JohnA, in that thread commented:

I thought I'd pick up on it, because I really don't think it is true. There may not be one easy answer, but there are a long list of changes, that taken all together would make Wikipedia a less toxic entity than it is at its worst.

One of the problems that WP faces is that because everything can be set against a desire to fix all problems simultaneously, it is always possible to undermine any change that moves towards a goal of a better encyclopedia.

Perhaps, it is time to take stock with some constructive suggestions.

We know that there is nothing difficult about implementing better BLP policies: they are not hard to do, it is just hard to get people to accept the change. If it is important, WMF should force the change.

Zero tolerance for abusive admins (which in turn leads to zero tolerance for abusive editors). Cut the crap, boot out Guy, welcome him back with open arms if he reforms.

Implement ArbCom for Articles. The WMF should empower an editorial oversight body with policies imposed at arms length. Buy them legal cover if needs be, rather than doing the wrong thing by trying to hide behind the wall of 230 immunity.

Make your mind up time: is being a great editor the route to power, or is it simply that WP needs aclass of bureaucrats to leave the editors to do good things. Either get rid of hanger on admins, or empower those with sound judgement.

Disband projects on a regular basis. Projects are a good short term solution to focusing on an area of content. Over time they evolve into ownership and cliques.

Allow flagged revisions to implement access control.

Get rid of IP editing.

Get rid of sockpuppeting being a crime. Let people sock if they want, then in discussions, people will have to address the arguments raised rather than the volume of noise. (In a dispute, you summarise the reasons given and then test each one, rather than saying 99 people say black is white and only 10 say otherwise therefore black must be white).

Centralise control of policy rather than the demented policy control of the mob which has been shown to be unable to control Those Of Status nor effect sensible reforms.

...and so on. These are not hard changes.

Nice try but none of the above suggestions will work.

Nice try, but that sweeping criticism doesn't work, either.

I cannot be forced to do your thinking for you. Its only "sweeping" because the reply is comprehensive as to result, without worrying about details.

Rather like stating that the Free Energy machine that you've been building in your garage will never produce any excess energy regardless of your supposed ingenuity, I need only to state the result without reference to the actual machine.

As I said, none of Dogbiscuit's suggestions, although laudable in themselves, will work or even come close to being implemented. None.

Besides which, the last thing we need is Wikipedia to shatter into a thousand little Wikipedias through endless forking of the content. That's what would happen if Dogbisuit's suggestions were ever close to being implemented.

As I see it, most of these suggestions will not work because they will not come close to being implemented. All very good suggestions, though.

In basketball, you miss every shot on goal that you don't take.

Hmm, my principle is this.

There was a point, somewhere near the beginning of the project where there was a level of optimism that Wikipedia was onto something. I reckon many here, including its most vehement critics would acknowledge that.

Some of those people are now in the "If only..." camp. I'm there.

Some are in the group that believes that there are systemic flaws that cannot be resolved and the fundamental concept is based on a fallacy that on closer inspection can be shown to be unworkable.

I don't think we can justify the latter position, because it seems that WP can produce works of quality, we just cannot automatically tell good from bad without some other knowledge.

So what we have is a water pump which we are designing for dusty children in Africa. We know that water pumps can work, but this one is a novel design which we think should be better but sometimes it pumps out water, and other times it falls to pieces. We can decide to give up and go and buy a different kind of water pump or we can examine why it does not work properly. As we find problems, we can fix them and we would reasonably assume we will get better performance and more reliability. There may come a point that in fixing the faults, we discover a part of the design cannot work as intended and it needs a complete redesign, but at the moment there are so many faulty parts that we cannot tell bad from good.

