Friday, January 01, 2010

Fluff post #5: Wikipedia and quality control

I’m not the only editor on Wikipedia that has spent my own money on books for research. One of my Wiki-pals (i.e., people I’ve met on Wikipedia) has spent wads of money that way. Of course, she actually takes a trip to her local university library to conduct her research. I haven’t gone that far, at least not yet.

I have plunked down loads of cash for books, though. It’s worth it, though, and they’re all books I’d be inclined to buy, anyway. I don’t spend time working on articles that I’m not interested in, you know. I’d rather own the book straight out, instead of worrying about library fines. I can also write notes in the books I own, or dog-ear them to mark areas I know I’ll need.

I’ve recently submitted one of my articles for Good Article (GA), which is the level of quality directly below Featured Article (FA). The difference in process between the two processes is that for an article to pass to GA, it only has to be reviewed by one person, whereas for FA, there are several reviewers involved. The criteria are also higher for FA.

Anyway, one of the issues the reviewer for GA raised was that my article didn’t have enough sources he could check easily, meaning sources that were on-line. My response, which I’m pretty sure was reasonable, was that there are loads of articles on Wikipedia (even FAs) that used those types of sources. I’m glad that isn’t a requirement, because all kinds of articles couldn’t be written, or at least they couldn’t be brought up to the level we all want in Wikipedia.

For Wikipedia to survive, the quality of its articles needs to be higher. I believe that I’m helping accomplish that goal. Eventually, there’s going to be less new articles written, since there really is a limit to the topics of knowledge, and the quality of the articles that remain will need to be higher.

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