Blog Post: The death of Wikipedia

[mouser]

Interesting reading..

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The death of Wikipedia
May 24, 2006
Wikipedia, the encyclopedia that "anyone can edit," was a nice experiment in the "democratization" of publishing, but it didn't quite work out. Wikipedia is dead. It died the way the pure products of idealism always do, slowly and quietly and largely in secret, through the corrosive process of compromise.
There was a time when, indeed, pretty much anyone could edit pretty much anything on Wikipedia. But, as eWeek's Steven Vaughan-Nichols recently observed, "Wikipedia hasn't been a real 'wiki' where anyone can write and edit for quite a while now."
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http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2006/05/the_death_of_wi.php

from http://waxy.org/

[Martin]

Bah, Wikipedia IS NOT and NEVER WAS an experiment in democracy... it is an attempt to create an encyclopaedia!

[jgpaiva]

Well.. Not being as radical as Martin , I'd say wikipedia isn't exactlly available for everyone to edit, and i consider it as a good thing. Not everybody is right, and if wrong information was uploaded, it might induce much people in error.
I think control is important, the important is that the moderation is correctly done.
Though, i don't support the blog's author's opinion, I wouldn't consider wikipedia as "dead" because it is trying to protect itself from spamming/vandalism.
After all, even forums have moderators, and forums don't have the responsability that wikipedia has.

[mouser]

i think wikipedia is a fantastic thing.
i also think its insane how long the people who ran wikipedia seemed blind to the fact that they were going to need better user management and permission control.  this was something blatantly obvious to many of us and it seems wikipedia people are finally begrudgingly accepting that it's a necesary thing to address.  i was very put off at the extremely poor user management and permission support in even very recent versions of mediawiki.  totally indefensible.

[f0dder]

Restriction on who can add/modify/remove topics is a good thing, having special interest groups moderate various topics is a bad thing. *shrug*.

WikiPedia is a nice resource, just take it's contents with a grain (or gramme, or couple of tons) of salt

[brotherS]

Compared to the Encyclopædia Britannica, Wikipedia is pretty damn good! IIRC, some university compared several articles and didn't find extremely more errors in the Wikipedia.

The only thing I see dead in the long run are some of Wikipedia's printed counterparts.