Wikipedia:Wikipedia is failing
This is an essay. It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. This page is not an encyclopedia article, nor is it one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, as it has not been thoroughly vetted by the community. Some essays represent widespread norms; others only represent minority viewpoints. |
historical reference. . Either the page is no longer relevant or consensus on its purpose has become unclear. To revive discussion, seek broader input via a forum such as the village pump |
Note: Unless stated otherwise or directly sourced, the statistics used in this essay were collected in February 2007 and may now be out-of-date.
- Contrast with essay: Wikipedia:Wikipedia is succeeding. See also Wikipedia:Failure, on the virtues of failure.
Is Wikipedia failing in its aim of becoming a reputable, reliable encyclopedia? Here are some illustrations of ways in which it is not fulfilling that aim.
Assumptions
To assess the quality of Wikipedia's articles, some assumptions are necessary. Here it is assumed that:
- The criteria defined by the Wikipedia 1.0 editorial team at {{grading scheme}} accurately reflect the quality of the articles to which these ratings have been applied.
- That articles that are neither FA nor A-class fall below the standards that an encyclopedia should demand of its content (possibly with the exception of some WikiProjects that have chosen to have GA above A-class instead of the other way round).
- That the sample of 300,000 articles assessed, with results listed at WP:1.0/I, is representative of the whole encyclopedia.
- The definition of an encyclopedia in Wikipedia's article encyclopedia as a "compendium of human knowledge" is correct.
Criteria which indicate substantial failings
Performance on core topics
Vital articles lists 988 articles on topics that can be considered essential. These topics should have articles of the very highest quality – ideally a featured article. So do they? In fact, of those 988, only 81 are featured articles and 9 are A-class. This means that 89% of the essential topics that should have excellent articles fall short of the standard, assuming that all vital articles that meet the FA criteria have been nominated for FA status.
Do they fall short by a long way? 65 are listed as good articles, which, according to Template:Grading scheme, means that 'other encyclopedias could do a better job'. Some editors have criticised the GA process as inconsistent and arbitrary, so the quality of those articles is further in doubt. The remaining 833 are B-class, C-class, stub-class or start-class on the assessment scale; this indicates that many articles require substantial work before they will match or exceed the standards found in other encyclopedias.
On current trends, how long will it take before all the Vital Articles are featured or A-class articles? On 1 January 2006, 41 of them were featured; by 1 January 2007, this had risen to 71. By 1 July 2011 (four and a half years later) the number was 90, indicating a sharp decrease in promotion rate. Even assuming that the current rate (19 articles in 54 months) declines no further, at this rate of approximately four a year it will take 225 years for all of the vital articles to reach the standards expected of them.
Performance on broader topics
There are 6,490 featured articles now. There are also 39,615
One useful, informal exercise for a reader is to critically read ten random articles. The numbers above suggest that on average, you'd expect to find one FA or A-class article in every 143 articles you looked at (based on WP:1.0/I), or every 762 (based on total numbers of FAs and A-class articles).
Maintenance of standards
Wikipedia Celebrates 750 Years Of American Independence
"…While Wikipedia's "American Independence" page remains available to all site visitors, administrators have suspended additions and further edits to its content due to vandalism." The Onion July 26, 2006[1]
Do articles which are judged to have reached the highest standards remain excellent for a long time, or do standards decline as well-meant but poor quality edits cause standards to fall over time? There are currently 340 former featured articles, so that more than 20% of all articles that have ever been featured are no longer featured.
Many editors observe that an FA that is not actively maintained inevitably declines; for an example see
Some or many articles may lose featured article status because they do not meet current standards, rather than because they have declined in quality. Without case-by-case analysis it is impossible to say what proportion this is the case for. However, we can note that the
Meanwhile, on the other hand, certain hoax articles containing blatantly incorrect information can stay up for years[2]. In January 2008, the longest-running hoax ever was discovered, the article on Brahmanical See, which was a hoax claiming that Hinduism has a Pope. This hoax existed for roughly 3½ years.
Rate of quality article production
Many argue that Wikipedia is a work in progress and that, given time, all articles will reach very high standards. Unfortunately, this is not borne out by the rate at which articles are currently being judged to meet featured article criteria. About one article a day on average becomes featured; at this rate, it will take 4,380 years for all the currently existing articles to meet FA criteria. If the current approximately exponential growth rate of Wikipedia (which will see it double in size in about the next 500 days) continues, then on current trends there will never be a time when all articles have been promoted to featured article status.
