Does Wikipedia want to be better?
Friday 17th February, 2006Nick Carr comments
on Mitch Kapor using Nature's survey on the quality of Wikipedia.
I have commented on WP's quality - or lack thereof - before; I think the discussion however misses a point: while we must be careful in taking for granted what we find on WP (but I tend to do so anyway, whatever the source...) I do not think that ACCURACY per se is where Wikipedia is showing its incredible strengths. Here is some more interesting areas.
Size and growth
WP is immensely larger than Britannica, and growing much faster. So IMHO even if its entries are some %'s less accurate than Britannica's, I think we can say it does a better job at representing a more significant cross-section of humankind aggregate knowledge.
Speed of fixing
As many commenters to Carr's blog post pointed out, all the errors found by the Nature study are long gone from WP, while the ones on Britannica are still there. So doing the test again now on the same entries would deliver an impressive 132 to nil score - rather an improvement from its previous 132-169 score.
But, perhaps more importantly,
Improvement rate
People who do these silly tests by assessing the quality of a given entry block are like people wtaching a movie and sneering at the photographic quality of a any given frame when compared to a still photograph. They miss the motion factor, which is all cinematography is about.
WP secret is its dynamic and resilient nature - I wish someone measured the respective improvement rates of the two encyclopaedias over a given period of time. Mathematics, not opinions, say that even if WP quality is lower (even much lower) than Britannica's, but its error fixing routine is much faster, the overall quality is bound to become higher in a time that depends only on differentials between current quality gaps and speed of error fixing.
I have commented on WP's quality - or lack thereof - before; I think the discussion however misses a point: while we must be careful in taking for granted what we find on WP (but I tend to do so anyway, whatever the source...) I do not think that ACCURACY per se is where Wikipedia is showing its incredible strengths. Here is some more interesting areas.
Size and growth
WP is immensely larger than Britannica, and growing much faster. So IMHO even if its entries are some %'s less accurate than Britannica's, I think we can say it does a better job at representing a more significant cross-section of humankind aggregate knowledge.
Speed of fixing
As many commenters to Carr's blog post pointed out, all the errors found by the Nature study are long gone from WP, while the ones on Britannica are still there. So doing the test again now on the same entries would deliver an impressive 132 to nil score - rather an improvement from its previous 132-169 score.
But, perhaps more importantly,
Improvement rate
People who do these silly tests by assessing the quality of a given entry block are like people wtaching a movie and sneering at the photographic quality of a any given frame when compared to a still photograph. They miss the motion factor, which is all cinematography is about.
WP secret is its dynamic and resilient nature - I wish someone measured the respective improvement rates of the two encyclopaedias over a given period of time. Mathematics, not opinions, say that even if WP quality is lower (even much lower) than Britannica's, but its error fixing routine is much faster, the overall quality is bound to become higher in a time that depends only on differentials between current quality gaps and speed of error fixing.
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