If I went back to my IT analogy: I have a faulty program. I could start again and write it in a different way, but then I know from experience that I will have written another faulty program, just with different problems. So unless I can show that the program is so badly written it is not worth patching up, I would normally go through a process of identifying and fixing problems. This is typically an iterative approach, as we know some fixes will themselves contain faults, or that in fixing one part, a fault is uncovered in another part of the system. By a planned approach, one can bring stability to a system. (To give you an idea of my experience on this, I worked on a system which had 20 full time people supporting it for a single customer and was doing 2 releases a day to try and fix problems when I arrived. There was no planning, simply fixing what the customer shouted about that day. It took a year but I became the single support person working part time with quarterly releases planned by prioritising problems and doing incremental fixes, all on a system I had no prior experience of and no knowledge of the language it was written in).

I stick to my original premise: there are lots of easy fixes to make things better and eventually enough easy fixes will make WP Good Enough. The hard thing is getting a change to allow them to be implemented. Half the problem is people sitting in power on the policy pages pretending what is there works, is perfect and Shall Not Be Changed. There is an easy workaround for that though: the WMF step up to the plate and start dictating change. They can switch off the servers or ban people on a whim, so i should not be that hard.

Part of the problem — and I daresy it may well be the most insidious part — is the culture of narcissistic wounding and its obvious fallout — loss of trust and respect.

No, It's Racket Science.

Until you comprehend that, everything you do or say about Wikipedia will be sheer futility.

Jon

...and replacing the decent requirement for trust and respect with simple AGF does not help.

Another part of the problem is that the whole thing is simply too damn big. And with that comes an inertia that makes it nigh impossible for any useful reforms to be carried out. As said by others elsewhere here, the only major changes that have been made so far were due to external forces.

At least the German WP has taken on a few of the points given above, namely flagged versions (although still in a test phase), and no IP editing.

Really? This is news to me. I shall be sure to cite it the next time I propose semi-protection of BLPs and am met with the response that the Foundation is adamant that no registration be required to meaningfully edit its projects. Thank you.

I'm not convinced of that. At any one time, people deal with an article.

Yes there is a need to segment policy so that it is more aware that the criteria for trivia articles is different from general knowledge is different from scientific is different from controversial politics, but I don't think the number of articles makes that a problem.

Where size matters is in administration. One thing that could reduce administrative burden is by accepting that vandalism would be reduced by validated accounts, even if that lost some editors too. Another reduction would be in killing off a sizeable proportion of the drama by <insert all your favourite methods here>.

Splitting Wikipedia might not be a bad thing, and does not necessarily make it unmanageable.

Oops. I just checked again and the German WP does not have a "no IP" policy. I was certain they did at one point - maybe it was a test run. My mistake. Sorry about that.

In Britain, we call it netball and it is played mainly by teenage girls. I doubt that we have any teenage girls posting here.

Arguably the same applies to every sport in which the scoring involves placing the ball (or other game piece) in a particular place at the end of the field, whether it be Football (of either sort), Hockey, Rugby (also technically a form of football I'm told), or anything else.

much like baseball is really called rounders and played mainly by children. Our version has the advantage that we don't have to sing silly songs, do some stretching exercises or worry about lots of pointless numbers to cope with the boredom.

I'll get me coat.

Wikipedia's main problem is that it is unreliable. Essentially everyone involved with it knows that. It's secondary problem is that the apparatus that has been cobbled together to address reliability problems has as much or more authoritarianism as is needed for the problem, but no accountability to make sure that the "corrective" actions are working in the right direction.

To my thinking, the reliability matter can't really be saved. If you want reliability, use Britannica. The wiki method for a broad-ranging encyclopedia has been tried, and it simply doesn't work and never will, in my opinion.

But that's not the end of the story. Wikipedia is here, people use it, and it's not going away. I think the best thing this forum can do is to beat the drum loudly about how unreliable Wikipedia is, and about particular ways that Wikipedia is unreliable and impeded in becoming more reliable. My ideal is that when the mythical poor African child finally gets internet connectivity and looks up something on Wikipedia, he will already understand perfectly well that he should regard it as a criminal enterprise, as far as putting his trust in it goes.

