Wikipedia:Wikipedia is failing

Is Wikipedia succeeding in its aim of becoming a reputable, reliable reference work? Here are some illustrations of ways in which it is not fulfilling that aim.

Criteria which indicate substantial failings

Performance on core topics

Vital articles lists 1182 articles on topics that can be considered essential. These topics should have articles of the very highest quality. So do they? In fact, of those 1182, only 72 are featured articles. This means that 94% of the essential topics that should have excellent articles fall short of the standard.

Do they fall short by a long way? 131 are listed as good articles, which, according to Template:Grading scheme, means that 'other encyclopedias could do a better job'. 133 are listed as articles which are either stubs or have a cleanup tag. The rest, presumably, are B-class or start-class on the assessment scale, meaning they require substantial work before they will match or exceed the standards found in other encyclopaedias.

Performance on broader topics

There are about 1,300 featured articles. There are also about 1,700 good articles. However, there are currently 6,897,573 articles on Wikipedia. This means that slightly more than 99.8% of all the articles on Wikipedia are not considered well written, verifiable or broad or comprehensive in their coverage. A useful exercise is to critically read ten random articles. It is very likely that most or even all will contain poor writing and unsourced material.

Maintenance of standards

Do articles which are judged to have reached the highest standards remain excellent for a long time, or do standards decline as well-meant but poor quality edits cause standards to fall over time? There are currently 340 former featured articles, so that more than 20% of all articles that have ever been featured are no longer featured. An FA that is not actively maintained inevitably declines; for an example see Ryanair, which attracts large numbers of highly biased edits which have wrecked a formerly excellent article. Sun's lead section was reduced to a few short sentences by an editor who either hadn't read or didn't understand the guidelines on what a lead section is supposed to be, and no-one has restored the previously existing summary. A whole section of Mauna Loa was removed by a vandal in November, and was not restored for a month. Generally, if the primary author of an FA does not take care of it, checking changes up to several times a day, it is likely to have its quality compromised by unnoticed vandalism or, far more damaging in the long term, well-intentioned but poor quality edits.

Rate of quality article production

Many argue that Wikipedia is a work in progress and that, given time, all articles will reach very high standards. Unfortunately, this is not borne out by the rate at which articles are currently being judged to meet featured article criteria. About one article a day on average becomes featured; at this rate, it will take 4,380 years for all the currently existing articles to meet FA criteria. Given the ongoing approximately exponential growth rate of Wikipedia, which will see it double in size in about the next 500 days, on current trends there will never be a time when all articles have been brought up to high quality.

Horsetrading

While the philosophy of "edit this page" has served wikipedia very well and promoted rapid growth of both articles and article quality, especially in the sciences, controversial pages -- where "controversial" can be interpreted very broadly as "controversial for half a dozen or more" -- are no longer amenable to rapid editing and large-scale correction. As editors become "invested" in articles, even minor changes to an article's structure, no matter how poor the original structure, can require elaborate "horsetrading" over the course of many days' discussion on talk pages. The heavy time-investment requirements mean that only the most dedicated editors stay for the process to play itself out and, unfortunately, "most dedicated" often ends up meaning "most emotionally invested".

Food for thought

If Wikipedia just aimed to be a social site where people with similar interests could come together and write articles about anything they liked, it would certainly be succeeding. However, its stated aim is to be an encyclopaedia, and not just that but an encyclopaedia of the highest quality. Six years of work has resulted in 3,000 articles of good or excellent quality, at which rate it will take many decades to produce the quantity of good or excellent articles found in traditional reference works. Almost 1.6 million articles are mediocre to poor to appalling in quality.

Open questions

• Why has the system failed to produce a quality reference work?
• What can be done to change the system?
• Is radical change required, or just small adjustments to the current set-up?
• Does this matter, given that Wikipedia is one of the most popular websites in the world?
• What is Wikipedia really, and what do we want it to be?