Wikipedia:Why Wikipedia is not so great

Nothing is flawless, and Wikipedia is no exception. This page enumerates user opinions on why Wikipedia is not so great. For formal criticisms, see Criticism of Wikipedia.

Much of the presented criticism is addressed in separate articles: why Wikipedia is so great, and replies to common objections.

Quality of existing entries

Accuracy

• Credibility of information is open to question because information on the provenance of the text in an article is not readily available. Various proposals have been made to provide provenance (e.g. see Wikipedia:Provenance). Such proposals are quite controversial (see Wikipedia talk:Provenance). However, providing provenance could help address some of the concerns that have been expressed about the credibility of information.

• Credibility of sources can be dubious because of the anonymous nature of the wiki. Most articles do not give any indication about where the information comes from, making them hard to check, or they take information from transient Web pages which are equally obscure about their sources. Admittedly this has been a general problem since the introduction of electronic publishing (see Wikipedia:Cite your sources).

• Dross can proliferate, rather than become refined, as rhapsodic authors have their articles revised by ignorant or biased editors.

• Anyone can add subtle nonsense or accidental misinformation to articles that can take weeks or even months to be detected and removed.

• The very nature of Wikipedia makes it possible for someone to change and/or rearrange an article in any way, resulting in lost information or to the point that the article no longer makes sense.

Completeness

• People attach {{stub}} instead of finding information to add to the topic causing Wikipedia to contain an abundance of articles which are merely a line or two. Editors who find stubs often are not experts in the subject and are wanting to learn more. If they do actually add any content, it has a possiblity of lacking in quality.

• Anyone can delete huge amounts of text from articles or even the entire article itself, ruining lots of work. This is referred to as "blanking" by those in the Wikipedia community, and is considered vandalism. Such "blanking" is typically fixed (by reverting to the previous version of the page, before the text was removed), within minutes. However, within those few minutes, or in the few cases where such blanking is first noticed by a viewer who is not aware of the history feature of Wikipedia pages, a page may seem to be severely lacking information, or be otherwise incomplete, due to this deletion.

NPOVness

• Many philosophers have argued that there is nothing that is completely true for everyone in all contexts. Therefore it might be so that Wikipedia's neutral point of view policy is doomed to fail because no chunk of text will be considered perfectly neutral to everyone. Even the idea that a NPOV is achievable is in itself a POV.

• The NPOV problem of Wikipedia is too easily seen as the fault of the person who changed the article to become problematic, rather than a systematic fault of Wikipedia. It is an unfair double standard to attribute Wikipedia's strong points to Wikipedia itself, but its weaknesses to those responsible for the problems.

• A new Internet user coming to Wikipedia for the first time (often through a link directly to the article via a Google search) will not know that articles are supposed to be NPOV and that if they detect these parts they can and should rewrite them.

• Political topics can end up looking like CNN's Crossfire rather than an encyclopedia article, with point-counterpoint in every sentence when a neutral statement of fact would do better. (e.g. Bill Clinton did this good thing but some say it was bad. He also did this bad thing but some say it was not so bad as opposed to Bill Clinton did this thing and then that thing.) To put it another way, good writing makes NPOV flow like an encyclopedia; not-so-good writing makes it flow like "Crossfire". But even given that peer review will improve the standard over time, are there really enough good writers with enough time involved in Wikipedia to mitigate this weakness?

• Many users reflexively defend their text when possible POV (Point of view) is pointed out rather than reflexively making a zealous attempt to strip POV from their text instead.

• If text is perceived as POV, then it doesn't reflect well on Wikipedia.

• You might have to work with people who believe the polar opposite to you on a given subject, and their opinion might win the day for reasons other than being correct. For example, a monomaniac, no matter how ignorant or even malicious, may "win out" eventually, because non-monomaniacs have other things to do than argue with them.

• Alternately, you might not have to work with anyone who believes the opposite to you. The stability of an article is relative to the people who are paying attention to it. Especially for less visited articles, these are not representative of all relevant POVs. Thus, often you will establish consensus for something which is still horribly POV.

• Many people with causes come here to "get the word out" because publishers laugh at their stuff and site hosting costs money, so we get detailed articles about obscure activists, while the opposing establishment figures get stubs whose content is a litany of all the evil things they've done to the obscure activists, e.g. Goldman Sachs or Merrill Lynch vs Accounting scandals of 2002

• Many people with national or ethnic heroes come here to "get the word out" as well, meaning that the importance of the contributions of an individual to a particular field of endeavour can tend to be overstated (even grossly overstated) because of their belonging to a particular nation or ethnic group.

• Most, if not all, contributors have a political bias, even if they pretend not to or think that they don't. They are all working to subvert articles one way or another. If they happen to have more resources, i.e. time, than other contributors, their views will prevail.

