Via Boing Boing comes this study by Nature that all the news about how unreliable Wikipedia can be might be more sound than fury.
[A]n expert-led investigation carried out by Nature — the first to use peer review to compare Wikipedia and Britannica's coverage of science — suggests that such high-profile examples are the exception rather than the rule.The exercise revealed numerous errors in both encyclopaedias, but among 42 entries tested, the difference in accuracy was not particularly great: the average science entry in Wikipedia contained around four inaccuracies; Britannica, about three.
My students wrote a Wikipedia article this semester and we talked about how to use sources, including Wikipedia. I was happy to see that the students found anyone who relied on a single source a bit daff. This Nature study should help people understand that relying on any signle source is bad research. This doesn't let Wikipedia off the hook for poorly written entries, but it should help people put things in a bit of context.
and take a look at this too. . .
Here's the list of articles they looked at in the study:
http://www.nature.com/news/2005/051212/multimedia/438900a_m1.html
So let's get busy and polish them up!
So it sounds like readability is the real problem, which then points up the big question of revision: how do we (people who write on wikis) get past the 80/20 rule of revision? Can you distribute the task of proofing for unity and coherence? Or will it always be that 80% of the people do 20% of the work while 20% of the people do 80% of the work? This is the same problem that Yochai Benkler calls "low-cost integration" in Commons-Based Peer Production.
80/20
From what I understand, this is generally what happens in most open source projects-a minority does most of the development. Seems like it's just the way that it works out in terms of community contribution.
What's wrong with 80/20?
Although it may seem unfair to have certain people doing the bulk of the work, I'm not sure this situation needs to change. Some people simply have more to contribute than others. I don't think people should feel uncomfortable trying to contribute simply because their expertise deals with only one small aspect of the project.
For that matter, the 80/20 rule isn't unique to community efforts. When I'm working on a project by myself, 80% of my results come from the first 20% of my efforts. Unfortunately, getting that last 20% completed takes the other 80%.
Wikipedia Can Be Unreliable about Politics and History Too
A political activist wrote an article about the American calling it "fascist." Unfortunately, it was badly sourced and inaccurate.
Wikipedia & the American Legion
A good example of how anybody with an agenda can write an article.