Wikipedia

"It's said that aeronautical theory says bumblebees ought not to be able to fly. Likewise, the idea that a useful, serious reference work could emerge from the contributions of thousands of "ordinary" internet users, many without scholarly qualifications, would until comparatively recently have been dismissed as absurd."

"Even the founders of Wikipedia had no clue when they started the project of what it would accomplish. They dug a hole to find water, and struck oil instead."

"A lot of articles will be locked down. The history of Wikipedia has been one of increasing barriers to changing articles"

"The early days were a gold rush,They attracted lots and lots of people, because a new person could write about anything."

"We now see the strong emergence of the Social Web instead of the Semantic Web, and a proposal has been made to use Wikipedia, the largest hierarchical collection of information in the world, as bottom-up input for the ontologies required to give shape to the Semantic Web."

"The only solution is to shut [Wikipedia] down and scatter it to the four winds. The idea that experts don't matter but 12 year old Canadians in their basements do is beyond untenable. ... What gives any anonymous douchebag the qualifications to write about ME and then call it encyclopedic? The project has failed from the top down. There is no fixing."

"Wikipedia is effectively one-of-a-kind. No other mass-market or topically broad wikis have had meaningful success to date. Even Wikimedia's other wiki projects are not nearly as active as Wikipedia. If successful wikis are rare, Wikipedia might be a one-in-a-million lightning strike — some unique combination of factors succeeded in this case, but those circumstances are unlikely to replicate. If so, Wikipedia's rarity might also highlight its fragility."

"There are a number of trolls, stalkers, and psychopaths who wander around Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia projects looking for people to harass, stalk, and otherwise ruin the lives of (several have been arrested over their activities here) ... You will eventually say something that will lead back to you, and the stalkers will find it ... I decided to be myself, to never hide my personality, to always be who I am, but to utilize disinformation with regard to what I consider unimportant details: age, location, occupation, etc."

"1. Wikipedia has no governance to speak of. It's a land of jungle law. 2. Wikipedia has no respect for people and their works. People are treated on Wikipedia like s--t. 3. Wikipedia cannot be trusted for accurate information, considering the agenda-pushing street gangs of wiki. 4. Wikipedia pollutes the internet as well as diminishes scholarship. It floods and pollutes the search engines on the internet and pushes out good scholarship and honest debate in favor of bad scholarship, defamation, and bold face intimidation and thuggery. 5. Wikipedia needs to be brought under the rules of slander, liable [sic], defamation, and copyright laws. 6. Wikipedia should be stripped of its 501c3 status."

"When I write, I consult Wikipedia 30–40 times a day, because it is really helpful. When I write, I don't remember if someone was born in the 6th century or the 7th; or maybe how many n's are in "Goldmann"... Just a few years ago, for this kind of thing you could waste a lot of time."

"At our roundtable, an audience member commented that the web was supposed to offer a democratic space in which no voices or experiences would be marginalized or ignored. Yet the coverage on Wikipedia has huge gaps, partly because of the interests and knowledge of those who have hitherto been most drawn to contributing: "more than 80 percent male, more than 65 percent single, more than 85 percent without children, around 70 percent under the age of 30." Although Wikipedia boasts thousands of detailed, well-researched, well-referenced articles on scholarly subjects, such as its Featured Articles, entries on fictional locations such as Middle-earth may be much more detailed than entries on real locations, such as countries in Africa."

"Two Israeli groups set up training courses in Wikipedia editing with aims to 'show the other side' over borders and culture done by Yesha Council, representing the Jewish settler movement, and the rightwing Israel Sheli (My Israel) movement. "We don't want to change Wikipedia or turn it into a propaganda arm," says Naftali Bennett, director of the Yesha Council. The problem, according to Ayelet Shaked of Israel Sheli, is that online, pro-Israeli activists are vastly outnumbered by pro-Palestinian voices. In 2008, members of the hawkish pro-Israel watchdog Camera who secretly planned to edit Wikipedia were banned from the site by administrators. Meanwhile, Yesha is building an information taskforce to engage with new media, by posting to sites such as Facebook and YouTube, and claims to have 12,000 active members, with up to 100 more signing up each month. "It turns out there is quite a thirst for this activity," says Bennett. "The Israeli public is frustrated with the way it is portrayed abroad.""

