.

In the meantime, the only tricky thing about Wikipedia's lack of quality is that no one gets hurt in the process. If someone builds something from faulty information in Wikipedia and ends up killing themselves, thats bad. But I believe that Wikipedia has built up enough of a community that self polices itself that this is not likely to happen.

In the meantime, Wikipedia will be useful to some people on this planet. Myself included.

Technorati Tags: bottom-up, collaboration, quality, wikipedia

Posted by Mayhem at October 19, 2005 01:04 PM