I think that's part of the answer, and the reason why I'm still here. I think its my right as a freethinking individual to criticize Wikipedia, its strained relationship with reality and its non-existent relationship with scholarship, accuracy, reliability, ethics etc.

I don't have all of the answers to Wikipedia, but I question very much the idea that's been floated around here that all you need to do is change the rules of the game and get rid of a few abusive individuals - no, no, no! It will never happen.

The problem is not that there are poor rules, its that the rules change over time and are inconsistently applied - any rule you care to name. The rules change based on who is supposedly breaking them, or who is applying them, or the motives of the person breaking the rules. Some rules clearly conflict with others. All of the rules are for reasonable people (or at least at one time they were). Now the rules are the enemy every bit as much as some key individuals in the hierarchy, and they are applied unreasonably by unreasonable people.

That is the nature of anarchy which is what Wikipedia is based on.

The greatest problem is that Wikipedia IS a game and not an educational project. As such, it is impossible to deal with Wikipedia once and for all unless the game is stopped dead in its tracks and without causing Wikipedia to splinter into a thousand mini-Wikipedias.

Some people will not ever accept that Wikipedia has to stop playing its game with history - they like the game and they're good at it! Those people represent the danger of forking if Wikipedia were ever to go off air (for whatever reason you can imagine).

The solution (at least my solution) would avoid having to deal with a splintered Wikipedia or trying to take over Wikipedia either by entryism or by coup d'etat.

Its overall unreliability is one of the major reasons why I stopped working on Wikipedia. I once worked on single article to the best of my ability and came up with something that was (to my opinion and to those of various reviewers) well-referenced, accurate and as impartial as possible. At no point did I assume ownership of the article, and I actively sought the opinions of others in looking for corrections and potential for improvement. There was no edit-warring and the development of the article was largely professional and very satisfying.

Afterwards it dawned on me that this is just one article. And since Wikipedia as a whole is unreliable, how would anyone be expected to know that what I wrote was reliable? Knowing that, the motivation to continue vanished.

There's no way that I regret putting in all this work only to walk away from it. The subject was something that interested me, and I guess I was sorta using this article as a way to get the subject clear in my own mind. If I were to work on a different encyclopedia project in the future, I would happily take what I wrote with me. But until reliability, among other issues, is properly addressed, I'll stay away from Wikipedia.

I think that mis-characterises what I am suggesting. I don't think I suggest that perfection will be achieved, nor do I suggest that there are a specific list of issues that will achieve near perfection.

What I do suggest is that there are obvious changes that should be applied which would do much to make Wikipedia better.

Let's take another IT analogy: Windows, where I could paint a long parallel between a derided system which at least has been through a fixing process and is a different beast from Windows for Workgroups.

Without debating the issues individually, my fundamental point is that there is a long bug list on Wikipedia processes. I would suggest that the vast majority of bugs have solutions. The end result of applying fixes to those bugs is a better Wikipedia, and I believe that the result could well be good enough.

If we gain acceptance of the message that there are problems and these problems are redeemable, then people may accept also that if these problems are not getting fixed, then there is a problem with the fix process that also needs attending to. My fix for that, as Wikipedia is anarchic, and the anarchy seems unlikely to fix itself, is that a solution needs to be imposed. In turn, I do not see that as insurmountable, as there is a structure in place that is effectively empowered to do that - WMF.

It may be 3 steps forward, 2 steps back, but either saying it is irredeemable or that all individual fixes are not the complete solution leaves us where we are. Change the rules and get rid of a few abusive individuals would be a step, but it is clearly not the entire solution, and it is a Wikipedian error to characterise it in that way - it is why Wikipedia cannot heal itself because that is exactly what you hear at the Village Pump, or the policy talk pages, on a regular basis. It is that unhealthy attitude that assumes that nothing can improve on the current (im)perfection of what is there now - "because it works"* and anything else is unproven. Yes, the problem is very much in the people, but I do believe that most people are redeemable if you give them the tools and the environment to succeed.