"So I finally gave in and coughed up a donation for Wikipedia. It was no trouble at all, and felt good. Now I have a sense that I'm a partial owner – a stakeholder of sorts – in this apparatus that I use every day. ... Giving like this can be habit forming. ... It's true that giving this way doesn't make rational sense according to a neoclassical idea of what constitutes economic rationality. Wikipedia is free and it will be there whether I give or not. The same might be said of the Mises Institute. If all we cared about were commercial exchange, I have every incentive to use the free good and never pay. There is no harm done in free riding, right?Mises himself had a broader view of rationality. He said that all actions are rational from the point of view of the actor. I'm glad to embrace that idea. Giving in this way is not strictly a capitalist act if you define capitalism as only commercial exchange based on contract. But if we see capitalism as the voluntary sector of society characterized by private property relationships, this kind of micro-giving is part of that."

"Wikipedia is, for many users, the primary site for information on the Web ... At present, Wikipedia hosts more than 2.9 million English-language articles, with a total of 13 million articles available in more than 250 different languages ... Wikipedia is the second-most searched site on the Internet, behind only Google."

"As Wikipedia founder Jim Wales revealed, back in 2005, 50 percent of all Wikipedia edits were made by just 0.7 percent of users; 75 percent of all articles were written by less than 2 percent of the user base. These numbers reveal that the active Wikipedia community is a lot smaller than you might think. It's understandable, then, for this active group to be somewhat self-centered, and not always accommodating to new or casual users."

"Concerns among the academic community about the reliability of information from Wikipedia are unlikely to ever be fully alleviated, but this has never been Wikipedia's fundamental goal. Much greater speed in adding and updating information, and involvement of the many rather than the few, have always been seen as ample compensation for any inaccuracies that emerge in the initial posting of entries. Wikipedia, like Castalia, is a flawed ideal but it is, as far as can reasonably be predicted, here to stay."

"Intuitively [students] are using Wikipedia as one of those [new] tools, creating a new layer of information-filtering to help orient them in the early stages of serious research. As a result, Wikipedia's role as a bridge to the next layer of academic resources is growing stronger."

"America's daily political vitriol is an undeniable fact. Against that depressing background, it is good to be able to celebrate an American invention which, for all its faults, tries to spread around the world a combination of unpaid idealism, knowledge and stubborn civility."

"It can be stunningly good on obscure corners of popular culture, and strikingly weak on mainstream matters."

"The kind of social production that Wikipedia represents has turned from a laughable utopia to a practical reality. That's the biggest gift that Wikipedia has given to us – a vision of practical utopia that allows us to harness the more sociable, human aspects of who we are to effective collective action."

"Wikipedia underscores an evolutionary lesson: We've always gotten farther as a species collaborating than going it alone. ... In the past, the groups that cooperated best lived longer and had more kids – and we inherited those tendencies. Groups would correct cheaters (people who didn't share info or goods) through social pressure. So Wikipedia is like humanity's social nature writ large electronically, complete with ongoing disputes and corrections."

"The generation of an infinite number of bogusly 'objective' sentences in an English of agonizing patchwork mediocrity is no cause for celebration, even if it eventually amounts to a Borgesian paraphrase of our entire universe. ... I liked the internet better before. The mistakes had flavor, passion, transparent purpose."

"The fundamental flaw in the way Wikipedians think about what they do is that they are entirely absorbed in rules and procedures and arguing fine points with one another and earning merit points; it has all the flavour, as has been suggested before, of a great online game. Users – the ostensible audience – are hardly considered."

"An authority isn't a person or institution who is always right – ain't no such animal. An authority is a person or institution who has a process for lowering the likelihood that they are wrong to acceptably low levels. ... And this is what I think is really worth celebrating as Wikipedia begins its second decade. It took one of the best ideas of the last 500 years – peer review – and expanded its field of operation so dramatically that it changed the way authority is configured."

