Wikipedia

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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

Problems of Wikipedia

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Problem 1: There's no such thing as NPOV, if you have finite space. Every article inherently selects which pieces of information are relevant and which are not, and that in itself represents a point of view.

For example, the article about typographer Eric Gill pointedly refrains from mentioning his enthusiastic endorsement of bestiality, while the article about Neal Horsley has a whole section on his admission of sex with farmyard animals. While the article about Horsley is under NPOV investigation, it's not the mule-humping that people including Horsley himself are debating the appropriateness of.

To pick another example, should the Minnie Driver article mention that her father was at the center of a $56m insurance fraud involving cash being squirreled away into a Swiss bank account? Maybe it's irrelevant, or maybe it gives insight into why she grew up living in Barbados?

Problem 2: Truth is not a matter of majority vote. In fact, in many important areas truth is extremely unpopular, and the majority of people prefer that it be replaced with bullshit. The sections on evolutionary biology spring to mind, as does the article on Socialist Libertarianism.

Problem 3: Sometimes the most "neutral" point of view isn't nice enough for Wikipedia. As one Slashdot poster parodied, if Hitler was still alive we'd see Wikipedia saying:

"Adolf Hitler was the führer of Germany, who reformed the German economy in the 1930s. He enjoyed painting and playing with his dog. He married his lifelong sweetheart, Eva Braun, two days prior to his death. See also: Criticism of Adolf Hitler".

I'm kinda neutral on Wikipedia. I use it, but I've come to realize that it's a lot less interesting than I thought it was, because of the rule against research. These days it's less about experts writing informative articles, and more about people summarizing information that's already available somewhere else, usually on the web. I'm starting to think of it as more of a specialized search engine with accuracy problems than anything else.