Quote:
Originally Posted by taustin
That depends on what it is an encyclopedia of. Wikipedia, by their own published policy, is an encyclopedia of public opinion on what the facts are. And that's fine, really, so long as you don't mistake for an encyclopedia of what the facts actually are.
Note that it is one side of the story, and one written by someone who was, apparently, fairly pissed off. But he's correct on what Wikipedia's published policies are (and links to them, as I recall).
You get accuracy by learned review. Which costs money and effort, beyond what Wikipedia is willing to apply. They want to be as credible a source as, say, Encyclopedia Britannica, but without having to actually do the work to produce that credibility. So they take the lazy way, and hold opinion polls on what facts people want to believe.
And what is scalable accuracy, anyway? A system which can start off being complete bs, but later scaled up to only being 50% bs, and later on, eventually, to 10% bs? Is that really what you mean? (Note: It may well be what they mean.)
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It is scalable because anybody can contribute. You do not have to be an expert.
And learned review also leads to inaccuracies. Didn't the empirical study show that there was little difference in accuracy between wikipedia and Britannica?