Wikipedia

[ciphergoth]

What do you think of Wikipedia?

If you were in charge of a project to create something like Wikipedia, but better, what would you create?

Comments

[barakta]

I actually like wikipedia a great deal, mainly as a readable (most of the time) thing for randomness - where one just follows links between pages and can hop from subject to subject...

I wouldn't use it as an authoritative source for anything, but as a first-line of information it is useful to get a handle on something quickly. Some wikipedia pages have useful links on them, which are pointing at authoritative and more in-depth sources of information.

I definitely agree it would be nice if there was a system of marking contentious information contained in wikipedia articles, and perhaps a scale of contentiousness vs acceptedness. So the reader could see that the article was in flux (see discussion/talk pages) or something which doesn't really have contentiousness...

I find wikipedia useful to point complete newbies to a subject at, so I have pointed random bloggers at geeky computer things (such as traceroute and what it does and why, which was written from a point of not much knowledge) and for my mum who is a primary school teacher who does 'projects' or has to swot up and provide teaching materials on a completely new subject with very little time to do research.