Wikipédia:Respostas aos críticos

Some people have very strong reactions to Wikipedia. Some are nearly instantly hooked, and they love the idea; others think the idea is so absurd as not to require any serious consideration. There are a number of very common criticisms of the Wikipedia project, which we try to answer here. (See also the Criticisms page for exact quotations of prominent critics.)

Many of the criticisms levelled at Wikipedia are not unique to it, but are due to the fact that Wikipedia is, at bottom, a wiki. Many of the same objections have been made to other wikis.

Letting arbitrary Internet users edit any article at will is absurd

My prose

I can't imagine having my golden prose edited by any passer-by. It's mine, so why would I let others touch it?

We (on Wikipedia) don't individually try to "own" the additions we make to Wikipedia. We are working together on statements of what is known (what constitutes human knowledge) about various subjects. Each of us individually benefits from this arrangement. It is difficult to single-handedly write the perfect article, but it becomes easier when working together. That in fact has been our repeated experience on Wikipedia. Consider the following example:

I thought I understood Gödel's incompleteness theorem pretty well, and since the then-existing article was short and incomplete, I decided to rewrite it. Since then, several people have chipped in, sometimes rewriting a paragraph, sometimes criticizing an omission, sometimes deleting parts. I didn't agree with all changes, but with most of them. No material is ever lost since Wikipedia stores all previous versions of all articles. So I reverted a few changes back. Overall, the article is now much better than I could ever have written it alone.

We assume that the world is full of reasonable people and that collectively they can arrive eventually at a reasonable conclusion, despite the worst efforts of a very few wreckers. It's something akin to optimism.

Cranks

Cranks are posting ridiculous theories on the Internet all the time. They will come here and ruin everything.

So far, we have had relatively few cranks on Wikipedia, and it's pretty easy to just delete patent nonsense as soon as it appears on the Recent Changes page.

There are websites out there that say the first moon landing was staged in a movie studio, or describe supposed perpetual motion machines. But you cannot correct those websites, no matter how wrong you think they are, because they are written by people who would never allow their work to be edited without their permission. They do not thrive on Wikipedia.

This does not mean that idiosyncratic points of view are silenced or deleted; rather, they are contextualized by attributing them to named advocates. The more idiosyncratic an entry, the more likely it is to be modified. Because there is no ownership of the information on Wikipedia, an individual is compelled to contribute information that is convincingly true. Thus, cranks who cannot accept critical editing of their writing find they have no platform and leave; those who are willing to present their interests in less-biased ways stop being cranks.

Some cranks are very persistent. Someone could write up a crankish page on the Holocaust, and keep reverting it back to their version.

However, a better tack is to challenge cranks using Wikipedia itself. For example, an article on Holocaust denial allows cranks to be seen for what they really are: something that cannot thrive in a neutral point of view. After all, it is better to understand inaccurate claims and challenge them than to try to ignore them.

Generally, partisans of all sorts are kept under the gun. Wikipedians feel pretty strongly about enforcing our nonbias policy. We've managed to work our way to rough consensus on a number of different topics. People who stubbornly insist on an article's reflecting their personal biases are rare, and then they generally receive a drubbing.

In the most serious cases, we can ban them as a last resort and use technical means to stop them from making further edits to Wikipedia.

Trolls and flamers

Wikipedia is going to end up like Usenet — just a bunch of flame wars.

This is a bit more of a problem, but it is dealt with fairly handily by the social mores of Wikipedia, aka Wikiquette. Arguments on article pages get moved either to a corresponding talk page (e.g. talk:theory of relativity) or to a new article page which presents the arguments within a neutral context (e.g., operating system advocacy).

The argument on the talk pages tends to be centered on how to improve the article, rather than on the merits of various competing views. We have an informal but widely-respected policy against using talk pages for partisan wrangling that has nothing to do with improving articles.