*Ho, hum.

You are kind of a newbie in this realm. Many people have made very specific points of this nature to people in power there. They have no stake in changing. Part of it is the personalities involved; part of it is something else, most probably, that's not transparent, and remains unclear as a motivation for no-change. But it is there and it is strong.

The bottom line is that there is no carrot and no stick, so nothing is going to change. This is a group of people who need a really big stick to behave, or a really juicy incentive carrot to make any small movement - not to mention longstanding changes to correct recurrent problems.

In a normal business, you'd have shareholders and investors being concerned, or you'd have the threat of lawsuits. They have neither. They also don't care much about bad press, and seem to be getting away with ignoring it too, for the moment.

Yes, I do agree that there is a fundamental blockage - but what is it that makes the WMF disinterested (at best) or malignly averse (at worst) to fixing Wikipedia (assuming that is where the final responsibility lies or should lie)? I've got a fair idea of the cultural background that has brought this about too.

I think though that my strategy for change is that if the list of fixes is obvious and undeniable, eventually change will come. That might be because the community becomes so dysfunctional that it becomes a necessity, or it may be that the community has an epiphany (if you like, the Giano/Cla68 strategy of "if we beat them up enough, they will understand" eventually works) or WMF gets it, they get sued into it, Jimbo has a moment of lucidity, or some external pressure arises. I'm not sure.

However, if one puts forward the premise that it is somehow irredeemable then one has no argument to put to those who might be able to effect change that they have a responsibility - you are effectively telling them - you are right to do nothing, because there is nothing we can thing of that you could do to fix it. So, for the moment, I'd like to keep the drip, drip, drip of You Can Fix This up. For me, the alternative is simply to walk away, because I am pretty sure that Wikipedia will not disappear through the whinings of the likes of me.

There is no doubt that WP has accreted over the years a bewildering and crazy-making set of vaguely worded, mutually inconsistent, and mutually contradictory rules. The existence of this collection of verbal cudgels is that Wikipedians routinely beat each other about the head and shoulders with randomly chosen weapons from the armory of rules, in accordance with the jousting procedures employed in talk pages, RfCs, RfArs, etc.

But even if the set of rules were honed down to sensible and mutually consistent set, it still wouldn't be the best regulatory model. An enterprise like Wikipedia needs protocols and practices which are more evolved than what can be achieved with jejune rules.

Mobs don't have "epiphanies" they have "riots"



I do not suggest that Wikipedia will simply go away, it won't. I suggest that strategies designed to regularize the rules obscure the fact that it is a game and not an educational project.

That is but one element of a solution. Bring back some sanity to the effort should allow people to see the wood for the trees. Allow for expert input. Get WMF to take responsibility, either directly or through delegation. You can minimise the game-playing. It seems you are now saying it cannot be fixed because it is a game. My point is that there are dozens of fixes, which are not just rule fixes, but cultural, managerial and whatever anyone else cares to identify.

It may well be that taking the game out of the project brings about its demise, but I don't think so. The game players don't contribute much, you would still have the enthusiasts with their pockets of expertise.

I think the project could be significantly restructured to remove the common man element (where appropriate, depending on where you stand on the Pokemon inclusionist debate) as originally it needed the infinite number of monkeys to get breadth of coverage. Biw it has breadth, and the monkeys can be switched off, aside from some sort of marketing requirement that allows them some article sandpit to play in.

What's your ideal strategy to move things forward?

It is not hard to design a game so that it is educational, or to structure an educational project in the form of a game. Wikipedia has aspects of an MMPORG, but it's more like Paintball than an educational game.

If they wanted The Encyclopedia Game to be both an authentic game and an educational project that yielded an authentic quality encyclopedia as a byproduct of the game, it would be possible to design it that way, with suitably crafted rules of the game play. There are some college professors who have indeed done that with their classes.

How do you know anything is "reliable"? Taking this to (albeit ridiculous) extremes, everything that has appeared in Nature or Astronomy and Astrophysics could well be complete fabrication.



