I think that you are missing the point. Newspapers, books, dictionaries, encyclopedias, TV news shows, and blogs for that matter are not necessarily more accurate than Wikipedia. However, unlike Wikipedia the other media have clear chains of accountability for what they publish. For example, the identity of a book’s author or a blog poster is usually known and can be factored into readers’ calculations about the accuracy of the material. Even dictionaries and encyclopedias, which are usually written by committees, typically publish the names of the committee members; and their brands are valuable, so publishers have a strong incentive to avoid publishing inaccuracies under their names. This is not the case for Wikipedia, where nobody stands to lose money or be fired because of bias or factual inaccuracy in articles, and where contributors are volunteers with sometimes unclear motives (and often anonymous as well).

The open-source model works for software because software is easily evaluated by users: it either works or it doesn’t, and if it works its features are readily compared to the features of competing products. An open-source encyclopedia is much more difficult to evaluate by users, who cannot readily determine if, for example, a reported birth date is accurate. The open-source encyclopedia won’t crash if someone inserts a grossly inaccurate entry, so the whole body of work has to be continually checked by volunteers, of whom there are never enough and who may have their own agendas. With a dictionary or a TV news show or a blog I can eventually figure out the biases, and if necessary read between the lines or ignore reports on particular topics. But what am I supposed to do if I don’t know the authors or their biases — if entries are composed, and may be revised at any time, by an anonymous (or even partly anonymous) swarm of authors? I have to distrust the entire body of work even though some of it is no doubt of good quality.

BTW, I did not assume that you are male, nor do I now assume that you are female. You probably are female, because why else would you quibble about such an issue, but all I have to go on is your assertion. I don’t really know anything about you except your IP address. Your defense of Wikipedia would be more convincing if we knew more about you and the other Wikipedia contributors. I’m not saying that you should reveal your identity, merely that there appear to be inherent flaws in the Wikipedia model.

Linus worrks as a production model becaause its products are tested against a real-world criterion that everybody can agree upon — either the code works, or it crashes. Wankerpedia does not have this readily-available correction mechanism, which is whyu it doe not deliver the enviable results of Linux despite attempting to use its model.

If this guy has a blog, maybe he could turn a buck by posting Wikipedia’s misinformation next to his researched corrections – submit to search engines, then court advertisers. Or he could sell his research to Wiki’s editors. He must be rewarded!

Still, I don’t think we can expect one internet encyclopedia to be the font of our modern knowledge. I believe we will always need at least three competing search engines to counterbalance the flaws each has. I think the development of an information oligopoly is a better long-term goal, than the creation of an information monolith.
-Steve

What is interesting is whether those errors get fixed,

Yes, but there is a time interval during which fallacious information has the wikipedia imprimatur. That information gets copied and will persist long after the wikipedia entry has been corrected.

The internet has dramatically lowered the logistical cost of disseminating information. The central informational problem now is sorting bad information from the good.

1) people make mistakes, and without snopes-like resolve to research, mistakes tend to persist

2) when mistakes persist, they tend to become urban legends, which are notoriously difficult to debunk

3) people have biases, including those at the top of the Wiki dispute-handling chain, which means some contentious issues will be misrepresented (see, for example, the entry on Little Green Footballs.)