I am not really a critic, but then if I criticized the world's biggest encyclopaedia for its shortcommings, I should also mention some of its features that has made it to stand the test of time and opposition from teachers who considered this unauthentic.
By the way wiki is still not considered an authentic source to quote out and due its nature it'll never be but then still it provies you accurate and precise information most of the time and that I should say is its success. it has been able to successfully manage the inflowing content marking out that which is old and that which may not be accurate. At so many places you would have seen tags like citation needed, old, needs updation, etc. There is a proper team of people who at their free times go to wikipaedia to read and edit and help maintain this enormous project. And the greatest part is that its successful.
Reasons for the maintainance of wiki or some tricks that worked have been discussed a lot but I write out the tricks that made it pass the test of time.
Internationalization: An article written by say in India is viewed and analysed by a person far off say somewhere in Africa. So he is neither familiar of the concept and in many cases might not have even heard of it. With such kind of people viewing who have no sort of attachment with the subject whatsoever, no connection most probably, you can expect proper judgement.Atleast the grammar, the feel of the issue and the emotions of the author can easily be understood by the third person who can then make sure it is successful.
No Registration: Registration is not compulsory for little editting. What that makes sure is that it hardly takes time for the people to modify it. Of course, the modification is monitored.
User Page: Never thought of it when i did not have an account, but I see it now, user page is an aspect of wikipaedia that has affected it the most. Everyone want's to tell the world what he has done. So if you have a user page as a wiki user, you will atleast know that your contributions are counted and there is a place where people can come to you. Its better than sending emails and keeping problems private. There is supposed to be all open matter on wiki and so is the user page.
Openness of templates: The templates of wiki are all open and the source code free enough to be modified. So the users can come up with new ideas to decorate it.
Support for Review: The most important aspect of maintainace is to check whether false facts do not come up. And that has been maintained by the neormous support for the reviewers or those people who take responsibility to help and maintain. They will normally ahve the WIkiEd installed so no issue of editor for them. Then the task is made simple - every fact requires a direct citation, not present mark it. Marking is just two letters or three letters of typing, not at all time confusing. the links are understandable and so you don't have to explain in detail what you have marked. Plus we can discuss each topic. This means there is a proper page for topic reviews and comments to the original author to use. The editting history is saved and can always be rolled back to. There are options of locking your articles from free editors to rgistered ones so that you atleast have their track.
Unity of theme: one good thing that has come up with the bad editor is the maintainance of the look and the theme. Every page on wikipedia is similar in font, font size, heading style. this makes it look formal and presentable. It looks like a set rather than just a collection.
Culture: wikipaedia has maintained its own culture of openess and helfulness. All code is available. Peopel are ready to show how to work, and maintain the read posts for help recent. The postings form a proper forum where there is everthing a person want ( maybe not proper topics).
I accept that some of the things are really great. Cheers to them!!!
By the way wiki is still not considered an authentic source to quote out and due its nature it'll never be but then still it provies you accurate and precise information most of the time and that I should say is its success. it has been able to successfully manage the inflowing content marking out that which is old and that which may not be accurate. At so many places you would have seen tags like citation needed, old, needs updation, etc. There is a proper team of people who at their free times go to wikipaedia to read and edit and help maintain this enormous project. And the greatest part is that its successful.
Reasons for the maintainance of wiki or some tricks that worked have been discussed a lot but I write out the tricks that made it pass the test of time.
Internationalization: An article written by say in India is viewed and analysed by a person far off say somewhere in Africa. So he is neither familiar of the concept and in many cases might not have even heard of it. With such kind of people viewing who have no sort of attachment with the subject whatsoever, no connection most probably, you can expect proper judgement.Atleast the grammar, the feel of the issue and the emotions of the author can easily be understood by the third person who can then make sure it is successful.
No Registration: Registration is not compulsory for little editting. What that makes sure is that it hardly takes time for the people to modify it. Of course, the modification is monitored.
User Page: Never thought of it when i did not have an account, but I see it now, user page is an aspect of wikipaedia that has affected it the most. Everyone want's to tell the world what he has done. So if you have a user page as a wiki user, you will atleast know that your contributions are counted and there is a place where people can come to you. Its better than sending emails and keeping problems private. There is supposed to be all open matter on wiki and so is the user page.
Openness of templates: The templates of wiki are all open and the source code free enough to be modified. So the users can come up with new ideas to decorate it.
