Or: “Why Wikipedia is doomed to failure”.

Please note: if, after you read this, your reaction is “well, if you don't like it, go away“, please understand that I am not not saying people should not contribute to Wikipedia and I am not saying Wikipedia has done/will do nothing useful. Wikipedia is useful, I do contribute to it and I do not plan to stop either reading or contributing. I merely believe that, in the future, Wikipedia may not be quite so useful.

Wikipedia has factual errors—I don't think anyone can deny that. Any written work of this size does. The question is, “how many?”; and the answer: no–one knows. Even if every article is created in good faith and entirely accurate—and that alone is dubious—how many errors have been introduced since then, whether by anonymous vandals, or POV–pushers, or simply well–intentioned but misinformed normal users?

At first, this wasn't a problem. Vandalism was quickly noticed and corrected, factual errors or omissions were researched and the articles corrected. But now, after only 3 years, the sheer number of edits in recent changes, the number of articles on an awesome variety of topics, is just overwhelming. No–one can possibly verify every single edit; no–one has the knowledge needed to spot—and correct—the factual errors that are introduced every day. Wikipedia is being crushed under its own weight. Its openness, the very feature that makes it so successful, is fast becoming its own downfall. Already we see vandals who deliberately introduce factual errors into articles; changing numbers, dates… most of them, perhaps, are caught, but how many aren't? Again—no–one knows.

In time—one year, two years, four years—Wikipedia will be worthless for more than anything other than a basic overview of a topic. Citing it as a reference source for facts will be laughable. As an encyclopedia, Wikipedia will be a failure.

Wikipedia is drowning in politics. Requests for arbitration, requests for comments, what sysops are, or aren't, or should do, or shouldn't do; what a vandal is, or what a troll is; whether such–and–such a user can be banned or not, whether this or that article can be deleted…

All this contributes nothing to Wikipedia. It distracts editors from real work—writing articles—and drives off outsiders and new users, not to mention existing editors. And this is increasing, not going away. Every day there are more arguments; more vandals, more trolls. This is arguably something that could be resolved by change; a change in policy, a change in process… but where is that change? There are no wonderful new ideas on how Wikipedia should be run. Any unresolved dispute is solved by “ask Jimbo”. This is not scalable. If Wikipedia doesn't take a long look at solving these problems, they may well end up contributing more to Wikipedia's death than even gross factual errors.

This is one of the most obvious, and yet—so far—one of the least troublesome problems with Wikipedia. But although the kind of person who would deliberately vandalise Wikipedia in a major way might be rare, they do exist, and it's only a matter of growth before they begin to be a problem. What happens when DDoS networks are created to perform vandalism? Restrictions on new users, blocking of users or IPs, or entire networks, and manual reversion can only go so far. The only argument against this appears to be “well, it hasn't happened yet”.

This inherent weakness will end up imposing an effective cap on the growth of any Wiki—once it reaches a certain size, concerted vandalism will devastate it, and Wikipedia is no exception.

—Lady Lysiŋe Ikiŋsile | Talk 03:51, 2004 Jul 5 (UTC)

Comments below this line, please.

I don't know about the factual accuracy comment, but I agree with you 100% on the "Internal politics" thing. Dysprosia 04:00, 5 Jul 2004 (UTC)

I was actually not too sure about politics. It's possible that at the worst, it'd just mean editors come, edit for a few weeks and leave. Inefficient, but not fatal. On the other hand, though, it's certainly bad for PR, and when Wikipedia relies on donations and grants for its existence… —Lady Lysiŋe Ikiŋsile | Talk 04:13, 2004 Jul 5 (UTC)

You have identified two problems with wikipedia, but neither of them come close to implying total collapse of Wikipedia, IMHO.

Misinformed normal users do indeed inject a lot of factual inaccuracies into new articles. Indeed, new Wikipedia articles are often bad. However, the key point is that uninformed users are not going to change the facts that have been written by experts. Thus this group will not decrease the quality of Wikipedia with time.

POV warriors are generally extremely blatant in the changes they make. They will replace entire sections to reflect their extreme viewpoint. It is easy to detect and revert POV warrior edits.

Vandals. Now you have noticed that 95% of vandals do things like replace entire pages like "blah blah blah penis". These kids are no danger to Wikipedia. The real problem is users that make false factual changes. Now to do this, you have to be genuinely malicious, and explicitly desire the downfall of Wikipedia, not just act on a silly graffiti impulse. There are very few people this nasty. This is proven by the rarity of truly malicious computer viruses, despite how easy it is to make one. And if they do a lot of vandalism like this, one of their edits will be detected and then the rest of the edits from their username/IP address will be scrutinized. Finally, do you really think anyone would have the energy to insert subtle factual errors into thousands of articles? Who would do such a thing? This is very much a contained problem.

Finally, it is true that Wikipedia will never be 100% accurate. But what is? There are so many errors in mainstream news sources, let alone the rest of the web. Yet people still use regular web pages for information. Wikipedia will still be much better quality than most web pages even if there are some scattered factual errors. It may never reach the accuracy of the Encyclopedia Britannica, but this will be more than made up for by the *much* larger number of topics covered here. Perhaps it will not be referenced in scholarly articles, but it will be (and already is!) a very useful resource for general use. You realize that on hundreds or thousands of topics, Wikipedia is already the top Google hit?

