Wikipedia wants Britannica quality
p2pnet.net News:- Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales says users should put more emphasis on quality than quantity.
The second annual Wikimania conference featured him as the keynote speaker and while Wikipedia, “may not be as hip as YouTube or MySpace, it certainly sucks up a lot of Web traffic (about 4% of daily traffic on the Net),” says bloggingstocks.
With more than 1.2 million articles in English alone, Wikipedia already has met its goal of becoming a comprehensive encyclopedia, the Associated Press has Wales saying, going on:
“Although we’ve always had this goal of Britannica quality or better, we’re not there yet. We can no longer feel satisfied and happy when we see these (article) numbers going up…. We should continue to turn our attention away from growth and towards quality.”
Wales said a few improvements coming to Wikipedia will help improve things.
“An editing tool called ‘Wikiwyg’ – ‘wyg’ stands for ‘what you get’ – should make it easier to change articles,” AP goes on. “As of now, readers who click ‘edit this page’ on a Wikipedia entry are confronted with a bit of programming code that Wales admits can scare off less technologically savvy users, denying Wikipedia their expertise.
“Wales also is encouraging the community to allow fewer unsourced claims in biographies of living people.”
“We have a really serious responsibility to get things right,” he stated.
Wales and the Wikimedia Foundation now also back a wiki dictionary, wiki course materials for schools, a wiki collection of famous quotations and a wiki for biological taxonomy, says The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and, “Wales also has gotten venture funding for Wikia Inc., a for-profit wiki-creating company, and wants to see wikis for political campaigns, in hopes of improving the discourse.”
Also See:
bloggingstocks – It’s Wiki tim, August 8, 2006
Associated Press – Toward a Better Wikipedia, August 4, 2006
The Seattle Post-Intelligencer – Wikipedia founder seeks more quality, August 4, 2006
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August 9th, 2006 at 4:38 pm
I presume Wales is referring to “quality” as well-written prose and not the density of facts. I read a while back that, in terms of errors per words per article, information on Wikipedia is almost twice as accurate as Britannica.