In article ,
Angus Rodgers writes:
On Mon, 15 Nov 2010 12:19:40 -0800 (PST), D7666
wrote:

On Nov 15, 7:43*pm, "
wrote:
What's happened to Wikipedia? Have they gone bust? If you try to go to
it now the browser hangs or you get a blank page.

Good.

Perhaps people will stop quoting it in here and do some real research.

People are always making a joke of Wikipedia, but I don't know
why. I'm usually impressed by the quality of the pages there.
It's pretty reliable for articles on mathematics, and, as far
as I can tell, for other subjects, too. Are there some famous
examples of bad pages, which might explain this widespread
notion that it is unreliable? (Yes, of course I know that any-
one can edit it, so that it can never have final authority.)

I have been a contributor to some pages where I have specialist
knowledge, such as the fluorescent lighting ones. I would say it
peaked around 4 years ago - there were several people, all clearly
specialists and knowlegable, developing the pages. Then more and
more dross would start appearing - such as people knowing nothing
about the field citing a piece garbage they read in one of the
red-tops, and the task slowly turned into continual dross-repair
activity. I got bored with doing that (although I do occasionally
return and do a bit). But most significantly, if I look through
contributions nowadays, there are no longer the same level of
specialists contributing. This isn't just my experience - I'm
hearing it from many others too. This means that when I use
Wikipedia to research something I don't know, I am aware that
the data comes without guarantees, and almost certainly some
level of errors.

I think it's probably inevitable too. As you encourage more and
more people to contribute, you are going to attract less accurate
information, and the signal to noise ratio will drop.

You are right that pages such as deep mathematical ones are still
excellent - these aren't going to get dammaged by folks who, with
the best intentions, think they became a lighting expert because
of some inaccurate article they read in their dummed-down comic.

--
Andrew Gabriel
[email address is not usable -- followup in the newsgroup]