Should we even expect all articles to meet the
Is
The strength and size of the core community
One of the most important aspects of Wikipedia is what could be called its "core community," as distinguished from the "community-at-large." The distinction is that the community-at-large is composed of everyone who edits Wikipedia, while the core community is the small group of veteran editors who regularly watch policy pages, facilitate the administration of various aspects of the site (such as mediation, the help desk, the reference desk, the various noticeboards, etc..). Earlier in Wikipedia's history, there was a project called Esperanza designed to strengthen Wikipedia's core community. In mid-2007, Esperanza was disbanded after facing criticism. At first, other projects were started to fulfill the same role that Esperanza did. Several of these projects have since been abandoned.
Projects stemming from Esperanza which were abandoned:
Projects stemming from Esperanza which are still ongoing:
Then there is also
Since a year it has become increasingly difficult to produce valid dumps for the largest wikipedias. Until that problem is fixed some figures will be outdated.
This problem, stemming from either financial shortfalls or incompetence, is itself a demonstration of Wikipedia failure. If Wikimedia isn't even capable of regularly collecting and compiling statistics on Wikipedia's success, then what can it do and how can we expect the Wikipedia project to succeed?
Questioning these criteria
Is it a bad idea to use Featured Article or Good Article status as criteria for judging the number of excellent articles in Wikipedia? It is possible that many or most articles that meet the
If these processes do not succeed in recognizing quality content, then this may be a failure of Wikipedia to perform accurate self-assessment rather than a failure to produce quality articles.
Gender bias
The issue of
Food for thought
If Wikipedia just aimed to be a social website where people with similar interests could come together and write articles about anything they liked, it would certainly be succeeding. However, its stated aim is to be an encyclopedia, and not just that but an encyclopedia of the highest quality. Almost two decades of work have resulted in 3,000 articles of good or excellent quality, at which rate it will take many more decades to produce the quantity of good or excellent articles found in traditional encyclopedias. Over millions of articles are mediocre to poor in quality.
Open questions
- Has the system failed to produce a quality encyclopedia? If so, why?
- Is change necessary?
- If it is, then is radical change required, or just small adjustments to the current set-up?
- Does this matter, given that Wikipedia is one of the most popular websites in the world?
- Does popularity establish authenticity?
- What is Wikipedia really, and what do we want it to be?
- Are the statistical measures introduced here relevant to the conclusions drawn?
- Are Wikipedia's own criteria for success accurately reflected here?
- Are the Featured Article and Good Article designations useful for determining the number of quality articles in Wikipedia? If they are not, how can they be reformed?
- At what rate is the number of new user accounts increasing?
- Does the number of active users increase in the same way as new user accounts, or do significant numbers of editors leave the project?
- Could it help any to introduce one or more of the following:
- A clearer vision and mission statement, prominently displayed?
- Better defined performance metrics for articles or edits?
- Voting, as popularity, or by "distinguished members" (opening a can of chicken/egg soup here)?
- Profiling authors/editors to identify promising candidates or repeat offenders so as to offer them voluntary coaching/mentoring (on private channels, not in public on discussion pages)?
- Offering references to alternative sites so as to channel creative energies of writers who repeatedly fail to meet Wikipedia criteria?