• Articles tend to be whatever-centric. People point out whatever is exceptional about their home province, tiny town or bizarre hobby, without noting frankly that their home province is completely unremarkable, their tiny town is not really all that special or that their bizarre hobby is, in fact, bizarre.

• Ideas to which most people related to new technologies are hostile (for example, arguments in favor of digital rights management) get reverted without thought even if written to NPOV.

• Wikipedia is hostile to whole fields of inquiry, as when there is controversy between "hard" scientists and scholars in any other field, Wikipedia will favor the scientists.

• Users can avoid POV criticism by cherry-picking NPOV details of an issue. By neglecting certain facts and presenting others, a series of NPOV statements as a whole may compose a very POV picture. As most Wikipedians miss the forest for the trees, such POV problems are rarely identified.

Other

• Wikipedia's somewhat haphazard usage of American, Australian, British, Canadian, etc. spelling and usage variations of the English language. Use of non-English words and names when English equivalents exist. See Manual of Style.

• Translations will always lag behind edits in other languages, meaning that those who read wikipedia in different languages will get different versions of the facts. Some never get English versions.

• The writing quality of some articles is horrible. Most paragraphs lack any cohesion and trail off without conclusions. Entire sections are composed of orphan sentences, created by piece-meal additions from random users. Similarly formed are the monstrous super-sentences, whose loose multi-layer clauses require the utmost concentration to comprehend. Users whimsically write equation-sentences ("The event is what caused excitement in the scientific community" instead of "the event excited scientists"), knowing nothing of conciseness. Grammar, punctuation and spelling are very good, but style and clarity are ignored. Wikipedians embrace bad "correct" writing, only recognizing its faults when told (or not).

Overall quality (net-level)

• Popular topics (like Abortion) get written about inordinately, whereas less popular ones may never receive much attention, or are hard to find.

• Geek priorities. There are many long and well-written articles on obscure characters in science fiction/fantasy and very specialised issues in computer science, physics and math. Some other topic areas are less active. However the balance is more even than it used to be. An earlier version of this page said that there was little or nothing in "vast areas of art, history, literature, film, geography". All these areas still need improvement, but that statement could no longer reasonably be made.

• Absence of concrete examples in the mathematical explanations.

• Too much nonsense is added. For example, "Mommy Tulips live in the Philippine Islands. Many baby tulips sprout from her. For more information, please e-mail us at [email here]". What's that about? Not enough of it goes to Bad Jokes and Other Deleted Nonsense

• Different view-points tend to create their own closed topologies of pages, and interlinking and comparison can be poor. This is exacerbated by the different camps tending to use different terminology (indeed, it is probably why they do).

• A lot of stuff is there, but it's not well linked together.

• Similarly, it can sometimes be very difficult to collect information as one may become lost in a quagmire of subtly different entries.

• Articles become longer much more quickly than they become better. Wikipedia's strong community bias against deletion of text encourages the accretion of many authors' partial (or mis-) understandings of a topic while making it difficult for a rewriter or editor to synthesize them briefly without causing offense. There seems to be a distrust of subject matter experts, as alleged in a 2005 article by a site co-founder.

• In a related problem, large articles constructed via numerous (individually reasonable) edits to a small article can look okay "close up", but are often horribly unstructured, bloated, excessively "factoid", uncohesive and self-indulgent when read through completely. In short, adding a sentence at a time doesn't encourage quality on a larger scale; at some stage, the article must be restructured. This happens nowhere near often enough.

Collaboration practices and internal social issues

Behavioral/cultural problems

• People raise endless objections on Talk pages, instead of fixing what bothers them (see Wikipedia:When people complain rather than edit). On the other hand, people can be too bold in updating pages instead of discussing changes on Talk first.

• The self-esteem of a bad writer with a fragile ego may be damaged by people always correcting horrible prose, tautological redundancies, bad grammar and spelling.

• If you have correctly internalized rules of English capitalization, spelling, punctuation or typesetting, you end up making trivial corrections rather than getting on with content.

• The evil twins of vandalism. If you revert or ban too quickly, sometimes a useful contributor will be turned away. If you revert or ban too slowly, then extra time will be wasted by good editors correcting the junk added to wikipedia.

• People revert edits without explaining themselves (Example: [1]) (a proper explanation usually works better on the talk page than in an edit summary). Then, when somebody reverts back, also without an explanation, an edit war often results.

• There's a culture of hostility and conflict, rather than of good will and cooperation. Even experienced Wikipedians fail to assume good faith in their collaborators. Fighting off the barbarians at our gate is a higher priority than incorporating them into our community.

Controlling problem users vs. allowing wide participation

• Anonymous users with very strong opinions and a lot of time can change many articles to support their views. Aside from IP blocks and bans for the most obnoxious, there is no means of preventing this issue.

