From HUMANIST an article in The Register on Wikipedia founder admits to serious quality problems. The article is by Andrew Orlowski (18th of October, 2005) and looks at the problem of quality (where many entries are terrible) and how (if at all) the wikipedia could rectify the situation. In particular the article discusses the way the wikipedia has become a “religious crusade” so that criticism is flamed.
I must admit that most of the stuff I have looked up was pretty good. Hmmm, I wonder if I am looking for a particular subset of things or have a low threshold for quality.
The article uses a term “splogger” for someone who creates phoney stuff to promote another site for Google. I guess it is a combination of “spam” and “blogger”.
Here is a quote:
Traditionally, Wikipedia supporters have responded to criticism in one of several ways. The commonest is: If you don’t like an entry, you can fix it yourself. Which is rather like going to a restaurant for a date, being served terrible food, and then being told by the waiter where to find the kitchen. But you didn’t come out to cook a meal – you could have done that at home! No matter, roll up your sleeves.
As a second line of defense, Wikipedians point to flaws in the existing dead tree encyclopedias, as if the handful of errors in Britannica cancels out the many errors, hopeless apologies for entries, and tortured prose, of Wikipedia itself.
Thirdly, and here you can see that the defense is beginning to run out of steam, one’s attention is drawn to process issues: such as the speed with which errors are fixed, or the fact that looking up a Wikipedia is faster than using an alternative. This line of argument is even weaker than the first: it’s like going to a restaurant for a date – and being pelted with rotten food, thrown at you at high velocity by the waiters.