Responses to alleged rebuttals and inadequate responses
The sister essay contains a great deal of "rebuttals" and "responses" to this essay based upon a number of sources. This essay concludes that these alleged "rebuttals" in the sister essay are weak and its responses are inadequate. It relies on
Clarifying possible misconceptions
A popular misconception among the public, which is also encouraged by the media, is the claim, "A scientist proved it in a study, so it must be true!" Science relies on proper methodology, objectivity, and replicability, among other things. The sister essay invokes a handful of studies without addressing criticism of their methodology or the fact that they arguably haven't been replicated. In particular, the single-study by
In addition, it is important to clarify that
Outside scientific studies confirming Wikipedia failure
First of all, it should be clarified that the burden of proof rests on those making positive assertions, which includes "Wikipedia is succeeding." In a 2005 study, Emigh and Herring note that there are not yet many formal studies of Wikipedia or its model, and suggest that Wikipedia achieves its results by social means—
With this in mind, it should also be clarified that the assertion that Wikipedia failure has not in any way been validated by any outside studies is patently false. Just as the definition of "success," has been skewed, if we inappropriately define "failure," as "total apocalyptic, nightmarish collapse," then no, that hasn't happened yet, so of course it hasn't been proven. But failure is more accurately defined by the question: "Is Wikipedia moving in the right direction"? According to a number of studies, such as the study by the University of Minnesota, no. [14]
Their abstract reads:
Wikipedia’s brilliance and curse is that any user can edit any of the encyclopedia entries. We introduce the notion of the impact of an edit, measured by the number of times the edited version is viewed. Using several datasets, including recent logs of all article views, we show that frequent editors dominate what people see when they visit Wikipedia, and that this domination is increasing. Similarly, using the same impact measure, we show that the probability of a typical article view being damaged is small but increasing, and we present empirically grounded classes of damage. Finally, we make policy recommendations for Wikipedia and other wikis in light of these findings.
Their specific policies recommendations:
It is likely that vandals will continue working to defeat the bots, leading to an arms race. Thus, continued work on automatic detection of damage is important. Our results suggest types of damage to focus on; the good news is that the results show little subtlety among most vandals. We also generally believe in augmentation, not automation. That is, we prefer intelligent task routing approaches, where automation directs humans to potential damage incidents, but humans make the final decision.
This proposal has been completely ignored, but it is a proposal that has merit. For instance, in order to address the problem of
As for the study by Nature magazine suggesting Wikipedia is as reliable as Encyclopedia Britannica,[15] this essay rejects that study on the grounds that it invokes the same flawed methodological assumptions in the sister essay. Furthermore, it is possible that the more specific claims made by The Register regarding the study may have merit:
"…Nature sent only misleading fragments of some Britannica articles to the reviewers, sent extracts of the children's version and Britannica's 'book of the year' to others, and in one case, simply stitched together bits from different articles and inserted its own material, passing it off as a single Britannica entry."[16]
Encyclopedia Britannica rejected the study and while their analysis is unreliable for obvious reasons of bias, their claims do support a possible hypothesis, which itself bolsters the conclusion of this essay. Britannica denied the validity of the Nature study, claiming that it was "fatally flawed" on the grounds that the Britannica extracts were compilations that sometimes included articles written for the youth version.[17] Nature acknowledged the compiled nature of some of the Britannica extracts, but disputed the claim that this invalidated the conclusions of the study.[18] Encyclopedia Britannica also argued that the Nature study showed that while the error rate between the two encyclopedias was similar, a breakdown of the errors indicated that the mistakes in Wikipedia were more often the inclusion of incorrect facts, while the mistakes in Britannica were "errors of omission".
There was also a study in the journal Reference Services Review which found that Wikipedia is less reliable than other references. From their abstract: [19]
The study did reveal inaccuracies in eight of the nine entries and exposed major flaws in at least two of the nine Wikipedia articles. Overall, Wikipedia's accuracy rate was 80 percent compared with 95–96 percent accuracy within the other sources. This study does support the claim that Wikipedia is less reliable than other reference resources.
Supporters of the claim that WP:Wikipedia is succeeding may cite the study by Fernanda Viégas of the MIT Media Lab and Martin Wattenberg and Kushal Dave of IBM Research which found that most vandal edits were reverted within around five minutes.[20] However, this isn't a particularly controversial or striking conclusion, nor is it particularly relevant. The same conclusion was reached by the researchers of the University of Minnesota. From a sociological perspective, Wikipedia's ability to prevent obvious vandalism is intriguing, but that alone is not how Wikipedia's success is defined, since the problems stem from systemic bias and erosion of good content, which, unlike random vandalism, cannot simply be addressed through the use of large networks of bots crawling Wikipedia and making automatic reverts according to a set algorithm. The development of such a network of bots, according to the University of Minnesota, is largely one reason why blatant vandalism is difficult on Wikipedia.
