[WEB4LIB] Wired article on Wikipedia

[Alain D. M. G. Vaillancourt]

Yes, interesting, and quite informative.  One of the best on Wikipedia
in fact, among the "pro-Wikipedia " ones.  But it fails badly on three
counts:

1- It quotes the usual absurd figures comparing Wikipedia's 500,000
articles in English to Britannica's 80,000.  Most of these "articles"
are only a single, small paragraph long.  Some are smaller still.  Yes,
there are long articles, and good ones at that, but they are not that
numerous.

2- It treats coverage of topics as if it were the same, in quality and
quantity, for all topics.  In fact Wikipedia is a very skewed piece of
collaborative work.  Because of its popularity among computer persons
it has countless amounts of computer-related articles.  And a
surprising amount are good, or even excellent!  I cannot say the same
for the humanities and the social sciences:  Quality there is extremely
uneven, and in some domains the quantities are very low.

3- It forgets to mention what seems to me like a very positive point,
that of the possibility of "looking under the hood" of the editing
process, thanks to the "talk" page (click on "discuss this page") of
each article. 

Alain Vaillancourt

--- "Sloan, Bernie" <bernies at uillinois.edu> wrote:
> There's an interesting article about Wikipedia in the March issue of
> Wired:
> 
> Pink, Daniel H. The Book Stops Here. Wired Magazine, 13(3). March
> 2005.
> http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.03/wiki.html?tw=wn_tophead_5 


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