That's a bit negative. Or are you saying you simply didn't want to invest the time to build up the necessary reputation? This is entirely understandable, and the main reason why Wikipedia will never attract significant numbers of editors with iron-clad reputation. These people have spent decades of their lives establishing their credibility, and won't be too pleased when User:PimplyKid tells them to move to shut up and move to the back of the intellectual bus.

...especially when User:PimplyAdmin flies in to enforce WP:NOR and WP:OWN

That's also part of the problem. Credibility. You're judged not on the merits of your own work but upon the demerits of everybody else.

There were other reasons for me leaving, not just this.

Individual reputation in a collective work such as Wikipedia might exist internally (with other editors) but not to the casual reader. And with that, there is no way for readers to know how reliable any given article may be, no matter who you are or for how long you have been an editor. I'm not convinced that the FA star helps here, either.

...and do you think there is a solution? The various offshoots of Wikipedia, like Veropedia and Citizendium have tried to address that problem (whether they have achieved anything there, I'm not sure as I have no sense of either of them having achieved a critical mass where we can say, their model works and it should be ported to Wikipedia).

I don't think it is necessary for a critic to have a solution, but I do think for criticism to be constructive that it should be grounded in the belief that it can be acted upon. It really is a pointless activity just to list faults repetitively without any belief that this will result in some form of improvement.

The rate of change may be slow, but I think we have seen there is a growing understanding among the WIkipedian population that Wikipedia is more flawed than the GodKing would have us believe, and as such the foundations for reform are there. People are less willing to abide by the old guard's assertions that policies and processes are as good as can be for the process.

In the end, collaborative editing is not novel. Producing encyclopedic articles is not novel. Publishing on the web is not novel. Producing different views for different audiences is not novel. All these elements have been shown to work. There is no evidence I have seen that says that the principle of Wikipedia cannot work. That is not saying that the way it is being done now is not fundamentally flawed, but in principle can be fixed.

As near as I can diagnose the dysfunction, it doesn't work on WP because of the bewildering WP:Hodgpodge of mutually contradictory and mutually inconsistent WP:Rules which Wikipedians routinely use as Kiboshnikovs to clobber each other on a daily basis. If they had just stuck to WP:5P (including WP:IAR), it probably would have worked reasonably well.

Collaborative editing by people unknown to each other IS novel. Encyclopedia creation utilizing anyone with an IP address IS novel. It also doesn't work.



There is precious little evidence that the principle of Wikipedia CAN work and lots and lots of evidence that it can never work.

There is a belief in collaborative editing by strangers that appears to be either utopian or naive or delusional. It simply does not produce quality. It produces drama.

I'll give you that last bit, however, we know that it can be resolved, either by more selectivity on editors or by some editorial oversight - which was the original principle - gather a heap of words, of which many may be useful, and then validate. (I do think it falls down on the principle that often it is quicker to write from scratch than to edit, but it does at least provide that first level of legwork that is a typical approach in many tasks).

I'd disagree with the first point though. Many technical books are produced by arbitrary collections of people, over many editions this collection of people change over time, and the only way you can assess these other authors are the quality of their work and the fact that they have been selected for the task by the publishers. I can assure you that some publishers' criteria are not high.

I'd disagree on the first point. Although there are still fundamental problems to address, like stability, I don't think anyone is claiming that there are not sound and useful articles in Wikipedia. So, in principle, encyclopedic articles are produced on a regular basis. Whether they are stable enough is another matter. There are solutions to that - editorial boards and so on. The same applies to the fact that it is impossible to tell simply by opening an article whether it is likely to be accurate, but there are solutions that could be applied.

I nearly agree with that, though again, I think it would be possible to show that there were quality works in there - so simply arguing that Wikipedia is bad by assertion is something that could be refuted by example. For example, one area which I think Wikipedia does very well is the gazetter side of its entries, where people who know a town or village have a forum on which to write, each contributing elements of local knowledge that they are aware of. I think it can produce quality - but you can never know you are going to find it.