A study by
An academic study of Wikipedia articles, circa September 2007, also found that the level of debate among Wikipedia editors on controversial topics often degenerated into counterproductive squabbling: "For uncontroversial, 'stable' topics self-selection also ensures that members of editorial groups are substantially well-aligned with each other in their interests, backgrounds, and overall understanding of the topics...For controversial topics, on the other hand, self-selection may produce a strongly misaligned editorial group. It can lead to conflicts among the editorial group members, continuous edit wars, and may require the use of formal work coordination and control mechanisms. These may include intervention by administrators who enact dispute review and mediation processes, [or] completely disallow or limit and coordinate the types and sources of edits."[24]
In conclusion, this essay finds support in studies conducted by the University of Minnesota, the University of Dartmouth, the University of Florida, and the study published in Reference Services Review.
An absolute definition of Wikipedia success
"Absolute" statistics in scientific analysis are generally to be regarded with immediate skepticism, because they do not measure continuous rates of change, only self-selected variables at certain fixed points in time ("snapshots"). The sister essay's unique definition of "success," appears to differ widely from the goal of the Wikipedia project explicitly stated in
According to Wikimedia's mission statement, the goal of Wikipedia is "to empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content... ...and to disseminate it effectively and globally."
The definition of "success," appears to have been downgraded recently in response to the clear evidence that Wikipedia is failing. The argument, then, is not that "Wikipedia is succeeding," but that "Encyclopedias were never that useful to begin with." In response to criticism, Wikipedia should change, not lower the bar.
This is demonstrated by comparing earlier statements made by Jimbo Wales with more recent cynicism and skepticism that got greater and greater as time went on.
Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing.
— Jimmy Wales, July 2004[25]
I frequently counsel people who are getting frustrated about an edit war to think about someone who lives without clean drinking water, without any proper means of education, and how our work might someday help that person. It puts flamewars into some perspective, I think.
— Jimmy Wales, July 2004[25]
We help the internet not suck.
— Jimmy Wales, September 2005[26]
Our goal has always been Britannica or better quality. We don't always achieve that.
— Jimmy Wales, September 2005[26]
No, I don't think people should cite [Wikipedia], and I don't think people should cite Britannica, either – the error rate there isn't very good. People shouldn't be citing encyclopedias in the first place.
— Jimmy Wales, September 2005[27]
I can NOT emphasize this enough. There seems to be a terrible bias among some editors that some sort of random speculative 'I heard it somewhere' pseudo information is to be tagged with a 'needs a cite' tag. Wrong. It should be removed, aggressively, unless it can be sourced. This is true of all information, but it is particularly true of negative information about living persons.
— Jimmy Wales, May 2006[28]
In a discussion on IRC, on January 27, 2008,
People want to know about
User:Bjweeks Wikipedia IRC[29]
The sister essay to this article relies on an "absolute measure" of Wikipedia's success, which doesn't seem to be quite what Jimbo originally had in mind when he founded Wikipedia along with the Wikimedia foundation's original definition of "success," or even the claim that Wikipedia should be "Britannica or better quality." To have the same quality as Britannica would involve having the same marginal rate of accuracy, a relative measure of success, not the some arbitrary absolute amount of encyclopedic content. The absurdity of an "absolute" measure of success or quality can be demonstrated through the following analogy: Let's say you have a book not owned by Britannica, but which contains 100% every piece of information contained with
Non-featurable content isn't necessarily "garbage," but the analogy fits because it's not the kind of stuff that a traditional encyclopedia editor could take and put a rubber-stamp on it, to say, "This is good encyclopedic material!"
To look at that and say, "Wikipedia is succeeding! I mean, look, all the information in Britannica is there and besides, in German Wikipedia, the landfill isn't growing!" is absurd. If Wikipedia were to delete everything other than the articles which are currently featured and then focus on creating articles worth featuring, then it would be sensible to call it an encyclopedia that is roughly comparable in accuracy to Britannica.
The essay regularly engages in such special pleading, including the following assertion:
"...many B- and Start-level articles are indeed superior to their counterparts in standard encyclopedias, such as the Encyclopædia Britannica. For example, the coverage of the B-level article, Secondary structure, a core topic in protein science, is far superior to its coverage in the Britannica..."
Many humans have red hair, therefore most or all humans have red hair? This assertion doesn't follow, not to mention that it invokes an ambiguous subjective opinion which shouldn't be found in value-free scientific analysis.
Growth, by itself, is not necessarily a good thing if the "growth" is in unencyclopedic material rather than encyclopedic material. If an article is "roughly comparable" in quality in Britannica, then it is fair to assume that it should be featured.