"Warm, kindly, humane Wikipedia didn't grow up in today's Internet. Now it's like a hothouse orchid the size of a barn."

"The difference between Wikipedia and other editorially created products is that Wikipedians are not professionals, they are only asked to bring what they know. Everyone brings their crumb of information to the table. If they are not at the table, we don't benefit from their crumb."

"Every single day for the last 10 years Wikipedia has got better because someone – several million someones in all – decided to make it better. ... Wikipedia is best understood not as a product with an organisation behind it, but as an activity that happens to leave an encyclopedia in its wake."

"Watching pornography [...] is like going to a Wikipedia page. You search for a specific thing, a specific feeling, a specific result, and that's exactly what you find."

"Wikipedia was an idea whose time had come on an information-driven net whose consumers couldn't wait for the slow workings of expertise or the cost of proprietary content: a free encyclopedia written by anonymous users supposedly striving for an “unbiased” perspective. ... Wikipedia in practice has strayed from these utopian ideas because of the ease with which political and social bias trumps altruism. ... Finding examples of Wikipedia's bias is not difficult. One need only compare the entries of figures who do the same thing but from opposite sides of the political spectrum."

"I am astonished at the ethical blindness of Bell Pottinger's reaction. That their strongest true response is they didn't break the law tells a lot about their view of the world, I'm afraid."

"But the blot on the encyclopedia's fair name is not just in the wrongness of the statement, but in its partisan and non-encyclopedic nature.... If Wikipedia wants to live up to its promise of being a reliable encyclopedic source, it will strike this and all sentences resembling it from its article on me. At most, it can use me as an example of how it was fooled by some of its all-too-partisan collaborators. Speaking of whom: the history page accompanying my page proves forever that some Wikipedia collaborators wanted to inflict on me the maximum harm possible, an attitude incompatible with work for an encyclopedia. Shouldn't Wikipedia fire them and wipe out everything they wrote? Of course they can still contribute blogs and columns, by preference under their own full names, but they have proven themselves not to be encyclopedic authorities..."

"We don't want Wikipedia to be just as accurate as the Encyclopedia Britannica: We want it to have 55 times as many entries, present contentious debates fairly, and reflect brand new scholarly research, all while being edited and overseen primarily by volunteers."

"Despite being staffed entirely by an army of volunteers, Wikipedia – which is not, strictly speaking, a news site – is keeping pace with conventional media outlets. Official results make their way to athletes' Wikipedia pages within hours, and sometimes minutes, of their finish. With dedicated editors working 24/7, Wikipedia pages are proving to be faster, leaner and more popular alternatives to traditional reporting."

"Wikipedia, as you well know, is a fraudulent encyclopedia. It's sort of invented. And we all go to it. The entry under Michael Savage – I have one person who keeps trying to correct the truth. But the soviets, that is the communists, that is the liberals, that is the democrats, have at least ninety-nine people who attack my site, every time he makes a correction. For example, when he reenters that Michael Savage single-handedly stopped the Dubai Ports Deal? They take it out of there. They don't want anyone to know it. In other words, they revise my history, the way the soviets did to individuals that they wanted to destroy in their country. Now you understand why I'm not allowed on any television station. Why Michael Savage is an unknown individual in America, except to its millions of listeners. And why this show is number two on the Internet and radio. And why I have six best sellers in a row. Because somehow the truth is getting out. But I'm warning you about Wikipedia. If Wikipedia doesn't stop these ninety-nine democrat liberal soviets from modifying things that are true, then how could you rely upon a website that's so fraudulent? You can't. You can't! But I can't fight every battle every day, you understand that?"

"Wikipedians [...] act as de facto topic moderators, they often end up being biased and frequently quirky. ... Articles are often edited with the sensibility of adolescent too-clever-by-half males[, which] describes a lot of Wikipedians."

"It is partly a product of history, where we came from in the early days. We were really a child of the dot-com crash. There was no investment money. We were just a group of people on the internet trying to do something cool. A lot of the volunteers wanted to put it into the non-profit [Wikimedia Foundation] – made sense to me."

