Wikipedia (ii)

I followed a suggestion from readwrite and looked at the entries on Wikipedia in the archives of Making Light, tnh and pnh’s blog. There is a particularly enlightening discussion here, with lots of comments and some links. It seems like a very large number of people are ending up highly disillusioned as a result of expending time, effort, knowledge and hopes on Wikipedia. Just looking around the place last month, I sensed a corrosive hostility towards anyone who knows what they are talking about, and it seems this was not an illusion. It is, in fact, remarkable that the site is no worse than it is. But a lot of the credit for that is clearly due to committed people who have worked hard in the past. This year Wikipedia has been haemhorrhaging expert editors: just a quick look around the web establishes this. The experiences described here seem depressingly typical.

More cheerfully, I also found this excellent cartoon.

I usually evaluate print reference works by looking up some pages on topics that I know about and seeing whether I think they are talking sense. If they are full of howlers, I cannot assume that the other pages aren’t also full of errors: errors I may lack the know-how to spot. On this test Wikipedia fails miserably.

Okay, the theory is nice: if I fix the errors I can see (or some of them) and other people who know what they are doing fix the rest of the pages, it will become a useful work of reference. But it is plain that while Wikipedians pay lip-service to this kind of endeavour, the culture of Wikipedia does not support it.

The so-called ‘encyclopaedia’ is as good now as it will ever get. If Wikipedia cannot keep the people who are genuinely knowledgeable and capable, if other people with something to contribute look at their experiences and decide that they don’t need the grief, the project will go downhill. Right now it is a tainted well of knowledge. In time, probably quite soon, it will be a toxic one.

Moreover, it is damaging the web. It is not the only reason why I frequently get less useful search engine results than I used to, but it is certainly one of them. But maybe I’ll say more another time about the degradation of search results.

Right now Wikipedia is on a big fund-raising drive. Interestingly enough, it does not seem to be doing all that well. I think there are far more deserving causes: such as the truly excellent and useful Project Gutenberg, or the Wayback Machine, so often useful for retrieving good pages that have vanished from the web.

*

In eldest time, e’er mortals writ or read,
E’er Pallas issued from the Thund’rer’s head,
Dulness o’er all possess’d her ancient right,
Daughter of Chaos and eternal Night:
Fate in their dotage this fair idiot gave,
Gross as her sire, and as her mother grave,
Laborious, heavy, busy, bold, and blind,
She rul’d, in native anarchy, the mind.
      Still her old empire to restore she tries,
For, born a goddess, Dulness never dies.

Alexander Pope (1688–1744)

from The Dunciad


tags: wikipedia

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