For a user edited site, Wikipedia is taking “its content” more seriously these days.
BERLIN (Reuters) – Wikipedia, the Web encyclopedia written and edited by Internet users from all over the world, plans to impose stricter editorial rules to prevent vandalism of its content, founder Jimmy Wales was quoted as saying Friday.
In an interview with German daily Sueddeutsche Zeitung, Wales, who launched Wikipedia with partner Larry Sanger in 2001, said it needed to find a balance between protecting information from abuse and providing open access to improve entries.
“There may soon be so-called stable contents. In this case, we’d freeze the pages whose quality is undisputed,” he said.In other words portions of it would become an online encyclopedia…
Update: Apparently the story is bogus, the status quo prevails in Wikipedia-land…
Hmmmm.
“pages whose quality is undisputed”
Good luck. Right now almost the entirety of WikiPedia is unmitigated garbage not worth printing out and wiping my ass with.
Perhaps after several years of review and editing it will then be worth printing out and wiping my ass with.
But I’m not going to keep my buttocks clenched until then.
I like Wikipedia. Is the Encyclopedia Brittanica supposed to be faultless– or even moderately unbiased? The very fact that you have to read Wikipedia with a grain of skepticism is a HUGE plus– it doesn’t get the “pass” that a leather-bound volume might, and keeps your intellectual BS detector set to “high”– a good position for the meter to get stuck.
You want perfect information– better ask God.
As long as we humans are involved, the level of s**t is going to be pretty high.
As long as you’re not searching for “George W Bush”, and instead for something like “Greek Entablature”, its a fairly respectable, exceedingly FREE, resource.
I like the Democratisation of the Press and the Encyclopedia.
If the contents were indisputable… why would you need to freeze them?
It’s pretty good for keeping semi-geezers like me up to date on the latest slang, otherwise I go elsewhere.
Wikipedia is great as long as you’re not looking for anything controversial. I’ve actually been using it for reference in my History of US Wars class. It was great for getting information on Nathanael Greene and John Paul Jones. Now, if I was looking up Operation Enduring Freedom, I’d skip it completely.
If Wikipedia wants static pages of indisputable facts, that’s fine, but, in addition, it should still keep a companion, dynamic page anyone can edit for that topic.
I have found Wikipedia accurate and helpful on many occasions. I think it is a dandy idea to try and filter out the more trashy stuff. The only reason I use an encyclopedia anyway is to get a braod overview of a subject, and considering most subjects will have several points of view, Wik simply provides one of them.
As someone already mentioned, all encyclopedias have some slant and bias. Authority on an issue is hard to come by.
The real problem surfaces some anus with the moonbattitude copies and pastes something from wikipedia during an exchange with me about something like the Patriot Act.
They want to maintain some sort of bullshit stance using wiki-style ‘facts’ to backup their claim in a public forum, all the while not concerned with the idea of when they use their first amendment rights to express ‘their opinions’ and they also claim to be afraid of so fervently that their front door gets kicked-in at any moment.
Just look up wiki in wikipedia – it notes…
… allows anyone to edit the content
I love wikipedia, but beware of it’s capacity.
Wikipedia’s content reliability jumped the shark since the ’04 election and politically motived trolls got a chance to control the ‘truth’.
is annoying that news start to appear in wikipedia. they may would like to wait a bit.
or they want to become CNN?