It's a good organisation - very transparent. I was a long standing editor. They have no govt or corporate sponsors and have been dedicated from the first to keep independent. So all money comes via donations. They put up donation requests on their articles through December, so it will be over soon.
Yes, the model has its weaknesses but it's pretty incredible that it's still here at all after 20 years. All the content is created free, by thousands of volunteer writers. 200 000 registered editors. 57 million articles in 325 languages. Over six million encyclopedia articles in English - all written for free and offered for free. It gets over two billion unique views a month.
I created about fifty articles and stewarded about 500 more, mostly poetry biographies. I stopped doing much about five years ago, as coding was hurting my eyes too much. I do occasionally check in, to see if there was been any uncaught vandalism, but the articles are remarkably stable and tend to just improve over time.
If it had turned out to be a small project on a small scale I think WP wouldn't have worked. But as it's the world 13th most visited site, there are billions of eyes on the articles all the time - watching, correcting. Behind the scenes - on the discussions pages, there is constant arguing going on. All of it publically viewable and under constant scrutiny.
Maybe about ten years ago, WP went over to a system of requiring strong citations for new info added to articles. This has strengthened the system, I think. In terms of people editing their own biographical articles, the bigger the name, the more people watch it and scrutinise, so the less problem there tends to be. Smaller articles do suffer from self editing, but the ranks tend to come down on 'conflict of interest' writing like a ton of bricks. Independent strong sources are required.
If you like Britannica as a source, this is their article on WP.
The Wikimedia non-profit runs all the different arms and projects, including Wiktionary and shared image commons. It employs staff and develops the tech Wikimedia use. They are not 'broke', no, but they do rely solely on donations to keep operational. they could put up a paywall, like many newspapers have done, but they are committed to free, collaborative and transparent knowledge sharing.
Some of the best projects I have been involved with are the Galleries, Libraries and Museums (GLAM) initiative. Volunteers work with places like the British Museum, British Library, the Smithsonian, the Royal Opera and the V&A to bring archives to public view. I helped upload the Ted Hughes archive from the British Library. Such an amazing opportunity for editors to help digitise archives.
An early, and soon corrected, entry on the singer Jim Morrison. “Interestingly, while Jim Morrison was born in a van, Van Morrison was born in a gym.” It made me smile.
As an aside, Wikimedia are extremely careful with their hiring process, most software engineer jobs for example have maybe 4 stages on average, Wikimedia have around 8. They hire worldwide to get the best talent so they are quite an international team, and the internal culture is that everyone involved is very passionate about the mission to provide free access to information. It’s a laudable cause in my opinion.
When my daughter was in Uni, she was told that they were not to quote wiki in any work as it " was unreliable for its factual accuracy " ,ditto The Hitler loving Daily Hate Mail. Why might that be ?
I tend to think of WP as a constant work in progress by thousands of minds - ever changing, the product of millions of hours of discussion and reading. It is not designed to be static or present a kind of 'universal truth'. Good articles will offer a selection of citations and sources so that readers can go and explore further. In many ways, this can be WP's best asset - offering a collection of places so you can carry on researching. We can see it as a beginning - a stepping off place, not of a final 'answer'. It's more like AI (with real people) constantly learning, changing and developing.
So, it can be a good starting place for students to start an investigation, but it should be no lazy short cut for doing deeper research. Because WP is so ubiquitous, and students have smart phones, it must drive tutors crazy that people just cut and paste from the WP articles. With any luck, the articles will prompt a mass of questions and start the investigation.
In my view, one of WP's biggest problems is that most readers don't know what it is, how it works, why it was concieved or who writes it. In my experience (of talking about it a lot) few people ever seem to ask.
The other problem is that the various WPs, in all their languages, are now so vast, and the readership is so much of the world, that it's virtually impossible to evaluate. It's constantly changing, like the web itself.
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Having been involved with both GW and WP for some years, I think there are lots of parallels (I've noted this on other threads). They are about sharing ideas and education. Most of the people involved get excited about helping people out and give a lot of their personal time to help. There's an element of learning and generosity it in. There is a strong community behind it. It's very widely read, 'free' and accessible.
You could find ten gardening books that will give ten different approaches to growing vegetables. You could argue about it endlessly, or you could find common ground to agree on. Curiosity and good questions are always going to be helpful.
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Hats off to you, @Fire, for your altruism.
Why might that be ?