Wikipedia success is qualitative, not quantitative
The sister essay seems to assume that Wikipedia success is quantitative rather than qualitative. Wikipedia success is defined, not by the quantity of the articles, but by the quantity of high-quality articles. As an example, they cite an "independent test".
To demonstrate the above point, we return to the "landfill" analogy. Two common objects found in landfills are banana peels and refrigerators, the latter being far larger than the former. The fact, however, that the refrigerator is larger than the banana peel does not establish that arguments over larger "trash" as opposed to smaller "trash" is necessarily progress. Plenty of edit-wars can certainly be fought over large articles and large amounts of content as opposed to stubs. In fact, it is intuitive that it would be the case, since stubs are stubs precisely because they are viewed less often.
Progress is only made when there is a greater amount of good quality edits, not just greater amounts of large edits as opposed to smaller edits. Large amounts of large edits, by themselves, do not necessarily imply an increase in articles of high quality, something which isn't captured by the "independent study" cited.
"Maintenance of high-quality articles"
For this argument, the essay offers no rebuttal, which is why it's not clear why its assertions are given the title "rebuttal." It acknowledges that high-quality articles are poorly maintained. It disputes that this reflects Wikipedia failure by use of a straw man: The argument was not against random acts of obvious vandalism done in bad-faith, but continual destruction of high-quality articles which may in fact even have been done in good-faith. If it acknowledges the fact that high-quality articles are regularly poorly maintained, then it should address that fact and not dispute it by bringing up the irrelevant fact that random and blatantly obvious vandalism is rare. This essay, in fact, agrees with that point and makes no assertion otherwise.
Lowering the bar
The idea that encyclopedias were never that reliable or useful to begin with is not an adequate defense of Wikipedia's success. If this were true, then it's not clear why anyone, especially in Wikipedia's early history, should ever have had the enthusiasm that they do if that were the case. It is often said that Wikipedia is not reliable as an academic source, but it is a "good starting point" or a "good academic reference." These assertions seem self-contradictory. A good starting point for what? A good starting point for research would be a collection of good sources, something which Wikipedia does not currently necessarily provide. After all, if its sources were accurate, then it ought to be far more accurate. The issue itself is the unreliability of the sources used. As such, it cannot be a starting point for another other than what the average person generally thinks about a topic, based on what he can dig up on it on Google, in a matter of seconds. In this regard, it is a step above Google by saving people time they would have to otherwise spend looking for some sources themselves, but it remains a step below actual encyclopedias.
Furthermore, the idea that the appearance of Wikipedia failure can somehow be a misleading statistic generated by editorial standards that are "too high," doesn't seem consistent with the wiki process, because the editorial standards are themselves generated by the wiki process, not arbitrarily determined by expert editors. If the editorial process was too strict, it would be particularly easy for there to develop a consensus around lowering the standards. Ironically, the sister essay accuses the editorial standards of being too high, while at the same time it refuses to come out and directly say, "And to address this, we think editorial standards should be lowered."
The assumption of limitless patience
Out of every assertion made in the sister essay, the "assumption of limitless patience," stands out like a sore thumb.
Critics argue: About one article a day on average becomes featured; at this rate, it will take 4,380 years for all the currently existing articles to meet FA criteria.
Wikipedians are very patient.
Wikipedia editors are not limitlessly patient. It's admittedly tough to measure a possible
Speculations regarding German Wikipedia
It's tough to say why German Wikipedia has done so well, but one possible speculation is this: According to
If I see [a contributor] is publishing shit, maybe by swearing or not making sense, I warn him ...the second time he turns on, I block him.[30]
This may shock some people, but it's perfectly acceptable if, in fact, Weber is in the right when he does that. And the claim above is in direct contradiction to the flowchart which describes how to
Why isn't Weber thinking of "a reasonable change that might integrate" with the troll's ideas? The answer: Because there are none, when you're dealing with trolls, in which case they should be blocked either in accordance with policy or in accordance with ignore all rules which is itself policy. According to
Then again, perhaps not? Jimmy has also argued that his authority rests on an appeal to tradition:
My authority and the authority of the ArbCom does not derive from the Foundation directly but from the longstanding historical traditions of our community
— Jimmy Wales, December 2007[31]
That remark would seem to suggest that it isn't really important to
Anyway, in that flowchart,
It could be speculated then that German Wikipedia has been more effective because the role of administrators and
- Wikipedia is an encyclopedia
- A neutral point-of-view (where rationality and objectivity are both heavily emphasized)
- Free content
- No personal attacks
This is far more simple, more clear, and apparently more effective empirically, and this essay recommends all wikis follow the example of German Wikipedia and reject the absurd proposals made in Wikipedia:Wikipedia is succeeding. A more thorough review of their proposals will be published in the future.
