---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: james burke <[email protected]> Date: Wed, Oct 23, 2013 at 1:35 PM Subject: Fwd: [IP] MIT Tech Review: The Decline of Wikipedia To: Michel Bauwens <[email protected]> MIT Tech Review: The Decline of Wikipedia http://j.mp/1a6l6UL (MIT) "Yet Wikipedia and its stated ambition to "compile the sum of all human knowledge" are in trouble. The volunteer workforce that built the project's flagship, the English-language Wikipedia-and must defend it against vandalism, hoaxes, and manipulation-has shrunk by more than a third since 2007 and is still shrinking. Those participants left seem incapable of fixing the flaws that keep Wikipedia from becoming a high-quality encyclopedia by any standard, including the project's own. Among the significant problems that aren't getting resolved is the site's skewed coverage: its entries on Pokemon and female porn stars are comprehensive, but its pages on female novelists or places in sub-Saharan Africa are sketchy. Authoritative entries remain elusive. Of the 1,000 articles that the project's own volunteers have tagged as forming the core of a good encyclopedia, most don't earn even Wikipedia's own middle-ranking quality scores. The main source of those problems is not mysterious. The loose collective running the site today, estimated to be 90 percent male, operates a crushing bureaucracy with an often abrasive atmosphere that deters newcomers who might increase participation in Wikipedia and broaden its coverage." - - - --Lauren-- Lauren Weinstein ([email protected]): http://www.vortex.com/lauren Co-Founder: People For Internet Responsibility: http://www.pfir.org/pfir-info Founder: - Network Neutrality Squad: http://www.nnsquad.org - PRIVACY Forum: http://www.vortex.com/privacy-info Member: ACM Committee on Computers and Public Policy Lauren's Blog: http://lauren.vortex.com Google+: http://google.com/+LaurenWeinstein Twitter: http://twitter.com/laurenweinstein Tel: +1 (818) 225-2800 / Skype: vortex.com _______________________________________________ nnsquad mailing list http://lists.nnsquad.org/mailman/listinfo/nnsquad Archives <https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/247/=now> <https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/247/6508916-345ab7e1> | Modify<https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=6508916&id_secret=6508916-49e8c799>Your Subscription | Unsubscribe Now<https://www.listbox.com/unsubscribe/?member_id=6508916&id_secret=6508916-13220834&post_id=20131023021309:2E2A9916-3BAA-11E3-A5E2-B59636EEC858> <http://www.listbox.com> -- Web: www.lifesized.net Phone:+31 (0)6 5244 6445 Twitter: @lifesized -- P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net <http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation>Updates: http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens #82 on the (En)Rich list: http://enrichlist.org/the-complete-list/