"The site I avoid at all cost is Wikipedia, which for many subjects I've found to be a trove of misinformation. I don't even have any desire to read my own Wikipedia article."

"For any information, it is necessary to trace it back to the primary source, and unfortunately this is not always the case for online publications. This is also true for Wikipedia, which considers newspapers and magazines to be reliable sources. In my case, it was first published in a magazine and then on Wikipedia that my father was a driver, but, while I have absolutely nothing against drivers, my father was a Russian interpreter."

"It all started one night when writer Amanda Filipacchi was browsing through Wikipedia and noticed an absence of women under the category "American novelists." At first, she thought the female writers being moved off the page were not important enough to be on it. But then she discovered some obscure male novelists were still listed, while some well-known women were not."

"As they say, history is written by the victorious Wikipedia editors."

"Of the approximately 7,000 languages spoken today, some 2,500 are generally considered endangered. ...less than 5% of all languages can still ascend to the digital realm. We present evidence of a massive die-off caused by the digital divide. ... To summarize a key result of this study...: No wikipedia, no ascent."

"It rarely tries new things in the hope of luring visitors; in fact, it has changed little in a decade."

"Dealing with the Wikipedians is like walking into a mental hospital: the floors are carpeted, the walls are nicely padded, but you know there's a pretty good chance at any given moment one of the inmates will pick up a knife."

"Every single person who signed this petition needs to go back to check their premises and think harder about what it means to be honest, factual, truthful. Wikipedia's policies around this kind of thing are exactly spot-on and correct. If you can get your work published in respectable scientific journals - that is to say, if you can produce evidence through replicable scientific experiments, then Wikipedia will cover it appropriately. What we won't do is pretend that the work of lunatic charlatans is the equivalent of "true scientific discourse"."

"Today, this democratic federation [Wikimedia] controls a large proportion of the sum of human knowledge, largely displacing the former Britannica Empire which had once stretched from A to ."

"...when I used to teach kids, there was a fierce debate between teachers on the pro versus the anti Wikipedia side, and I always came down very strongly on the pro side, and I told my students if they were researching something for me – like Wikipedia is totally OK. Copy and pasting from Wikipedia is not, but there is no place to get a better overview from things. ... it all depends on what do you need, and if you just want to check some quick fact about something, Wikipedia is totally reliable. Now there's reasons why you can't cite it as a source, but ignoring that for the time being, Wikipedia for a huge number of people's needs is totally fine. ... the thing that is disturbing is the number times that that source link does not go anywhere, or, I have found some times where the context of the source link says something that is completely contrary to the feeling that you got from the Wikipedia page itself ..."

"You'd be amazed at the number of times I've been with top professors in the field and I've asked them a question and they've said, 'I'm not too sure about that, let me check', and gone straight to Wikipedia."

"With such a massive amount of rules and regulations to adhere to, how is it not absolutely deterring for newcomers to join Wikipedia? Most likely, because they do not even know these rules exist. Counter-intuitive as it may sound, in spite of all the regulations, it is perfectly fine and acceptable to just use common sense when editing Wikipedia, relying on one's best judgment on how to make it a better encyclopedia. In fact, one of the Wikipedia policies goes even further and states that “If a rule prevents you from improving or maintaining Wikipedia, ignore it,” and one of the five pillars of Wikipedia claims that “Wikipedia has policies and guidelines, but they are not carved in stone; their content and interpretation can evolve over time. Their principles and spirit matter more than their literal wording, and sometimes improving Wikipedia requires making an exception.” In a similar spirit, there is a rule stating that instruction creep should be avoided and that pettifogging is not welcome. One policy, which describes what Wikipedia is not, insists that Wikipedia is not a bureaucracy."

"Whether or not Wikipedia has managed to attain the authority level of traditional encyclopaedias, it has undoubtedly become a model of what the collaborative Internet community can and cannot do."

"The prime agent of this change is a development that nobody (save perhaps Douglas Adams, author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy) would have predicted. It is called Wikipedia—an online encyclopedia collectively produced and edited by 'amateurs' who have created what is effectively the greatest reference work the world has yet produced."