It's for the masses.

Really? I spend probably five to ten hours a week at Wikipedia while I'm at work. I've found articles that were not as complete as I would hope, usually on some half-obscure scientist, but never, never something I would assess as bad. The content that is there is good.

I've easily spent over a thousand hours just perusing, and I've never stumbled upon a case of vandalism myself. The process for dealing with that stuff is fast, and the history logs reflect that. The odds of any one user noticing vandalism before it's taken care of is miniscule. Take a look at the recent article on the new missing link fossil, they're busy arguing about whether it should be A missing link or THE missing link.

I can see the point about how that kind of article is different, because there's lots of attention on it. I can totally believe an article might suck due to neglect, but give me an example.

What industry?

Give that man a medal.

I don't know how many times I've been presented with incomplete or erroneous information from an encyclopedia. At least Wikipedia revises when necessary.

Wikipedia is actually fine starting point for most casual research. The science entries are pretty decent across the board, with some being exceptional. I don't go looking for a guarantee of accuracy, because I'll be verifying most stuff with additional (and usually significantly more rigourous) sources. As a generalist source of information that often provides a synthesis of multiple sources, I think Wikipedia is invaluable. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that I regard Wikipedia as one of the greatest achievements of the Internet, and representative of the sort of thing possible through collaborative (including the dumbasses) efforts.

I know of college professors who say Wikipedia is great because it allows students a broad starting-point for research that simply hadn't been available to them in the past.

Of course, these same professors will also laugh at a student who tries to cite Wikipedia, for good reason.

I also think that the whole Wikia concept is great because it provides specific sectors with communal knowledge. Of course all of this knowledge commons with an asterisk, but for most people, that asterisk is good enough.

I want to see one.

http://feeds.arstechnica.com/~r/arstechnica/index/~3/0DijX3hObzo/wikiped...
http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-6100754-7.html
http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/editorials/2005-11-29-wikipedia-edi...

Not to open a can of worms, and this doesn't deal with badly written or unreliable articles, but political debates can be carried over into Wikipedia articles. Take for example the English language entry for the term "hispanic" and the Spanish language entry for the term "hispano". The English language article considers the term "hispanic" to mean "used to describe the culture and people of countries formerly ruled by Spain, usually with a majority population of substantial Spanish heritage and speaking the Spanish language." This is regardless of race. "The terms Hispanic and Latino tend to be used interchangeably in the United States for people with origins in Spanish–speaking countries. Latino, from American Spanish, is used in some cases as an abbreviation for latinoamericano, "Latin American".[12] In some Hispanophone countries, Hispanic and Latino are not commonly used." Not an unproblematic definition by any means. It recognizes that in "some" of the countries supposedly described by the word "hispanic," the people themselves prefer not to be called "hispanic." But otherwise it glosses over any serious problems with the term, mainly discussing the problems the U.S. government has had defining the term for itself.

The Spanish language entry goes further in declaring that "La definición de "hispano" en los EE.UU. es intencionalmente racista y prueba del grado de ignorancia de quienes la usan..." (The definition of "hispanic" in the U.S. is intentionally racist and shows the level of ignorance of those that use it...") and "El término hispano e hispánico tiene fuertes connotaciones colonizadoras hispanas, o sea, españolas..." ("The term hispanic [noun] and hispanic [adjective] have strong hispanic colonial connotations, that is, Spanish...") The Spanish language article complains several times that while "hispano" supposedly describes spanish-speakers, it is actually used (erroneously) to describe race as well, so that a Dutch-born person immigrating to the United States but having grown up in Argentina (and therefore speaking Spanish) is still considered "hispano" in the U.S.

How much politics do we want in our communal knowledge base? Personally I welcome all the debate and it's great that we now have another point of view other than some homogenized "standard" that is in fact just as politically constructed as the next. However, the English language article attempts to gloss problematic usage much more than the Spanish language article which adopts a much more polarized stance.

Traditional enciclopedias are far from the neutral paragons of unambiguous and apolitical knowledge many may make them out to be. But the gift of a multiplicity of voices involves a greater burden on the user to know how to weigh each one. If the difference between these two articles provokes the user to question both and probe deeper, then outstanding!

