The Economist has a suprisingly good article on Wikipedia, the “infinitely elastic internet encyclopedia”.
Wikipedia has its strong points and its weak points, and the article manages to touch on all of them successfully, without devolving into a laundry-list of the usual unfounded accusations, or listing off all the misguided ways that Wikipedia could easily solve all its problems.
To me, the strongest point of Wikipedia is that you have not only the most recent article to look at, but the complete history of every modification to the page—from vandalism to spelling fixes to complete rewrites. Not only that, but you also have the complete history of every change to the discussion page for every article. You can see what parts of the article are controversial, why they’re controversial, and the reasons people have given in defense and in criticism of the various pieces. That’s an amazing wealth of information.
The weakest point of Wikipedia isn’t about vandalism (both the blatant kind and the subtle kind get reverted very quickly) or bias (even very controversial pages don’t have a very strong bias, and you can always read the talk page anyway). The weakest point is that articles that “northern white computer-literate males” don’t care about tend to be neglected in favor of subjects they do care about.
Fortunately, I think even the neglected articles tend to get better over time. It’s easy for someone to add bits to them, and that information is never lost (even if it gets reverted or changed). Over a long period of time, a substantive article forms, even on obscure, non-mainstream topics. It’s self-correcting in a way—if nobody is interested in a certain type of article, it doesn’t get created—but that’s okay because nobody is interested. If suddenly people are interested in that type of article, they will tend to create new content when they find it’s missing.
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