Usenet lacks at least two features that are absolutely essential to Wikipedia's success: (1) on Usenet, you can't edit other people's work, while we can here on Wikipedia, thereby encouraging creative and collegial collaboration; or more strongly, on Wikipedia, there's no such thing as "other people's work", because there's no ownership of information; (2) Unlike Wikipedia, Usenet does not have the possibility of enforcing community-agreed standards. Moreover, Usenet is a debate forum. Wikipedia is, very self-consciously, an encyclopedia project! This provides at least some agreement on What Wikipedia is not.

The Wiki way is to focus on agreement, not disagreement as weblog or mailing list or Usenet often do. It is fair to say that there is room for almost anyone to work on Wikipedia, without necessarily encountering those who have a truly incompatible view.

At any given time, there are probably a few trolls and flamers trying to stir up trouble on Wikipedia. But while these folks can make a lot of noise, the great majority of work on Wikipedia continues without paying much attention to them.

Amateurs

There are plenty of ignorant people who think they know stuff: your articles will end up riddled with errors and serious omissions.

In all honesty, Wikipedia has a fair bit of well-meaning, but ill-informed and amateurish work. In fact, we welcome it — we'd rather have an amateurish article on a subject that can be later improved, than nothing. In any case, when new hands (particularly, experts on the subjects in question) arrive and go to work, the amateurish work is usually straightened out. Really egregious errors are fixed quickly by the scores of people who read Wikipedia every day. In general, the worse the error, the faster it will be noticed and fixed.

Amateurs generally recognize when they're talking to an expert on a subject, and start contributing in a different way — by asking questions, saying which bits of an article are unclear, and doing some of the "grunt work" of research. Wikipedia benefits from having amateurs and experts, working together.

Nothing prevents "professionals" from coming in to correct errors later, but, if we did not concentrate on a framework and terminology and conventions that made sense to amateurs, we'd exclude them, and end up segmented into many more specialized works that made professionals happy, but that no one else could read. If on the other hand we can build a GNU FDL text base that is good enough for the serious scholar to correct, and with an interface and update protocol that are tolerable and respectful enough for them to use, we can make stone soup.

Also, it's much more time-efficient for an amateur to write an article because usually, the corrections a professional will perform will be minor. In any field, professionals are few compared to amateurs and are generally busy, so an extensive collection of knowledge nowadays is much better off having amateur contributions as long as this is recognised as a learning curve.

Partisans

There are plenty of partisans who are all too eager to leave out information that is important to presenting a balanced view. They'll be delighted to post to Wikipedia, and that's going to create huge gaps in your coverage, which will ruin the project.

Frequently the initial author omits crucial information, whether due to ignorance or malice. In many cases, but not all, this is fixed quickly by the scores of people reading Wikipedia every day. For example, Wikipedia has fairly decent, balanced articles about war, capitalism, evolution, abortion, Islam, Scientology, and prostitution. Wikipedia is actually notable as a means of coming to agree on controversy, and has been studied by some researchers for its ability to neutralize the often noxious debates on such topics. Very often it is easy to find a related topic on which many such partisans can work in relative peace and come to agree on methods, even facts. An example of this is the Cornwall page in which the difficulties over Cornwall's legal status and its relationship to England have over time been worked into what is a largely acceptable form of words to all parties. (The corollary of this particular debate is that the article is far more complete than it would otherwise have been, and certainly makes the point far more accurately than certain other encyclopaedias we could mention).

Bear in mind that Wikipedia is a work-in-progress, a draft, an "alpha release" if you will. It does have many important gaps, which we try to make explicit. This lack of coverage isn't due to ignorance, partisans, cranks, or anything else malicious — it's due simply to the finite amount of time that a finite number of people have been working on it — see systemic bias below.

Finally, we are aware of the potential for literally hordes of partisans to arrive in waves as part of a "troll war". If you are quite concerned about this potential, you might help us work on these policies.

Advertisers

But what about advertisers? Won't those with a product or service to hawk see the opportunity to hit a targeted market and write new articles for their product or worse, edit the article that corresponds to their generic product class (e.g. computer) to an ad for their product?

