Monday, December 05, 2005

 

wikipedia feels the pain

There is a big article up on CNET about Wikipedia's growing pains. It talks about a former aid to Robert Kennedy being implicated in the assassination of both Kennedys for over four months before the article was taken down. There are other examples, many less gross, of how Wikipedia has grown so far and so fast that it has difficulty policing itself. Supposedly there are over 1500 new articles added a day. Quite a lot when you consider how quickly they go live and how little time volunteers have to police the articles before they are buried under the next day's listings. This is made worse by the sheer number of articles being updated and the fact that unless you are really interested in a topic, and watch the relevant articles like a hawk, there is a really good someone will change them when your back is turned and introduce fiction or spam.

With all that in mind, let me just say: what a fantastic problem to try and solve! I'll be interested to see how the free (and open source) market tries to deal with it. How would you deal with it?


Comments:
One of the things that they should look at is the people posting...imagine somebody "anonymous" could put up an article about somebody else or about something that is entirely unproven.

Everybody could contribute....but offer a way to screen those who are.

http://purelocke.blogspot.com/
 
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