{"id":233,"date":"2004-06-02T19:41:39","date_gmt":"2004-06-02T19:41:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/maydanoz.arved.priv.at\/blog\/?p=233"},"modified":"2004-06-02T19:41:39","modified_gmt":"2004-06-02T19:41:39","slug":"did_wikipedia_f","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/arved.priv.at\/weblog\/2004\/06\/02\/did_wikipedia_f\/","title":{"rendered":"Did Wikipedia fail?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Horst is guilty of preventing me from doing university stuff. He wrote a grumpy rant about the shortcomings of Wikipedia<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Horst claims: Wikipedia generates noise, not knowledge. Previous encyclopedias were well-researched and contained precise information that could be trusted to be correct. Wikipedia, on the other hand, contains a large amount of errors, omissions and superfluous trivia.<\/i><\/div>\n

I wrote several long comments trying to correct his picture of Wikipedia, among others<\/p>\n

What happens if there is a bug in your Brockhaus? There is no easy way, you as a reader and maybe expert in one special field can correct it. You have to wait for the next edition before the readers get the fixed version.
\nWhat happens if you read a “random hit” from Google and notice a bug? Often it is not easy to find a contact address of the author, and even if there is a contact information, there is no gurantee this bug will ever be fixed.
\nThere is no easy way to tell the world that this information is wrong.
\nThe Wikipedia contributors believe that n+1 eyes find more bugs than n eyes.
\nI 100% agree with you, that an encylopedia is about trust. To help your decision about the trust of a Wikipedia article, you can also look at the whole history. If a fact has survived more than 100 edits, i would trust it more than one that has been added only recently. (One feature I am still missing in Wikipedia is a “cvs annotate” like functionality) <\/div>\n

Another comment from myself, about linking in Wikipedia.<\/p>\n

I noticed that the linking inside Wikipedia is a lot better than in the WWW (even better than in Weblogs), so it is very easy to browse from one article to the next one. I think the reason is the well defined naming scheme, which allows linking to articles that don’t exist at the time the article was written<\/div>\n

I really should do more research on this topic and write a longer article in the summer holidays.<\/p>\n

A very pessimistic follow up from Horst:
\nThe good thing about it — giving everybody who visits the opportunity to share their knowledge — turned into a bad thing because there are just too many people out there who are feeling compelled to share their lack of knowledge.
\n<\/i><\/div>\n

This could be generalized to apply to the Internet or Publishing. And I really hope that this is not the future.
\nOn the german Wikipedia Mailinglist there is currently a similar discussion<\/a> on how to ensure the quality.
\nIf you are a wikipedia contributor, I would really like to know, if you can confirm Horst’s claim that the quality of your contributions was decreased by the follow-up edits?
\nUpdate 2004-06-03:<\/b> Horsts article is making a lot of noise in the german Blogosphere. Some articles and comments are interesting to read:<\/p>\n