This kind of thing has already happened. There are basically three forms: adding excessive external links to one's company, outright replacing of legitimate articles with advertising, and writing glowing articles on one's own company. The first and second forms are treated as pure vandalism and the articles are reverted. Most Wikipedians loathe spam, and spammers are dealt with especially severely. The third form is normally dealt with by editing the article for a neutral point of view.

Corporate advertisers would likely not find Wikipedia to be an attractive advertising medium. In traditional web-based advertising, such as banner ads, popup ads, and email advertising, the response rate can be directly measured, either through web bugs or server logs. If a company used Wikipedia to peddle its goods, the response rate could not be measured.

Not being able to measure results may not stop individuals who want to advertise their new multi-level marketing scheme, but unless they're using a bot (see next section), it takes a lot of time and energy to keep reverting the page back to the advertisement, so that the would-be spammer would get their message viewed (in an uneditable form!) more often and more reliably by using a traditional advertising medium.

Ironically, advertising spam can actually be beneficial to Wikipedia. Suppose an advertiser for penis enlargement products edited that page to an ad for its product. A reader that happens by and sees the spam could copy the advertisement, revert the page to its previous state, and then add information discussing the advertiser's specific methods or claims to the wealth of knowledge on the subject. In effect, advertisers' claims, when tempered and weighed against other knowledge associated with the subject, can yield a more robust article than before.

See wikipedia:spam

Bots

You still haven't addressed the real bane of Usenet: massive automated spamming. It would be trivial to write a script to post Viagra ads to all Wikipedia pages, and once spammers or vandals start to use wikibots, you're sitting ducks.

There are scripts to deface wikis, primarily aiming for increased PageRank in search engines, but there are several things that keep this from being too much of a problem. It's easy to revert spam, and anyone can do so. We already block IP addresses, which serves as a basic form of spam filtering.

The Wikipedia is also an unattractive spam target for well-established legal reasons. Most countries do not have laws against USENET or email spam, but most have laws against unauthorised website defacement — what we call vandalism.

See also wikipedia:bots and wikipedia:spam

What do you do if people start running scripts to repost their own bit of vandalism or spam, and from different locations so you can't just block their IP address?

This would be similar to a distributed denial of service attack, which major websites occasionally fall victim to. Wikipedia has suffered some such attacks, and so far it's been much easier to block the attacks than for the vandal to devise new attacks.

If someone launches an extensive attack, all offending IP addresses can be blocked from further editing by the admins. We can develop ad hoc technical measures to disallow certain edits, or to revert edits that meet certain criteria. For example, measures are already in place that prohibit edits that add links to certain problematic web sites. Since some trusted members of the community have direct access to the page database, these measures can be effected more rapidly and with less effort than is expended by spammers to deface pages. In an emergency, we can restore yesterday's version from a backup we make of the server itself.

Systemic bias

Wikipedia coverage is heavily biased by the sorts of people who want to contribute to it.

This seems to be a perfectly legitimate concern. Certainly, Wikipedia coverage is patchy. It's easy to find examples of a really long article on one subject, where another, equally important subject, has only a stub. Sometimes this is just the result of a single enthusiastic contributor (e.g., Atlas Shrugged). Other times it is down to systemic bias.

As of May 2004, we think our largest bias is that we are biased in favour of Western topics, and particularly topics relevant to English-speaking nations such as the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia and so on. Also, many of our contributors are "geeks" of various descriptions: hackers, scientists/academics and so on, and as such, our science and technology coverage is far deeper and broader than our arts and humanities coverage. That said, Wikipedia now seems to be expanding more rapidly in the latter areas than in the former.

Earlier on, we had a systemic bias towards libertarian issues. However, as Wikipedia has grown, and become more mainstream, the libertarian contingent has declined as a proportion of Wikipedia in general. Perhaps our other biases will be partially neutralised in the same way.