It produces drama because WP:Rules inevitably produce drama with mathematical certainty.

If you want quality, make excellence an express objective.

Easy answer? Fork it. Rather than sitting around like a playground dictator and dictating all sorts of rules, you have the chance to completely redesign it. If your system is better, people will adopt it. There is no reason ever to port the changes back to Wikipedia if the new system is better.

To go back to the water pump analogy. Wikipedia is like a very cheap, handy, but dangerous pump in that 99% of the time it spits out potable water but the other 1% of the time it will slip in some urine or antifreeze. It's only very popular at the moment because it's practically free. All kinds of people are using it and word hasn't gotten around about the risks. Eventually, even if everyone is aware of what's wrong with it, the water might still be good for some purposes like watering lawns and so forth.

The answer could be to take the water produced by the Wikipedia pump and to further refine it with a more expensive pump. Or like you say you could produce a better pump.

Leaning over the shoulder of Wikipedia's powers-that-be is not worthwhile, unless you like to watch them work.

Well, it SORT of works. Patches are good, swatches are okay, a lot is crap. But the amazing thing about a waltzing bear is not how well it waltzes, but that it's able to waltz at all. Alas, we've now hit the wall, and further improvement is not to be had by sending the bear to Arthur Murray.

If someone were to fork it, then the last thing they'd want is for Wikipedia to steal content under the license. But that means copyrighting the material, which in turn means that they can't use Wikipedia material since that involves the CC (creative communism) license.

So a "quality fork" of Wikipedia would never get off the ground (cf Citizendium)

I want to know what would happen if they really did that Wikipedia vs. Britannica test with perfect fairness, using whatever article that actually happened to come up, and no backtracting to get a good version.

Entertaining, but of course today's Wikipedia didn't get written so that smarmy pundits can write all about how good or not it is, but to provide the information you're looking for. If you look up "Atom" and find "My poopy is made of atoms!!!" then it takes two seconds to hit "History" and find (and indeed revert to) the version with the information you want.

Indeed if it contained the word "poopy" then you could also just refresh the page, because the anti-vandalism bots that now cruise the site revert vandalism that obvious in literally the time it takes you to read it. It has honestly been ages since I've seen a Wikipedia article with vandalism in the latest revision which matters to the page unless you were to print it on paper.


Pithy, but with a project whose success (if any) has relied (and still does) on the cooperation of thousands of volunteers, not all change is necessarily good. In other words, the other team's hoop is on the same backboard in this game.

If they know what they should expect on a page, why are they looking for it on Wikipedia? And, more importantly, they should automatically know how to search through the history until they find the "correct" version? And they know how to revert a page?

Tune into Reality FM before replying.



Wrong. It's demonstrably more like an MMORPG than any game of basketball. Unless basketball involves team members stabbing or shooting each other in the back, and trying to get everybody else thrown off the court, and where the referees regularly change the rules in mid-game.

Welcome, and cheer up, poor sad Kiwi. Of course, you make two assumptions: that the reader knows about history and can find earlier versions, and that the only thing that matters is blatant childish vandalism. If the vandalism was to delete substantial material that disagreed with someone's POV (to quote an article I started, the people who kept denying that Queen Alexandra and Queen Mary officially had the title of Queen Mother), how would the average reader ever know?

The only solution to this one is to make Wikipedia better. People are attracted to Wikipedia because of the wealth of content, not because of the merits of editorial control or quality of writing. If they're naive of the way Wikipedia works then a quality fork like Citizendium won't help them in any way. I guess when flagged revisions finally come about this problem will be solved as best it can.

I see Wikipedia as being useful for two things. One is to find out about something you have no knowledge about. As you mention it, take Queen Alexandra. By looking it up, I now know that she originated from Denmark and was a 20th century British Queen Consort, and indeed subsequently the Queen mother, and so on.

