-- October 24, 2004
Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales together with a slick Apple iBook in a fun shot by Newsweek.
The above image was found in an article and illustrates the increasing awareness of Wikipedia's success. Since the end of the summer, Wikipedia's traffic has steadily increased and is breaking new records -- in less than a month, wikipedia will probably be among the top 200 sites on the internet. And this is achieved only since January 15, 2001.
As you may well know, I am a longtime contributor and sysop at the english Wikipedia. Even though I stick to the site, often editing and reading >5 hours a day, I agree on some of the criticism that has risen in the ranks of the also-growing anti-wikipedian community. As noted in several blogs, Wikipedia has no bottom line for article quality -- any text on an encyclopedic topic is allowed, often meaning that half-useless and possibly incorrect stubs lie around -- and may never improve. However, how should this be solved? I think we have mainly two solutions -- a structural change, or an attitude change. A structural change would be to introduce checks, like Article validation or possibly placing new articles in quarantine before letting them in -- effectively not allowing useless stubs to be created.
However, we could at least postpone this development by pushing for an attitude and process change. A Wikipedia where we make our editors (anyone's an editor) more actively scrutinize, edit, remove and improve articles. A Wikipedia where we don't have hard structures for article entry, but a firm policy for trusted editors to act boldly from.