Our hope is that when Wikipedia really hits the big time, while the percentages of people working on unpopular topics might remain the same, the sheer numbers of those people will be higher than they are now. The idea is that we'll be getting more content in those areas then. Besides, it's not as though we have a time limit. Even if the computer and mathematics areas, for example, fill up faster than the dance and literature areas, it doesn't follow that the latter areas will always be weak.

Another thing that we can do is target the weak areas and try to get contributors for those areas in various ways. See meta:Systemic bias for further discussion.

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Wikipedia can never be high quality

Under construction

It seems like there should be a giant "under construction" sign on almost every article.

Well, some pages are better than others. We have some articles on esoteric subjects that are the best resource you will find online for a given topic (see crushing by elephant). On more popular subjects, while Wikipedia articles don't tend to have multimedia extravaganzas, they are just as informative and well-written as anything you'll find elsewhere.

Equally, we have articles that are stubs, that are inaccurate, mis-spelt, biased, poorly written, or just plain rubbish. That comes with our ambitious goals, and the way we work. And on many of these articles, such as stubs, we do actually have under construction signs!

Wikipedia is both a product and a process. Even if the product is not yet perfect, the process ensures that at the end of every day, the encyclopedia is higher quality than it was at the beginning of the day. That doesn't ensure we will eventually attain perfection (if such a thing is even possible), but it's something to believe in.

Shortage of intellectuals

Wikipedia lacks upstanding intellectuals and highly qualified contributors. After all, Wikipedia will take anything from anybody!

It's fair to say that the majority of our contributors are at college or undergraduate level in the subjects they write about. So, the article on Physics is more likely to be written by someone taking a degree in physics than, say, Stephen Hawking.

To some extent, that's a good thing. Academics are adept at writing for other academics, but an encyclopedia needs to be accessible to everyone. We're breaking the hold of academia upon reference works! Huzzah!

Still, plenty of "intellectuals" have and do participate in Wikipedia. Our mathematics section, for example, benefits greatly from the dedication of several mathematicians who are very active on Wikipedia; our string theory articles have recently been expanded by a Harvard physics professor. (Who knows, maybe Stephen Hawking will start writing for Wikipedia!)

Motives of intellectuals

Why would highly-qualified people get involved with Wikipedia? Why should any researcher care about it, since it's not a serious reference work?

"Serious" can mean timely and up to date. "Serious" can mean open to change all the time, with no unalterable dogmas. "Serious" can mean immune to political or economic pressure. "Serious" can mean including views that most of Anglo-American culture has historically fought, or rejected, or misrepresents. It really depends what you mean by "serious".

Wikipedia is providing free, unlimited server space and well-designed page construction tools for anyone who needs to do something that fits within the Wikipedia mission and doesn't care about owning the information; a description that matches the prototypical academic researcher. Academics generally get their jobs because they like learning and/or teaching others. We do both here.

It can be fun for intellectually serious people if we know that we're creating something of quality. It's part of the volunteer ethic — the joy of helping others. And, as explained above, many people believe that we are creating something of quality here.

Errors and omissions

I looked at an area that I know something about, and I found all sorts of errors and omissions. I was surprised and amused. I don't want to be associated with something of this low quality.

Then contribute anonymously or pseudonymously until you improve things to the point you are happy putting your name on them. Many people do that. We're glad they do. The whole concept of authorship is not germane to wikis anyway. Bad articles cannot be credited to you because Wikipedia articles aren't credited to anyone!

We too deplore bad work: we just go ahead and fix the problems we see. It would be great if you would help us by doing the same. We also think that there's much on Wikipedia we can be proud of, so look at the best bits of Wikipedia, as well as the worst.

If the main thing that's stopping you at this point is that some articles in one area of Wikipedia are of substandard quality, we'd ask you to come back next year, or the year after. See if the mistakes in those articles haven't been corrected, and a lot more details supplied. Soon enough, we're sure the project will be something you want to be associated with.

