Amerika

For instance, to keep the site freely editable, Wikipedia will need to replace its stock of hardcore admins and editors as they retire or quit. But Goldman thinks this will be a problem, since many of these editors first started their work when Wikipedia was a quite different place. Now, the editors themselves discourage the contributions of others through “xenophobia” toward outsiders; Goldman believes that they see “threats” everywhere and points out that the greater part of all edits made to the site are actually reverted by these editors.

In addition, plenty of political jockeying takes place among editors. And editors have few incentives for their work — no way to make money, no real way even to earn attribution. Together, these problems mean that as editors get burned out by patrolling for spam and vandalism, fewer new people will be interested in stepping up to plug the gap.

The result: a death spiral among the editorial community.

Ars Technica

Wikipedia has always been a core group of a few thousand graduate students plagiarizing their coursework and restating it as a free encyclopedia.

The result is that quality varies, and there’s a lot of pretense among the editors.

Who wins? Google does, because since Wikipedians summarize the contents of the top ten resources on any topic, Google can always spit out a Wikipedia page and be roughly correct.

Tags: censorship, wikipedia