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by simsa0 » Fri May 24, 2013 10:00 pm
I just give 4 reasons why I think Wikipedia is not or not any longer important:
1) Wikipedia's most comprehensive and most visited language versions come from affluent nations. It's affluent societies, not poor or developing ones, that produce AND consume this open content. It is ironic that Wikipedia's goal -- to make "all human knowledge" available to everybody on the planet -- obviously doesn't resound much in those parts of the globe its authors think would benefit the most. This is not only due to the fact that "western content" and biases are irerlveant for most local communities and societies around the globe. It is also the result of a western concept of knowledge that focuses on independence from any knowing subject, wherin the objectivity of the content and the accessibility for the many rest. But in most societies around the globe, be it agrarian or nomadic, be it literal or oral societies, this separation of knowledge from the knowing subjects isn't shared. Knowledge is depndent on persons, it is a "know how", not a "know that". With this comes thirdly that for most people Wikipedia is simply a compendium of irrelevant information: you don't heal the stomach pain of your child, or build a house, or learn a language by reading an encyclopaedia. In sum: there are structual reasons why only the rich, not the poor, use Wikipedia.
2) Wikipedia not only relies on a crowdsourced wiki-process whose open licenses make possible the contribution and reuse of tiny contributions of content. It also relies on the structural feature of articles and lemmas, into which those "content donations" are organized. But given data-mining, semantic web, big data, automated text-processing, and developments in automated text-generation, we will have search- and editing-software that will crawl the web to find the most relevant information relative to a given search query. The queries will pull together information from a myriad of sources, all distributed and no longer confined to one site. In the near future, knowledge will no longer be laid down in form of articles. Rather, those articles will be written automatically as we proceed from one query to the next. Given this development, Wikipedia stands at the end of an era of media history, not at the beginning, as it is still structured like a printed book, not like a chatter on the marketplace. Search- and editing-algorithms will circumvent and thus replace Wikipedias's static features of article and lemmata in a few years time.
3) For Wikipedia there are not many easy "content donations" left to attract. To provide new content or edit exiting ones now takes more and more time for which the "content donation model" of Wikipedia and its "barnstar-reward-system" isn't well suited. As Wikipedia's growth slows and editors depart, the housekeeping / curation of the existing texts becomes more and more cumbersome. And as the rather dogmatic style of many admins in the decision of editing-problems has already shown, the crowdsourced process of text-generation isn't well suited for the curation and enhancement of existing pieces. The quality of Wikipedia's main language versions will thus deteriorate, not improve.
4) Wikipedia has never been a good encyclopaedia. Its main advantage isn't content but easy access: just two or three clicks in your browser is much more convenient than getting up from your chair to look into your printed dictionary on the shelf. With its easy access and Google's ranking Wikipedia became the dominant provider for encyclopaedic information on the planet, supplanting all other online alternatives. For your quick-and-dirty research over your breakfast news this is good enough. But the consequence is an encyclopaedic monoculture and thus a depletion in (qualified) perspectives only a plurality of sources, dictionaries, and encyclopaedias can provide. So instead of embarking on a sinking ship and trying to enhance Wikipedia's quality, people should put their energies into convincing publishers to make their specialized encyclopaedias and dictionaries available online. We need the already existing dictionaries and encyclopaedias freeely accessible online. For that we will need publicly funded endowments that reimburse publishers for making their copyrighted content freely available. Those publishers would keep their copyright (and coming with that: their obligation to curate the content) but would be paid by the public.
[Update to #4 : The problem of encyclopaedic monoculture prevails regardless of the quality of Wikipedia. Even if only Nobel Prize winners had written its articles, the loss of a plurality of other dictionaries and encyclopaedias means a loss, not a gain in knowledge. The reasons for this monoculture are twofold: a) the prevalence of Wikipedia due to its easy access and Google's ranking; and b) the refusal of main publishers to make their dictionaries and encyclopaedias easily (i.e., freely) accessible.]
Last edited by simsa0 on Sat May 25, 2013 12:40 am, edited 4 times in total.