Stubs are lame

Currently Wikipedia is pretty lame. I looked up a topic I know something about and found just a few words, just a stub. That's ridiculous!

Then chances are, you were reading about something obscure: in general, if Wikipedia has a stub on some subject, competing encyclopedias won't even have an article.

Yes, there are a lot of "stub" entries, and we share your opinion of their ridiculousness. Yet, mighty articles grow from little stubs. As people continue to find or fix a stub, so Wikipedia improves. Equally, we get new stubs created on subjects where previously we had no article at all! It's a consequence of the "continual improvement" of Wikipedia, and we're not ashamed of that.

Standards

It seems Britannica has extremely high standards for what they put into their publications, both online and offline. Wikipedia has no such standards. It's bound to be of shoddy quality.

It's simply false to say that Wikipedia has no standards — the standards we follow are those followed by each of its contributors, and in some cases, these are very high standards indeed. As we gain more traffic, we will continue to gain more expert help, and as gaps are filled in, the only way remaining for Wikipedia to improve will be in quality and depth. This, in turn, is likely to attract more experts, who follow their own very high standards.

To make a claim about what standards Wikipedia follows is to make a claim about what standards present and future Wikipedia contributors follow; to say that such people have no standards is baseless.

Selectivity

When it is good, Britannica is so partly because it is authoritative, and it got that way by being selective. Wikipedia isn't selective about its authors; hence it will never be authoritative.

The high quality of Britannica's articles is very important. Certainly it got that way by having high standards. We concede that, but what reason is there to believe that it is only "by being selective" (presumably by choosing who is going to write about what) that high standards can be achieved and maintained? Maybe there's another, more open way. Wikipedia is a good test of that proposition. We have, after all, managed to produce some really excellent articles — and, by the way, not all of these were written by the many Ph.D.s and other highly credentialed people that we have working on this project.

Mixing ignorance and knowledge

Good quality requires peer review and expertise. Why should we care about the products of an arbitrary group of people whose knowledge and ability could range from expertise to hopeless ignorance? Ignorance mixed with knowledge does not benefit knowledge.

First of all, the hypothesis that openness is to the benefit of quality has already been tested, and to the benefit of the hypothesis: articles that have been worked on by many different people in the context of Wikipedia are now comparable to articles that can be found in some excellent encyclopedias. If, however, you insist on considering the hypothesis a priori, we hope you will ask yourself: which is more likely to be correct?

1. A widely circulated article, subject to scrutiny, correction, and potentially constant improvement over a period of months or years, by vast numbers of experts and enthusiasts.
2. An article written by a nonspecialist professional writer or a fair-to-middling scholar (as so many encyclopedia articles are), and not subject to public review and improvement.

Second, there is a problem with the concept of peer review in general. Many of the great advances in the social and natural sciences have come by challenging the status quo and, for that, their contributions were ignored or debased by their peers. For example, George Akerloff, Nobel Laureate in Economics in 2001 had his classic paper (for which he won the Nobel Prize) entitled "The Market for Lemons: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism" rejected by the American Economic Review for being trivial and by the Journal of Political Economy because it conflicted with economic theory. Only after submitting it to a third journal, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, did the breakthrough article become published. Wikipedia allows for discourse where other venues would not.

Attribution and references

Look, all this speculation and "experimentation" is fine and well, but if there's one thing I've learned in my studies, it's that you can't really evaluate the validity of a piece of nonfiction writing unless you know something about the author and his/her qualifications to speak on the topic — or at least you are provided with the appropriate references to support his/her claims.

That certainly does seem to be a reasonable thing to say, but there are a few different points to bear in mind. First, an increasing number of Wikipedia articles do have references, and this is something we broadly encourage.