German restrictions in 2009
The judgment that the German Wikipedia has "done so well" is a matter of opinion. There are many German articles that contain accurate facts, as reviewed for article-verification status. However, the German Wikipedia is extremely hollow and limited in its content, as easily seen by the rejection, during 2009, of many translated articles from English Wikipedia. Mainstream simple articles, such as lists of American landmarks, were rejected when just a few words were translated into awkward German phrases. What should have involved a simple article transfer, as needing just a few days of translation, became delayed by months, as people complained that the wording of a quickly translated article was "not perfect" and that "having no article would have been better" than to bother them with translations of major articles viewed hundreds of times per week. In that sense, the German Wikipedia is a failure in terms of scope, due to rejecting translated articles that aren't grammatically correct. That is a failure of being too restrictive, which caused even many simple articles to be rejected from German Wikipedia.
Written by laymen with unenforced policies
The basic problem of Wikipedia's hollow articles, or meager coverage of subjects, stems from the systemic failure of the concept: take a group of
Wikipedia became battleground playpen
As a result of the tolerance for angry, unrestrained writers, the chaos of Wikipedia has driven off many serious people who prefer progress as a succession of solid, accomplished articles. Instead, Wikipedia became the battleground for angry people and the playpen of carefree writers. The people who remained to re-write Wikipedia were focused in 2 groups:
- intense people who treat Wikipedia as a battleground and spend time changing many articles to emphasize their opinions; or
- carefree, fun-loving people who ignore controversies, while dabbling in entertaining subjects.
The results can be quite predictable: the intense people will try to focus on serious subjects, with an intense mindset to push various fringe ideas. Do not expect serious articles to remain neutral, but rather, to be rewritten with intensity. Meanwhile, the carefree people will focus in non-controversial pop-culture articles or other fun topics.
The intense people can be expected to edit many articles: the intensity of their ideas is the same intensity to re-write many articles from their viewpoints. They will make time to slant many articles and try to overwhelm any opposing ideas. They will, they really will. And don't try to stop them.
The carefree people will push for fun or frivolity, in related articles. A likely result is that humor, puns or comedic irony will appear in their writings, either as related quotes or slipped into the article text.
The authority is not always trustworthy
The viewpoint of a reliable source is relative to the observer, the Wikipedia administrative editorial isn't an exception either. To illustrate; Wikipedia is heavily influenced by what 'reliability' means in terms of being an encyclopedia to e.g. a university's standards ('a reliable source must not be user edited or original research'). Correlation of trustworthy information is not necessarily an indicacy of reliability. Philosophically does reliability even exist? It is a pattern of reoccurences and can also be a
References
- ^ "Wikipedia Celebrates 750 Years Of American Independence". 2010-06-26. Retrieved 2014-03-24.
- ^ See Wikipedia:List of hoaxes on Wikipedia for examples.
- ^ The Decline of Wikipedia: Even As More People Than Ever Rely on It, Fewer People Create It | MIT Technology Review
- ISSN 0002-7642.
- ^ See WP:Anti-elitism
- ^ English Wikipedia statistics,English Wikipedia. Retrieved on 2008-01-24.
- ^ Wikipedia statistics – New Wikipedians,English Wikipedia. Retrieved on 2008-01-24.
- ^ "Wikipedia Statistics – Site Map". Retrieved 2008-01-25.
- ^ Gardner, Sue (19 February 2011). "Nine Reasons Why Women Don't Edit Wikipedia, In Their Own Words". suegardner.org (blog).
- ^ Andrew Lih (20 June 2015). "Can Wikipedia Survive?". www.nytimes.com. Washington. Retrieved 21 June 2015.
...the considerable and often-noted gender gap among Wikipedia editors; in 2011, less than 15 percent were women.