The other is as a compendium of information which may be useful to detailed research. For example, if I were writing an article or essay about the attitude to Anglo-Germanic relations of the British monarchy, I would find the discourse on Alexandra's hatred of Germans. I might be suspicious that it were unfair on her, and so quickly find that there are two, three and two copies respectively of the three cited books in my university library, and the page references there to help me find the information I'm looking for.

In each case, Wikipedia does the job regardless of actual quality.


You must have misunderstood the analogy. Moulton's analogy was referring to making changes to the system, where the individual basketball players are not necessarily analogous to individual editors. If you think you can equate the entire paradigm to any sort of game you've got another thing coming.

Its a remarkable machine that can produce quality output regardless of the quality of the input or the quality of the engine.

It's not just remarkable, its also impossible.

You have no way of knowing from those articles whether any fact can be trusted to be true, nor can you make trustworthy judgments when you have no knowledge of the provenance of the data or if the people who included or excluded data had any clue as to what they were talking about.

Which makes you a gullible idiot, and if so I have a lovely bridge in New York just for you for a very special price.

It doesn't matter if the "provenance of the data" is 100% all the time, if all you're doing is using Wikipedia as a brief overview and as a pointer to more detailed, specialised and accurate works. This is using it correctly, as AWK seems to be doing, and it's the whole point of a general encyclopedia.

Many people in the non-geek world who read Wikipedia are not aware of the process, don't know how to "use it correctly", and will never know. Most children who use Wikipedia have no idea how controversial the material is and how it was compiled. A lot of people have difficulties understanding how traditional verification and sourcing works, let alone the bizarre mess of Wikipedia.

Basically, no matter how often you geeks defend Wikipedia, the outside non-geek world reads a fact and assumes it is verified and legitimate. On Wikipedia and elsewhere.

Wikipedia has "major accuracy concerns" significantly more troubling than traditional encyclopdias. Whatsmore, Wikipedia is putting these traditonal sources out of business. If that isn't a serious problem facing our culture, then I don't know what.

http://wikipediareview.com/blog/20080224/w...ut-of-business/

So any efforts to create a solid detailed reference work, instead of just a brief overview, is beyond the scope of WP? Overall, that is true.

Please don't dignify these infants with the holy name of GEEK. They don't know enough real science to qualify.

The spell that draws these flies is more properly spelled GIKO (Garbage In Knowledge Out) — that is the "something for nothing" fantasy that fuels their tom-sawyer-foolery.

Move along — not a damn thing new to see here.

Jon

A question - is people misusing Wikipedia the fault of Wikipedia? If it is, why is it, and what do you think could be done? If it's not, then whose fault is it?

And I'm not a geek defending Wikipedia - I wouldn't use Wikipedia to determine anything important. It has its uses, but using it as anything more than a primer is a poor idea. Plus I'm not a geek. That said, using any general encyclopedia as your sole source of information, let alone Wikipedia, is restrictive and risky. And certainly not a good idea for serious work or research.



A solid, detailed reference work is not what an encyclopedia is intended to be.

Yes, it is Wikipedia's fault. If you disseminate unreliable information without making abundantly clear that it is unreliable information, then you are responsible for the misuse of that information. Wikipedia should have a big, bold-faced warning on every page that the information contained therein is unreliable, and that Wikipedia accepts no responsibility for its accuracy.

Despite various stock statements put out, Wikipedia does not make it clear that it is unreliable with "serious accuracy concerns". Far from it.

The WMF make a concerted effort to ingratiate themselves with educational institutions, and yet make no clear announcements to the uninformed as to the problems that beset the project. Here, they attempt to foist Brand Wikipedia on the UK National Curriculum. This is very dangerous and irresponsible, and similar efforts by ignorant Wiki-Apologists to push Wikipedia to school children were right attacked in the media by the UK Teaching Unions. (Who found themselves smeared on Wikipedia as a result).

http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_...SChildrenUK2007