Second, the greater the number of participants, the greater the sheer number of experts who are involved in bringing our weaker articles up to par — so, while you might not know which experts have been at work on an article, if you know that an article has been around for many months and that we have some experts in the general area at work here, it's fairly likely that it's been given a going-over by those experts. In other words, knowledge of the process, and of the fact that it includes participants who are expert in a wide variety of subjects, is potentially a substitute for knowledge that some particular (alleged) expert has written some particular article. Perhaps the relevant question to ask is, "How expert is the community of people who have created Wikipedia?" The answer is, "We've got experts in several different fields, and new highly-qualified people are arriving all the time." We don't require that most or even very many of experts on this and that join us, or think well of us; we require only a few, who have been steadily "raising the bar" from the beginning of the project.

Third, if we find it advantageous, we will install some sort of approval mechanism. Alternately, because this is free content, somebody else might start a project that "approves" Wikipedia content itself.

Accepting edits

Indeed, then, I should like to see some means of peer review before edits are accepted on articles which have already been approved by some similar process of peer review. At the moment it is entirely in the hands of an individual whether he thinks a modification he intends is an improvement, so there comes a point when a modification is as likely to damage the resource. If some system could be installed, then you would protect against crank attacks as well as misjudgement, and ensure a continually improving resource.

As a community, almost all of us are opposed to what has been called the policy of completely "freezing" particular pages — so that they can be edited only by a select group of people (e.g., only the author and an "editor"). We feel that our own collective monitoring of Recent Changes is an adequate safeguard against cranks — see above. Moreover, it is quite obvious that Wikipedia has achieved what success it has so far precisely by being as open as it has been. So — again — we don't want to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.

That said, perhaps someone who has the above suggestion will be pleased by the approval system mentioned above and which can be found discussed at Wikipedia:Approval mechanism. Such a system would identify a body of experts that would put its official stamp of approval on some articles. Those articles could still be just as easily revised as they were before, but there would also be a version that would be presented as the "approved" version. This way we can "freeze" high-quality content without freezing the process.

Until then, people dissatisfied without a form of peer review can try Wikipedia:Peer review.

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Scalability

Quantity and quality

Many of your replies seem to assume that quality will improve as the website grows, but quantity doesn't always beget quality. Perhaps it will get worse as it gets bigger?

There are two reasons to think that increasing numbers of articles and participants will lead to higher quality.

First, the more eyes see our articles, the more transparent the errors will be (over the long haul). While we might have one or two philosophers on board during one month, a year later we might have ten or twenty — and then mistakes in their work will be caught much more quickly.

Second, statistically, the more people who are participating, the greater the sheer numbers of experts; that seems to be our experience so far. Moreover, as a matter of fact, people usually tend not to touch articles they know nothing about, particularly when the article is well-developed or when they know that some resident expert will pounce on their mistakes. (There are exceptions, of course.) So, the greater the number of participating experts, the higher the overall quality of the content produced under their general guidance. It is not mere hype to say that Wikipedia caters to the highest common denominator — it's actually an observation we've made!

Rate of growth

You may have grown fast in the past, but it's surely fallacious to suppose that the growth rate in the past is any very good indication of what will happen in the future.

It seems our critic here believes we have the following simpleminded argument: "The number of Wikipedia articles has been growing at rate R for the past nine months; therefore, it will continue to grow at the rate of R for the indefinite future." If that's all there were to it, that indeed would be foolish to say; but that's not all there is to it.

To be clear, we agree that it's very risky to make any specific predictions about growth rates. But it does seem reasonable to suppose Wikipedia will continue to grow at a rapid rate.

Now, what makes it reasonable to think that Wikipedia will continue growing at a rapid clip is not simple extrapolation, but observation of the factors that have made it grow at the rapid clip so far. Google has been sending us lots of traffic (thousands of visitors a day from Google alone; it used to be just in the hundreds). The more traffic Google sends us, the more people get on board and create content; and then Google sends us even more traffic. Moreover, more and more people are linking to Wikipedia. This raises Wikipedia's Google rankings. (Thus more traffic, thus more content.) Already, plenty of Wikipedia pages are listed on the first few pages of Google results (See Wikipedia:Top 10 Google hits for an incomplete, outdated listing).