- ^ Statistics based on Wikimedia Foundation Wikipedia editor surveys 2011 (Nov. 2010-April 2011) and November 2011 (April - October 2011)
- ^ Wikipedia 'completely failed' to fix gender imbalance, BBC interview with Jimmy Wales, August 8, 2014; starting at 45 seconds.
- ^ Emigh & Herring (2005) "Collaborative Authoring on the Web: A Genre Analysis of Online Encyclopedias", Proceedings of the Thirty-Eighth Hawai'i International Conference on System Sciences. (PDF)
- ^ Priedhorsky, Chen, Lam, Panciera, Terveen, Riedl. "Creating, Destroying, and Restoring Value in Wikipedia" (PDF). Retrieved 2008-01-25.
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- ^ Orlowski, Andrew (2006-03-26). "Nature mag cooked Wikipedia study". The Register. Retrieved 2008-01-25.
- ^ "Fatally Flawed" (PDF). Encyclopædia Britannica. March 2006. Retrieved 14 July 2007.
- PMID 16572128. Retrieved 2006-07-14.
- ^ "Emerald: Article Request". Retrieved 2008-02-19.
- ^ Fernanda Viégas; Martin Wattenberg; Kushal Dave. "Studying Cooperation and Conflict between Authors with history flow Visualizations" (PDF). MIT.
{{cite journal}}
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(help) - ^ Anthony, Denise; Smith, Sean W.; Williamson, Tim. "The Quality of Open Source Production: Zealots and Good Samaritans in the Case of Wikipedia". Dartmouth University. Retrieved 2008-01-24.
- ^ Larry Greenemeier. "Wikipedia "Good Samaritans Are on the Money". Scientific American. Retrieved 2008-01-24.
- ^ David Drake. "Dartmouth Wikipedia Study Flawed But Still Valuable". Scientific American. Retrieved 2008-01-24.
- ^ Besiki Stvilla; Michael Twidale; Linda Smith; Les Gasser (Oct 2007). "Information Quality Work Organization in Wikipedia" (PDF). Florida State University. pp. (on collaborative quality control), 38 pages, 650kb PDF. Retrieved 2009-01-22.
- ^ a b Jimmy Wales, July 2004 (2004-07-24). "" Wikipedia Founder Jimmy Wales Responds"". Slashdot. Retrieved 2008-01-24.
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: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link) - ^ Jimmy Wales, December 2005 (2005-12-14). "Wikipedia: "A Work in Progress"". BusinessWeek. Retrieved 2008-01-24.
{{cite web}}
: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link) - )
- User:Bjweeks' permission.
- ^ Peter Munro, 2005 (2005-09-20). "Life, the universe and Wiki". Sydney Morning Herald. Retrieved 2008-01-24.
{{cite news}}
: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link) - ^ Jimmy Wales, 2007 (2007-12-26). "Life, the universe and Wiki". Sydney Morning Herald. Retrieved 2008-02-04.
{{cite web}}
: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link) - ^ "Wikipedia: Basic Principles, German Wikipedia". Retrieved 2008-01-25.
See also
Article space
- Criticism of Wikipedia
- Essjay controversy
- Seigenthaler incident
- Virtuous circle and vicious circle
Project space
- 100,000 feature-quality articles
- Anti-elitism
- Evaluating Wikipedia as an encyclopedia
- Expert retention
- Problems with Wikipedia
- Wikipedia:Why Wikipedia is not so great
- Wikipedia:Why Wikipedia is so great
- Wikipedia is not failing– this essay sets out specifically to rebut the arguments presented in the essay, Wikipedia is failing.
- Wikipedia is a work in progress – it's not failing or succeeding, it's just not done yet
- Wikipedia:Wikipedia may or may not be failing
- Wikipedia:Vandalism won by 2009
User space
- Amarkov/Problems with Wikipedia
- FreeKresge/Wikipedia problems
- Heimstern/Wikipedia is going to suck sometimes
- Moreschi/The Plague
- ONUnicorn/The problem with Wikipedia... AND the solution
- Thomas H. Larsen/problems with the English-language Wikipedia
- Ravpapa/Tilt
- User:GoneAwayNowAndRetired/Wikipedia is broken and failing
- User:Kephir/reports/Backlog statistics