Roundup
Thursday, August 28th by Ben Yates- New York Wikipedia articles show surprising inaccuracies. (I wonder if trust coloring would have caught this stuff.)
- The 5 worst IT-related entries on Wikipedia
- “There’s hardly a ‘Wikipedia replacement’ that hasn’t started from trying to make a welcoming environment for authors. Wikipedia, however, is popular because it’s what readers want.“
I usually beat the drum for wikipedia’s accuracy, and take it to task for unfriendliness. But neither of those is always right.
August 28th, 2008 at 7:07 pm
Mmm. I’m not sure my post is really related to Wikipedia accuracy … when I do media, I always say “It’s not reliable as such, it’s just written by people. But they care about writing good stuff, so it’s usually pretty good. But take due caution.”
My point was mostly that making a happy environment for warring editors is missing the point of what the readers want. I suspect editor wars are inherent to trying to write a wiki with one article per topic.
I’ve found Uncyclopedia interesting in this regard - it’s different because it’s basically creative writing, with some ownership of the article. Sometimes someone will come along and rewrite an article because they think it sucks, and someone else will send the old version off to a fork because they liked it. Compare Fursecution and Fursecution (unbiased). That works in a humour wiki, but not in a factual wiki - readers want one decent source (which Wikipedia is, for all its fault), not multiple attempts at a decent source.