I'd say Wikipedia can be viewed in the same way the internet can be viewed. They are both collections of work that are edited and fact-checked to varying degrees. With both the internet and Wikipedia people are also learning about more topics than they ever have.

Everything on the internet isn't factually accurate or well written and neither is Wikipedia or even Encarta. I think Wikipedia is much more valuable than Encarta since articles often contain links to primary sources and other secondary sources that can be quickly and easily explored.

Another positive as people have mentioned is a quick fact-check use of Wikipedia. If someone 'remembers' something that you think is absurd, you can easily get a second opinion.

I don't personally miss the decline of 'professional' news writing or encyclopedia writing because I never enjoyed either. If you value this type of writing highly, which it seems you do, then the negatives are much stronger for you.

I just don't want to see what happened to investigative journalism happen to encyclopedias, but it seems like it happened years ago anyways.

I like how Wikipedia seeks to achieve its democratic goal by democratic means. Since it's an open-source project and it uses millions of people who constantly add, check and edit articles, you get a lot of what Parallax mentions. This “socialisation of expertise” makes sure that errors are found and fixed really fast. And that the site is constantly updated. No traditional encyclopedia can top this scrutiny.

But creating knowledge by consensus or some kind of Darwinian democracy is fatally flawed. A fact is not true simply because lots of people think so. Traditional encyclopedias are written and edited by academics and professional experts, whose reputation is put on the line by the articles they produce. Anyone can write a Wikipedia article, regardless of how much or how little knowledge they have of the subject. Worse, because contributors are effectively anonymous, it is impossible to assess the quality of an article on an unfamiliar topic by assessing the credentials of those who have produced it. See the examples I posted above in reply to Danjo.

It just seems to be a matter of how comfortable you are with the level of checks and balances.

I didn't do any research into the editing process itself, so those comments are based on the snapshot of information available this evening from the two articles. I know that the total number of Spanish language articles is much lower, but that doesn't necessarily reflect on their quality or editorial contributions. On the one hand it's frustrating not to have a stable knowledge base, even though some entries may become refined over time and reach more or less stable states. On the other, it's helpful to have entries that respond to new facts and incorporate them quickly, as we have already mentioned.

QFT

The whole to do is that people are finally realising the humanity behind tomes and texts. Instead of the all-knowing infallible scholars in robes we all see in our minds, we have Joe Blow textbook writer that does his own editing to the best of his/her ability because they're the experts, Not Britannica or McGraw-Hill.

The system is just as flawed as before, but now it's free and updates multiple times an hour.

As in the first link Edwin posted but not stated, That guy had to go back and re-edit his false submission back in a couple of times because someone would notice the error and correct it. Wikipedia corrected itself, "journalists" propagated the falsities. If anything, it highlights what makes Wikipedia superior.

As a tool for information like music or movies etc. it's great.

Wikipedia doesn't create knowledge - it reports on it.

It's a good thing that Wikipedia's policy is to require citations of primary sources then, isn't it? Yes, anyone can write an article. But anyone can also fix an article, and if they provide sources, they'll blow away the person with less knowledge. Your citations are not proof of Wikipedia's failures, they are part of the process. People publicize failures and failures get corrected. It's not Darwinian democracy, it's an intellectual meritocracy where the person with the best sources generally wins over time.

I can tell you this - I am far more comfortable with Wikipedia than I would ever be with Britannica or Encarta. Small groups of people tend to have agendas or inherent biases. Wikipedia's agenda is to make its articles as good as possible.

I used wikipedia several times throughout my college career on normal weekly homework assignments, maybe I didn't want to look through my textbook for the equation, or the problem needed a little bit more knowledge from the previous class than I remembered, but anyways, usually it worked great. Twice the equation we looked up was actually incorrect (once in an orbital mechanics problem, sign error in the vis-viva equation) second time in.... something. The text of the paragraph was correct, it just had a typo in the equation. It gave illogical results, so we caught it, and someone in the class fixed it. This is the sort of thing you have to watch out for when using wikipedia for a primary source.

Other than that I have loved wikipedia, even for much more in-depth research during my year-long senior project wikipedia was great because of the "related reading" sections and the sources.