Wikipedia's weakness

The major players are all about the failings of Wikipedia:  Instapundit, Pajamas Media and of course the great Roger L. Simon.

The Posse agrees with our patron saint that anonymity is the critical weakness of Wikipedia's model.

When we first learned of the site, we were intrigued.  Indeed, there are many good things to say about a collaborative effort such as Wikipedia.

However there must in the end be some kind of accountability.  Recently we read an article on the site about the French Revolution.  It has since been corrected, but someone had gone in and inserted childish prank phrases and obscenties throughout the piece, rendering it worthless.

It is also clear that Wikipedia in its current form cannot handle anything even close to contraversial, as articles relating to the Instapundit have repeatedly shown.

The strength of the blogosphere is its accountability.  There is no hiding behind editors, sub-editors, copy editors and anonymous sources.  The buck stops at the blog.

Even "anonymous" sites such as this one have an ultimate identity: the blog name.  The Posse is responsible for what it publishes.  Should we write crap, our readership will take note and cease to visit.

Should we prove inaccurate, inarticulate and generally offensive, we will ultimately pay that price.

Wikipedia is different.  Anonymous authors can erode Wikipedia's name, undermining the entire point of the enterprise.

The simple solution would be to require all articles to be signed and, perferably, provide links to the author's blog (assuming there is one).  In this way, people would know what they are getting.

Wikipedia should also stay away from more current events and focus on areas where encyclopedia's truly excel: verifiable historical facts.  Articles about bloggers should be right out.

Comments

[James Day]

Requiring ID is a common suggestion but a harmful one. There are more than half a million accounts registered at the English language encyclopedia. How do you plan to vet them or use their blogs, if any, to ascertain whether a particular article, which may have thousands of authors, is accurate?

The sites the Wikimedia Foundation hosts have dealt with such things as posts from one account and IP per edit, with an automated bot performing those edits as fast as practical. It's not technically at all difficult to also register an email address and respond to a confirmation email or link to a blog created at one of many blog hosting sites.

What is both practical and quite effective, but not perfect, is to use the reluctance to register as a filter to select changes for a higher level of scrutiny. There are also ever-increasing amounts of automated filtering to help the humans do the checking.

However, Wikipedia and the related sites have as one of their distinguishing characteristics a multitude of authors and viewpoints, some of them possibly malicious, compared to the relatively small number involved in a traditional encyclopedia. That's both a strength and a vulnerability for the live work.

[mark james]

ok xa

[mark james]

well i guess what had been written here are not reliable..