Second: bureaucracy. It's natural that there will be more bureaucracy as the userbase gets larger. It takes a lot of time from the editors, yes. But a lack of people writing articles is hardly the problem. And it hardly affects new users: they will never notice unless visit the arbitration pages. No collapse here.

To me, the only real threat to Wikipedia is the danger of a Kuro5hin-style collapse caused by a change in the community. What happened to Kuro5hin is that an influx of bad new users came, overwhelming the old community and drastically lowering the quality of the discussion. Wikipedia needs to take care to properly assimilate all new contributors into its standards of quality. But fortunately, it seems to have been doing this very well so far. I am also worried about running out of money (the servers are already too slow), but hopefully as Wikipedia gets a higher profile the donations will increase until it's no longer a problem. It only takes one billionaire donator, after all.

Considering the amazing success of Wikipedia over the first three years of its existence, I don't see why you're so pessimistic. --Shibboleth 04:28, 5 Jul 2004 (UTC)

There are so many errors in mainstream news sources, let alone the rest of the web. Yet people still use regular web pages for information.

Yes—but isn't Wikipedia more than just a collection of web pages? I'd like to think Wikipedia could be an encyclopedia, an authoritative reference on almost any topic. Perhaps this is simply not possible for a Wiki.

[If] they do a lot of vandalism like this, one of their edits will be detected and then the rest of the edits from their username/IP address will be scrutinized.

In some cases, yes. But how many? If someone finds one error, corrects it, and goes off to do something else, it's likely enough to be lost in the history and never noticed by anyone else. Or a piece of POV or error may be rewritten, rephrased, copyedited, to the point where it's impossible to find where the original error was introduced.

There is also a delay between the error or vandalism being introduced and it being found and corrected. In most cases, one would hope, a small delay; but what about this vandalism, left uncorrected for a month, and found by a journalist? (From WP:VP). How many errors of this kind are there at any one time? Let's call these uncorrected errors the error corpus, since fancy terminology is so fashionable. As the size of tthe error corpus increases, Wikipedia's usefulness decreases. How long can the size of it be kept in check? —or even measured?

You realize that on hundreds or thousands of topics, Wikipedia is already the top Google hit?

Yes. That's how I found Wikipedia, actually—via pulse-code modulation, IIRC. But that isn't necessarily a good measure of quality, only popularity. And I hardly need to say that popularity is not proportional to quality in this day and age…

And finally, politics might not have a direct, measurable effect on articles, but it does cause editors to leave, and it does make Wikipedia look bad. And most importantly, it fractures the community, the very thing that Wikipedia relies on. Just look at Wik for an example. —Lady Lysiŋe Ikiŋsile | Talk 05:08, 2004 Jul 5 (UTC)

I agree that the delays are an issue, indeed probably the main issue as far as errors goes. But your example of "Chesapeake, Virginia" is somewhat unfair, as this is one of the autogenerated pages that's almost never visited by anybody. What really matters is not the absolute size of the "error corpus", but which percentage of the pages on Wikipedia are errorfied. On this measure "Chesapeake, Virginia" barely matters, since it would be visited by one person per year at most. You'll notice that the most popular pages, such as World War II, are kept of very high quality. This is what really matters. I agree that there will be errors, and many of them, but it won't be to a disastrous level unless the quality of our main contributors (which are currently for the most part highly serious and educated) collapses.

I don't know, someone like Wik is bound to cause problems no matter what reforms we make to the system. I'm a new user and wasn't around back when there was the Wik battles, but I understand he vandalized pages when he couldn't get what he wanted.

Anyway, I agree that Wikipedia has its problems, but I mostly object to your claim that it's "doomed to failure". The evidence doesn't indicate that Wikipedia is heading towards doom at present. It's possible that it may collapse in the future, after all this is all a grand experiment and it's too early to tell --- but the indications are currently that Wikipedia is heading for success, and indeed is already quite successful.

I don't know, personally I don't care if Wikipedia is ever considered a "true" encyclopedia. As long at it becomes widely popular and useful to lots of people, I'll be happy. It's already more useful than Britannica, not because it's better but because Britannica is non-free and there's no way to read it unless you pay for it, which most people won't do. I've read a thousand times more encyclopedia articles since I started visiting Wikipedia than I ever did previously. --Shibboleth 05:36, 5 Jul 2004 (UTC)

I agree strongly with that point, of course we will have inaccuracies in less known articles, however articles which are being constantly watched by a group of people who are very well known to the subject will remain top-quality. --Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 20:15, 2004 Jul 6 (UTC)

*Rolls eyes* I hate pessimism much, much more than anything else. It must be all the Star Trek happy-endings. Rock on with that emo tune, Lady L.I. Good luck, and good day._{Peace Profound!} --Merovingian✍Talk 05:34, Jul 5, 2004 (UTC)