Wikipedia: Why Wikipedia is not so great

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ja:Wikipedia:なぜウィキペディアは素晴らしくないのか

Here are some user opinions on why Wikipedia is not so great.

Quality of existing entries

Accuracy

• Credibility of sources can be dubious because of the anonymous nature of the wiki. Most articles don't give any indication about where the information comes from, making it hard to check, or they take information from transient Web pages which are equally obscure about their sources. Admittedly this is a general problem since the introduction of electronic publishing (see Wikipedia:Cite your sources).

• Dross can proliferate, rather than become refined, as rhapsodic authors have their articles revised by ignorant or biased editors.

• Editors can add subtle nonsense to articles that take weeks or months to be detected and removed.
  • On the other hand, editors in traditional publishing can mandate subtle nonsense in articles that will, by many people, never be detected.

Completeness

• People attach {{stub}} instead of finding information to add to the topic.

• Way too many pages are merely stubs.
  • We believe that is a function of Wikipedia's relative youth.
  • "Find a stub, fix a stub"
  • Some believe that certain items should remain as stubs, since an author's time could be better spent working on more widely used articles (i.e. probably better to let a page on pet rocks be a stub, so that an author may work on incomplete articles featuring generally more important topics).
• Anyone can just visit this site, click on "edit" and delete huge amounts of text.
  • That article you just spent hours typing up can be gone the next day.
    • The history feature remedies the loss of data, but not the chaos, caused by a deleter.

NPOVness

• Many philosophers have argued that there is nothing that is completely true for everyone in all contexts. Therefore it might be so that Wikipedia's neutral point of view policy is doomed to fail because no chunk of text will be considered perfectly neutral to everyone.

• Political topics can end up looking like CNN's Crossfire rather than an encyclopedia article, with point-counterpoint in every sentence when a neutral statement of fact would do better. (e.g. Bill Clinton did this good thing but some say it was bad. He also did this bad thing but some say it was not so bad as opposed to Bill Clinton did this thing and then that thing.)

• Many users reflexively defend their text when possible POV (Point of view) is pointed out rather than reflexively make a zealous attempt to strip POV from their text instead. If someone thinks your text is POV, that's not a good sign in and of itself.

• You might have to work with people who believe the polar opposite to you on a given subject, and their opinion might win the day for reasons other than being correct. For example, a monomaniac, no matter how ignorant or even malicious, may "win out" eventually, because non-monomaniacs have better things to do than argue with them.
  • It has been noted that this problem is not restricted to Wikipedia and frequently appears in many areas of human discourse.

• Many people with causes come here to "get the word out" because publishers laugh at their stuff and site hosting costs money, so we get detailed articles about obscure activists, while the opposing establishment figures get stubs whose content is a litany of all the evil things they've done to the obscure activists, e.g. w:Goldman Sachs or w:Merrill Lynch vs w:Accounting scandals of 2002
  • Many people with national or ethnic heroes come here to "get the word out" as well, meaning that the importance of the contributions of an individual to a particular field of endeavour can tend to be overstated (even grossly overstated) because of their belonging to a particular nation or ethnic group.
  • Most, if not all, contributors have a political bias, even if they pretend not to or think that they don't. They are all working to subvert articles one way or another. If they happen to have more resources, and thus time, than other contributors, their views will prevail.

• Articles tend to be whatever-centric. People point out whatever is exceptional about their home province, tiny town or bizarre hobby, without noting frankly that their home province is completely unremarkable, their tiny town is not really all that special or that their bizarre hobby is, in fact, bizarre.

• Ideas to which most geeks are hostile get reverted without thought even if written to NPOV.

• It's hostile to whole fields of inquiry, as when there is controversy between "hard" scientists and scholars in any other field, Wikipedia will favor the scientists.

Other

• Wikipedia's somewhat haphazard usage of American, Australian, British, Canadian, etc. spelling and usage variations of the English language. See Manual of Style.

• Translations will always lag behind edits in other languages, meaning that those who read wikipedia in different languages will get different versions of the facts.
  • Articles can be written in any language; they are not simply translations of the English Wikipedia. Some never get English versions.

Overall quality (net-level)

• Popular topics (like Abortion) get written about inordinately, whereas less popular ones (like "Ethiopian presidents") may never receive much attention, or are hard to find.
• Geek priorities. There are many long and well-written articles on obscure characters in science fiction/fantasy and angels-on-a-pinhead issues in computer science; there are stubs, or bot articles, or nothing, for vast areas of art, history, literature, film, geography. A summary of this complaint might be: "this is the encyclopedia that Slashdot built".
• Absence of concrete examples in the mathematical explanations.
• Too much nonsense is added that sounds as if the author had taken LSD, peyote, or psilocybin. For example, "Mommy Tulips live in the Philippine Islands. Many baby tulips sprout from her. For more information, please e-mail us at [email here]". What's that about?
  • See: Bad jokes and other deleted nonsense
• Different view-points tend to create their own closed topologies of pages, and interlinking and comparison can be poor. This is exacerbated by the different camps tending to use different terminology (indeed, it is probably why they do).
• A lot of stuff is there, but it's not well linked together.
• Articles become longer much more quickly than they become better. Wikipedia's strong community bias against deletion of text encourages the accretion of many authors' partial (or mis-) understandings of a topic while making it difficult for a rewriter or editor to synthesize them briefly without causing offense.

