The Great Wikipedia Joke
MercatorNet has posted my recent article on wikipedia.
According to Wikipedia’s own estimates there are over 765,000 stubs. This estimate could off by about 20 per cent because Wikipedia rounded up in its counts and articles might be listed as a stub in multiple categories. This leaves about 600,000 stubs. That means over two in five articles in Wikipedia are stubs. That does not include articles that are stubs that have not been tagged by someone. This is in line with other estimates.
Wikipedia also has a policy forbidding the use of original research in Wikipedia. If it hasn’t been published somewhere else, it cannot be used. However, over 180,000 articles are tagged by Wikipedia as not having necessary sources. That is, over 12 per cent of the articles in Wikipedia contain assertions which have not been documented.
Lastly, there are pages that exist solely as “disambiguation” pages. These are pages listing the many alternatives for a certain word. For instance, if you search Wikipedia for “George Bush”, you get a page that lists the alternatives of what you might mean. There are about 73,000 disambiguation pages. There are also about 32,000 articles that are nothing but lists of other articles.
Adding the numbers above shows that 58 per cent of articles on Wikipedia have no intellectual merit whatsoever.
Read more at Mercator.
I wonder, does it really matter a lot the wealth of the country or the people in that country? I’d imagine that this sort of system might work better where people didn’t have as much money.
Comment by CCLVLBRREF | January 19, 2007