Now, that's only part of the argument. The other part is that, while there is attrition (some old contributors don't write so much anymore), there's an overall increase in active population. There are a lot more active Wikipedians now than there were, say, three months ago.

Another part of the argument is that the overall quality of Wikipedia has been increasing, and our experience so far indicates that it will, probably, continue to increase. This makes it more likely that people will take notice of the project, link to it, use its contents (properly sourcing Wikipedia), etc.

In short, "the rich get richer." Please note, this is not mere speculation: it's an explanation of how Wikipedia's growth has occurred in the last nine months.

Of course, we will run out of topics sooner or later — the number of encyclopedia topics is not infinite. But it is really huge. A lot bigger than 1 126 741, and a heck of a lot bigger than the number of topics contained in Britannica. Even if we reach a point at which we cannot grow significantly in breadth, we will still be able to grow significantly in depth.

Success breeds failure

You say Wikipedia is growing rapidly. Suppose it gets really big. Then you'll start to attract the attention of more malicious elements. All the noise will eventually be larger than any group of editors can handle.

Wikipedia is the largest wiki there is, and it's an open question as to whether it will scale up if it becomes even larger. Indeed, many folks believe that online communities may not scale, whether wiki-based or not.

Many of us believe that Wikipedia will scale indefinitely. The more people there are to abuse it, the more people there are to ward off the abuse. As traffic increases, so does the number of people who work on and care about the project. We've been Slashdotted before, or had articles featured on TV, and had huge bursts of traffic, and while there were a few "malicious elements," they soon find out that it's just not worth their while. After all, what is the satisfaction from defacing an article submitted to a non profit organization that anyone can contribute to, not exactly much of a challenge is it? Bear in mind that people have been telling us that Wikipedia won't scale since back in 2001, and so far it has.

On the other hand, some of us agree with you, and think that Wikipedia won't scale indefinitely. At some point in the future, we may look back and see that while Wikipedia is a good encyclopedia, it was even better a month ago. Well, at that point we can start to take the project forward using a different approach, perhaps involving a more rigorous peer review system, or we can hand on the baton to someone else. But at the moment, Wikipedia is scaling nicely, and long may it continue to do so.

Miscellaneous concerns

Departures

Some excellent contributors have been driven off Wikipedia altogether: see Missing Wikipedians.

It's natural for all volunteer projects to have some turnover of staff. People may find better things to do with their time, or may no longer enjoy Wikipedia as much as they used to. Equally, Wikipedia has changed over time: in the early days we were focused on creating new and broad articles, like mathematics, where now we're more interested in refinement of existing articles, or creating articles on more esoteric subjects.

In short, it's not the end of the world when people leave Wikipedia, provided they are replaced with "fresh blood". On the other hand, where there are systematic problems causing many people to leave, that's something we have to address.

Page protection

Some articles end up being protected for very long periods of time, in direct conflict with the stated goal of Wikipedia.

On the page Wikipedia:Administrators, it is said in particular that:

The main page used to receive a lot of vandalism; protecting it is an unfortunate compromise to keep our welcome mat free of random profanity.

Wikipedia is not "pure" open, but it is close to it. We try to make sure that the only limitations made on editing are:

• clearly and immediately justified
• mostly effective
• the weakest possible such limitations that are this effective

Protecting pages is actively discouraged (see Wikipedia:Protection_policy and m:Protected pages considered harmful) and limited to a very select group of trusted users, about 200 out of many thousands. In this way we make the enforcement of the protection policy feasible. While there are cases where pages are protected without cause, any admin who is alerted to this can undo it, the wiki in effect again at a smaller scale.

Communism

I am afraid you have some similarity with the Communists or the Left. You should promote the values of the free market; such as competition, individual property and intellectual property.