Collaboration practices and internal social issues

Behavioral/Cultural Problems

• People raise endless objections on Talk pages, instead of fixing what bothers them (see Wikipedia:When people complain rather than edit). On the other hand, people can be too bold in updating pages instead of discussing changes on Talk first.

• The self-esteem of a bad writer with a fragile ego may be damaged by people always correcting horrible prose, tautological redundancies, bad grammar and spelling.

• If you have correctly internalized rules of English capitalization, spelling, punctuation or typesetting, you end up making trivial corrections rather than getting on with content.

• The evil twins of vandalism. If you revert or ban too quickly, sometimes a useful contributor will be turned away. If you revert or ban too slowly, then extra time will be wasted by good editors correcting the junk added to wikipedia.

• People revert edits without explaining themselves (Example: [1]) (a proper explanation usually works better on the talk page than in an edit summary). Then, when somebody reverts back, also without an explanation, an edit war often results.

• There's a culture of hostility and conflict, rather than of good will and cooperation. Even experienced Wikipedians fail to Wikipedia:Assume good faith in their collaborators. Fighting off the barbarians at our gate is a higher priority than incorporating them into our community.

Controlling problem users vs. allowing wide participation

• Anonymous users with very strong opinions and a lot of time can change many articles to support their views. Aside from IP blocks and bans for the most obnoxious, there is no means of preventing this issue.

• IP range blocks can reduce participation if they are for ranges selected from dynamically by IP providers, both dial-up and broadband. How

• If Wikipedia follows the pattern of every other 'community forum' on the net, small groups will become powerful to the exclusion of others. Thus the priority, inherent bias and hostility issues are likely to get worse. The increasingly nebulous "troll" could be used as an excuse for excluding people from the decision making processes behind the encyclopedia.

• Geeks run the place. Wikipedia has become more and more hierarchical in order to 'defend freedom' from 'trolling'. There are administrators who can delete articles. There are no checks or balances on this power built into the system, other than the attention contributors have time to give, whereas their ability to delete and ban is built in at the coding level.

Personal interests of contributors and others

• This site is creating large numbers of wikipediholics who could be doing something more useful. This is harming the economy.

• Authors cannot claim authorship of any article.
  • If you want someone to evaluate your own work, you can always guide them to the "revision history" section.
  • Also, there are countless places in the world to build your resume; Wikipedia is just not one of them.

• Those disaffected with humanity are provided with an outlet for their vitriol, rather than having to become misanthropes, terrorists or political researchers. Such people will take great pleasure in demonstrating the idiotic futility of such rubbish.

Technical/usability issues

• No easy way exists to add vector images to wikipedia. This results in most images being raster, which can be far more difficult to modify, so the images tend to lag behind the text of the articles.
  • Of course, at some point m:SVG image support might be added.

• One centralised wikipedia server: lacks robustness against server or network problems.
  • The license does allow creating mirrors however.

• You have to get the word form and case exactly right to link to articles. Wikipedia is highly case sensitive - for example, searches for M&M and m&m lead to two entirely different pages.
  • Or create redirects.

Miscellaneous

• Articles are sometimes copied virtually verbatim from other sources infringing on (international) copyright, particularly when no credit is given.
  • There is a Wikipedia:Copyright problems page that is designed to deal with such "copyvios".
• Adding content to Wikipedia, although revolutionary in concept, is practically not very exciting. One could imagine a room of medieval scribes, and this is 21st century, isn't it? No solutions for "power" editors/contributors.

• Its subdued, professional appearance does not appeal to people who like flashy sites.
  • On the other hand, Wikipedia provides compatibility and presents a less system intensive core.

• Edits by scholars and experts who disagree with some of its core values are repelled.

• The changable nature of Wikipedia discourages proper citation. When citing a reference it is vital to include which edition was used so that anyone following the reference can see exactly what you saw. This effectively means, with regards to Wikipedia, including a link to the specific version. Among other problems this means that if several authors cite the same Wikipedia article, they may all cite different versions, leading to complete confusion. That just linking to the article sans version information is not enough can be seen by those Wikipedia articles themselves which refer to others, where it is clear from following the link that a different version was referred to (and there is no clue which of the many versions in the history was actually read by the person who cited it).

See also: Wikipedia:Why Wikipedia is so great, Wikipedia:Replies to common objections.