Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales has made an appeal to the site's users to start concentrating on quality, not quantity. Wikipedia is used by millions each day and the free online encyclopedia needs to improve the quality of its content in the coming year Wales, the founder of the project, said Friday.
"We're going to have a really strong quality initiative," Wales told attendees in his opening keynote address at Wikimania, a three-day conference for users of projects run by the Wikimedia Foundation, taking place in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
The wildly popular online entity would become even more valuable if entries were written less choppily, for example, or better identified their sources, Wales said on Friday.
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AP reports that Wales cited the recent study in the journal Nature finding that Wikipedia had only slightly more errors than the venerable Encyclopedia Britannica. But Wales added that his online project "got lucky" in that comparison because the Nature authors only looked at science articles, a field in which Wikipedia's geek-heavy community shines.
"Although we've always had this goal that we should be Britannica- or better quality, we all know we're not there yet," he said. "We can no longer feel satisfied and happy when we see these (article) numbers going up. ... We should continue to turn our attention away from growth and towards quality."
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The negative publicity reached fever pitch last year when John Seigenthaler, a U.S. journalist and former political aide, wrote an article about what he found in a Wikipedia biographical listing about himself.
Seigenthaler was erroneously named him as a suspect in the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy. The defamatory content sat mostly unaltered for four months on the Wikipedia site, and the criticism was enormous.
"That was really bad, a terrible error, and we fixed it really quickly," Wales said, noting that after he appeared on CNN with Seigenthaler to discuss the incident in December, traffic to Wikipedia nearly tripled, reports IDG.
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Wales acknowledged that Wikipedia's policies on biographies of living people need refinement. Wikipedia's approach to handling complaints by people objecting to content about themselves also has to improve, he said.
"We have a really serious responsibility to get things right," Wales said.
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Wales is absolutely correct.
While Wikipedia is a fantastic tool and an asset online the Seigenthaler incident shows better controls must be in place. The online encyclopedia is now large enough that it should concentrate on quality and not quantity.
Kudos to Mr. Wales
--Story/Commentary by James Cliner
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