One of the places where Communism ultimately failed was that it forced people to work for and share what bureaucrats deemed the common good. On Wikipedia people of all stripes, nations and ages are sharing their own intellectual property as they choose. Thus, Wikipedia is in no way like the economic and political systems of the 20th century called "Communism", but very much like a democracy. Some communists, anarchists and others on the Left would say this sort of democracy is central to their politics. Some on the right wing would gladly give these folks a backhander. Most centrists and moderates find the whole subject too foolish for comment.

There is nothing forcing someone to edit here, and there is nothing that prevents someone from taking the info stored on Wikipedia and creating a business around it. In fact, there are many websites that already do that (i.e. make money off of the Wikipedia content), see Wikipedia:Mirrors and forks. All the GFDL ensures is that information remains free. By attracting people who are knowledgeable on esoteric subjects, public domain material that you could find free on the web anyway (Euler's Number, anyone?) can be collected in one place and cross-referenced.

Furthermore, to suggest that an encylopaedia "should promote" one system of values over another defeats its very purpose; an encyclopaedia exists to disseminate knowledge without bias.

Redundancy

Why is there a need for an encyclopedia at all? Why not just go to your favorite search engine and search for whatever topic on which you're looking for information? You're more likely to find it, and it'll be more interesting and more current.

Here's a glib answer: isn't it interesting that, in fact, thousands of people per day arrive at Wikipedia via Google?

Here's a longer answer. The Internet, armed with good search engines, functions not unlike a giant, and often useful, encyclopedia. But does it follow that there is no need for an open content, community-built encyclopedia? Not necessarily.

Indeed, the fact that search engines are merely often useful is a point worth noting. There is a lot of dross on the web; it's easy to get side-tracked by rubbish. Also many of the points above directed at the Wikipedia do apply to the Web at large. A filtering mechanism of some kind is required.

That mechanism can take many forms: personal skepticism, peer opinion, popular opinion or a centralised authority, for instance. The Wikipedia provides another; that of mass peer review. It is a handy place to store stuff you find out. But if you can't substantiate what you say, others will remove it. An encyclopedia is not a place for things that it is not certain are true.

Also, Wikipedia is free and open content which is valuable. This means that anyone will be able to use the content for any purpose, particularly for educational purposes. The prospects of the use of a really huge, free encyclopedia for educational purposes is very exciting. However, it isn't necessary for the information to be stored in the wikipedia for this to happen.

Additionally, it's important to note that both personal and organizational pages on the Web become out of date (so-called 'bit rot'). Errors of fact can remain in place for years with the only feedback mechanism being increasingly rare (due to spam) "mailto:" tags. With Wikipedia, all readers are editors. Interested parties can keep articles up-to-date and current long after the original author has lost interest or has less time.

It is also easier to edit knowledge on a wiki than on a proprietary page because the editing is one click away.

Finally, it is possible that in the fullness of time Wikipedia will contain more relevant, reliable information on any given topic than can be easily found via a search engine search. That's certainly our plan for it.

Markup and Display

Wikipedia software is inadequate to the task of collaboratively writing an encyclopedia. It is hard to collaboratively edit images, there is no WYSIWYG editing, and anything complex requires reams of HTML.

There are some ways in which Wikipedia is less than ideal in these respects. We are working to improve some of these issues, though: for example, the largest concerns have been in the mathematical section of the site. Wikipedia began supporting TeX Markup in January 2003 and this is no longer a problem. Similarly, we now support image uploads.

In addition, a simplified image syntax has recently been introduced (see meta:image pages). There is also simplifying table markup — see Help:Table. The Wikipedia software is open source, so if you'd like to work on other extensions, then join the MediaWiki-L mailing list and offer your services.

In the meantime, while we can agree that the current software is not fully polished, it is certainly not inadequate; everything we do now can be carried over as we slowly improve the software.

See also

• Wikipedia:Why Wikipedia is so great
• Wikipedia:Why Wikipedia is not so great
• What Wikipedia is not
• meta:modest replies