• IP range blocks can reduce participation if they are for ranges selected and assigned dynamically by IP providers, both dial-up and broadband.

• If Wikipedia follows the pattern of every other 'community forum' on the net, small groups will become powerful to the exclusion of others. Thus the priority, inherent bias and hostility issues are likely to get worse. The increasingly nebulous "troll" could be used as an excuse for excluding people from the decision making processes behind the encyclopedia. The insistence that a cabal must exist typically stems from this concern.

• Geeks run the place. Wikipedia has become more and more hierarchical in order to 'defend freedom' from 'trolling'. There are administrators who can delete articles. There are no checks or balances on this power built into the system, other than the attention contributors have time to give, whereas their ability to delete and ban is built in at the coding level. Only the most abusive administrators have their status removed, perhaps 2% of the total. Administrators can seriously damage the site if their account is broken into, e.g. by history merges.

• Editors have learned that formation into "gangs" is the most effective way of imposing their views on opposite minded contributors. It makes a travesty of the revert rule when one individual can simply send an e-mail alert to friend requesting a timely "revert favour" once he has reached the limit of his daily reverts.

Personal interests of contributors and others

• This site is creating large numbers of wikipediholics who could be doing something more useful.

• Authors cannot claim authorship of any article.

• Those disaffected with humanity are provided with an outlet for their vitriol, rather than having to become misanthropes, terrorists or political researchers. Such people will take great pleasure in demonstrating the idiotic futility of such rubbish.

• Instead of just stating the facts, many authors feel the need to attack their own pet peeves of the article's subject. They adopt pedantic tones as they correct "common belief" or "false assumption," when the facts alone are all that is necessary.

Technical/usability issues

• One centralised Wikipedia server lacks robustness against server or network problems.

• Mirrors are not always swiftly updated. Misinformation which is quickly corrected in Wikipedia itself may persist for some time in the mirrors.

• Wikipedia can run so slowly as to become unusable for editing or for consultation

• Word form and case has to be exactly right to link to articles. Wikipedia is highly case sensitive. Case of some articles. e.g. Light Characters in the Wheel of Time series can be difficult to figure out even for somewhat experienced users.

• Most internet search engines are case-insensitive, and that is what most users have come to expect. Creating redirects for all possible alternate capitalizations of Light Characters in the Wheel of Time series would require 127 redirects, and this only considers the first letter of each word. (However, that article has since been redirected to Minor Wheel of Time characters, and its content moved there or to separate articles).

Miscellaneous

• Articles are sometimes plagiarised from other sources, infringing on (international) copyright, particularly when no credit is given. The Wikipedia:Copyright problems process only catches a fraction of these.

• Images are a particularly bad case, as it is difficult to spot plagarism when the uploader lies, but the pedantry and bureaucracy of the tagging scheme leads to other usable and useful images being deleted and removed. Once removed, images are lost permanently, unlike text.

• Edits by scholars and experts who disagree with some of its core values are repelled.

• Wikipedia cannot explain technical terms, even those it uses itself. An editor who wishes to explain a term will naturally make it into an internal link and create a page to explain it. However, that page will fall foul of the " Wikipedia is not a dictionary" policy and be transferred to wiktionary and removed from wikipedia, leaving a red link (like this one) and no explanation. Why such transfers are not accompanied by a redirect from the removed page to the wiktionary entry is deemed obvious, but is a source of confusion to those not in the know. The use of the soft redirect Template:wi has other negative effects, such as disrupting the feature to list Special:Shortpages.

• Because Wikipedia is widely used, often showing up high in Google searches, and its dangers are not well understood by many people, misinformation in Wikipedia articles can easily spread to other external sources. In turn, the external source (which may not have cited the Wikipedia article) may be used as justification for the misinformation in future revisions of the Wikipedia article.

• Wikipedia, especially as it is propagated widely, presents an ideal target for smear campaigns and vicious rumors against individuals. While such smears can be found and edited, the rumors sometime continue to exist in page histories, on Wikipedia mirror sites and in web-caches.

• Editing Wikipedia is tedious in the case of conflicts.

• Sufficiently dedicated contributors with idiosyncratic beliefs can push their point of view, because nobody has the time and energy to counteract the bias.

• Certain pages are taken over by fanatics and special interest groups that consistently revert the contributions of new contributors. This problem tends to occur most around controversial subjects, and sometimes results in revert wars and pages being locked down.

• Some argue that criticisms are systematically excluded, deleted or reverted by self-appointed censors, and that attempts to compromise or include a variety of views are thwarted by uncompromising vandal-editors who delete or revert views which do not fit their agenda.

• Personal preference as well as just pure meanheartedness often out rule any sense of right and wrong.