Wikipedia Is A Work in Progress

Wikipedia Is A Work In Progress

Wikipedia is, by number of articles, the largest encyclopedia ever to exist. It contains a lot of information, and has been edited and viewed by millions of people, many of whom have found it useful. Unfortunately, much of it really isn't that good. Many people have eagerly pointed this out — often failing to give weight to the notion that it has been created entirely by volunteers, from nothing, in just ten years — and some have even suggested that the Web would be better off without it. However, in airing their complaints, they frequently miss out one crucial detail: Wikipedia is not finished. Not even close. In fact, we're barely getting started.

In its very early days, Wikipedia went through several major software changes. Existing wiki software was not designed for writing encyclopedias, and developing the first version of MediaWiki took time. As a result, much of the earliest page histories have been lost, and while the history of some pages is preserved right back to January 2001, other pages which are equally as old have no information from before 2002. It is possible to see Wikipedia as it looked in its entirety in December 2001, as a read-only copy of the pages at that time is hosted at nostalgia.wikipedia.org. To really demonstrate the point, though, it is necessary to go back even further.

Imagine you're Nupedia contributor RoseParks. It's mid-afternoon on Tuesday, 30 January 2001. You heard about Wikipedia being set up through your work on Nupedia, and you've created a couple of pages over the past week or so. The project seems to be going pretty well; there are nearly six hundred articles — more than Nupedia has — although they are all rather short and most lack information in important areas. You notice that one thing Wikipedia doesn't have an article about is the mathematical concept of sets. So you create a page, titled "SeT" (as the rather elementary wiki software forces you to use CamelCase titles), and write the following:

A SeT is a collection of objects. For example, one can define the set S = {Sn: Sn is a sibling of the Larry M. Sanger, who is the Editor-in-Chief of Nupedia}.

We require that sets be well-defined. Given an object Sn, we must be able to determine if

Sn belongs to S.----

What, there are no recursively enumerable sets?

It's not Shakespeare. Nor is it a particularly good article, even by January 2001 standards. Someone wishing to learn about sets would be foolish to use this as their only source of information. But it's a start. It's better than nothing.

You wonder what kind of future Wikipedia has. Six hundred pages are all very well, but proceeding at the current rate it will be decades before the encyclopedia is big enough to be useful. Will it become popular some day, or join the long line of ideas that didn't quite make it (a line recently joined by many commercial Web start-ups)?

Fast-forward six years and the answer to this question is obvious. Wikipedia is one of the most visited websites on the Internet, it has grown to more than three million articles in English alone, and versions are being written in over two hundred languages. Something else has changed too, though. People have started using Wikipedia as a source of information. There's nothing wrong with that — after all, it would be ridiculous not to make use of such a resource, for all its defects. Furthermore, though, people have started to rely on it as a source of information, often as their only source of information about a particular topic. This issue predates Wikipedia, of course — citation of encyclopedias in academia having long been discouraged — but Wikipedia has brought with it both problems and benefits beyond those of traditional encyclopedias, one of which is its permanent status as a work in progress. Pinning down the time at which this really began to happen would be difficult (probably impossible), but is likely sooner rather than later; 2002 at the latest.

But wait… nobody said Wikipedia was ready to be used! In the early days, it was clear at a glance that Wikipedia was not an authoritative work — a small number of pages, relative to the average encyclopedia, short articles, filled with to-do notes and empty sections, and an abundance of what we now call "red links" (which in the early days appeared as small question marks; this is still available as an option in user preferences). Since then the project has recognized that it has an audience, and tried to make itself more presentable, which is admirable. It has also been forced to take measures to prevent abuse of the wiki system by users uninterested in improving the project, which is unfortunate but inevitable. However, it has also begun to treat itself as a work approaching completion. Many have suggested that with more than two million articles written, there can't be that many more to write, and have — partly in response to external pressure — turned their attention to the quality of the articles. A shift in focus from quantity to quality has taken place — in itself is a good thing, but it has brought problems. The project has stopped looking forward ("Wow, we have a million articles!") — and started looking back ("Oh no, most of our articles are rubbish!").

Somehow, we have taken what was originally blatant, and always a given — that the encyclopedia is incomplete and lacks consistent quality — and turned it into a problem. Like the inherent drawbacks of the wiki system, this problem cannot be solved without fundamentally altering the nature of the project. If we focus too strongly on how good the existing encyclopedia is, rather than on improving it, the project will become bogged down and the overall rate of improvement will slow. This has already happened to some extent. The solution is to return to the strategy that brought Wikipedia to where it is today. Remember that Wikipedia is a work in progress. Don't waste time measuring that progress, make the progress happen.

Rather than taking weeks and expending heaps of effort bringing one article that's merely "very good" up to "featured status", turn a hundred bad articles into good ones. (This is not a reference to "good" as in "Good Article" status. Thousands of perfectly acceptable articles lack this.) Rather than spending weeks ploughing through article assessment backlogs — which is all some WikiProjects seem to do now —, forget about assessment classes and tagging, and actually improve the articles you're "assessing". The same goes for cleanup and maintenance tags. And most importantly, write the encyclopedia. Don't let the impressive article count figure fool you; there are thousands of article requests sitting unanswered, and thousands more important, encyclopedic topics that nobody has thought to request. There are also many more thousands of one or two-sentence stubs; adding a few more sentences to one won't make it a featured article, or change its "assessment class", but it will vastly improve that article. The project will benefit, in the end, if its original spirit is maintained.

Recently, people have been getting themselves in a panic because the quality of Wikipedia is not as high as they'd like it to be. Now this is a problem, certainly, for anyone who wishes to depend upon Wikipedia as a high-quality, reliable source of information. But to someone who wishes to write a free encyclopedia, it's not a problem. It's an opportunity, and that's what we're here for. Remember, there is no deadline.

So, if you rely on Wikipedia so much in its current state, that's your problem. We're not done with it, and we never said it would be any good — we only said it would be free (Wikipedia • The Free Encyclopedia). If you aren't satisfied with it now, help improve it, or come back in another six or seven years and take a look then. It'll be better. We promise.