Wikipedia Is Nearing "Completion" 248
Hugh Pickens writes "According to Rebecca J. Rosen, it may seem impossible for an encyclopedia of everything to ever near completion, but at least for the major articles on topics like big wars, important historical figures, and central scientific concepts, the English-language Wikipedia is pretty well filled out. 'After an encyclopedia reaches 100,000 articles, the pool of good material shrinks. By the time one million articles are written, it must tax ingenuity to think of something new. Wikipedia,' writes historian and Wikipedia editor Richard Jensen, 'passed the four-million-article mark in summer 2012.' With the exciting work over, editors are losing interest. In the spring of 2012, 3,300 editors contributed more than 100 edits per month each — that's a 31 percent drop from spring of 2007, when that number was 4,800. For example, let's take the Wikipedia article for the War of 1812 which runs 14,000 words cobbled together by 3,000 editors. Today, the War of 1812 page has many more readers than it did in 2008 — 623,000 compared with 434,000 — but the number who make a change has dropped precipitously, from 256 to just 28. Of those original 256, just one remains active. The reason, Jensen believes, is that the article already has had so many edits, there is just not that much to do. Jensen says Wikipedia should now devote more resources toward getting editors access to higher-quality scholarship (in private databases like JSTOR), admission to military-history conferences, and maybe even training in the field of historiography, so that they could bring the articles up to a more polished, professional standard. 'Wikipedia is now a mature reference work with a stable organizational structure and a well-established reputation. The problem is that it is not mature in a scholarly sense (PDF).'"
Violations of Wikipedia:Ownership (Score:4, Informative)
Wikipedia was originally the draft of Nupedia (Score:5, Informative)
Maybe there is a need to split this project along the lines of the split between Red Hat and Fedora?
They tried that. Wikipedia was originally the draft version of Nupedia, and Nupedia fizzled.
Re:Notability (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Violations of Wikipedia:Ownership (Score:5, Informative)
And one of Wikipedia's sock puppets/cheerleaders chimes in as expected with his "it's all sweetness and light if you follow the bureaucracy and play Wikipedia the Role Playing Game" posts...
You just don't get it do you? It's exactly that all that bullcrap, favoring those who play Wikipedia The Role Playing Game over those who want to do the work, that has driven the latter away. The lunatics are now running the asylum.
Re:Not mature in a scholarly sene... so fscking wh (Score:4, Informative)
I would love to exerts in a field become the editors for one or two articles in Wikipedia as part of the academic responsibilities. Nothing that would take more then an hour a week.
I would love for experts in a field to become the editors for one or two articles in Wikipedia as part of their academic responsibilities. Nothing that would take more than an hour a week
I'm an expert pedantic speller.