Support for Review: The most important aspect of maintainace is to check whether false facts do not come up. And that has been maintained by the neormous support for the reviewers or those people who take responsibility to help and maintain. They will normally ahve the WIkiEd installed so no issue of editor for them. Then the task is made simple - every fact requires a direct citation, not present mark it. Marking is just two letters or three letters of typing, not at all time confusing. the links are understandable and so you don't have to explain in detail what you have marked. Plus we can discuss each topic. This means there is a proper page for topic reviews and comments to the original author to use. The editting history is saved and can always be rolled back to. There are options of locking your articles from free editors to rgistered ones so that you atleast have their track.
Unity of theme: one good thing that has come up with the bad editor is the maintainance of the look and the theme. Every page on wikipedia is similar in font, font size, heading style. this makes it look formal and presentable. It looks like a set rather than just a collection.
Culture: wikipaedia has maintained its own culture of openess and helfulness. All code is available. Peopel are ready to show how to work, and maintain the read posts for help recent. The postings form a proper forum where there is everthing a person want ( maybe not proper topics).
I accept that some of the things are really great. Cheers to them!!!
Recently I had been writing articles for my college techfest Aranya at wikipedia. It was there that I realized what wikipedia we see is not even half of it. They have really done a fine job writing articles for the editor, I don't think does not match any high class. Even the blog editor and the mail editor provide basic features of WYSIWYG. But it seems that despite managing the world's biggest encyclopaedia, the makers have not even added a good enough editor. Atleast enter shoud have been recognisable rather than a tag. High time man, this encyclopaedia gives a tough time editting. their sandbox is just a viewer rather than an editor. I see that they have done a fine job with the templates section keeping the coding open for people to modify but how do they expect people from far off places to write out articles when it is so confusing. The only support i think we have is to paste and add stuff later. We can't even write to our favourite word editor and put the stuff there. For the formatting is gone without a reason.
Editor: You can't start a paragraph with a few white spaces as is normal paragraph formatting. And indeed if we closely notice the articles they either are fully indented or start at the right edge. It is html we are writing, just that it is outside the tag for that is what they have generated. They don't have a simple editor, to say the least. They may be having WikiEd for the users to install as a plugin but that is not the way to deal with the issue. In modern day people are not installing plugins. Plus there is no support for IE 7 and Opera 9. Opera 9 has been in market for so much of time and as far as IE is concerned people are concerned with mostly the IE 8 which is supposed to be highly strict on web developers, and if your site cannot run on the linient 7 forget the strict 8. And I think same will be the case for 8. What the makers need is a team of people who could make some cool stuff for wikipedia and help attract editors. Plus it also require the save now as in the blogger, where you can save your post not for publishing it but because it is incomplete, or yet not formatted well enough. Atlest help add an under construction tag. I started with my article and I opened it next day. Somebody had marked {{Afd}} meaning article for deletion and it would have been deleted in five days if I had not seen it. In such cases think of it if a person decides to write an aricle and just gives it a name. That's how wikipedia they said works. But now its time for expansion, to add articles that were not a part of it straight, that are localized and will become internationalized with time. So people who are there don't know about the stuff and label it. People in regions like India are normally not heavy web users and editors and liek this to start off an article is tough. Plus there is no ABC or the famous check your spelling and basic grammar. They say its not perfect, but its better than nothing. Is it meaningful if people have to again and again change a little words in their article??
Support: I haven't seen flash and videos in Wikipaedia. The encyclopaedia does not support these. Quite strange, because you cannot definitely say that encyclopaedia should not contains these stuff. With youtube going global and giving great video integration properties, no one can understand why don't they have a proper integration with youtube. I don't think the editors would not wanr videos in their articles and also don't think that keeping a check on videos will be tough. It seems to be simply just that wikipedia wants to isolate itself from everything else on the internet. That's not sportsmanship. Not even the thing that could benefit the world. I know they are scared of marketization as well as vandalism to everyon'e favourite encyclpaedia, but that does not justify video non - integration as properly as to have it in articles. We seem to remember the legendry CD-DVD based encyclopaedias of Britannica and Encarta when it comes to video and flash content. Researchers would be happy to share their research videos on wikipaedia for the work remains as their's and people might learn something from them.
Coming on to flash, it can be a two sided issue - many would say yes and many no. Wikipaedia is maintained by editors and not by technical geniuses and so we can pardon them for not having interactive flash content on their sites. But still look at the world around. Flash and javascript are a part and parcel of world wide web. People would love to add quizzes and all after their articles. Say make it a sister project where people can make interactive stuff and link it to the encyclopaedia. I don't find a meaning why that is not possible. Wikipedia has tried to live in the world where there are limitations so that its safe. In the end they are a non profit organization and so the people are doing it for virtually nothing. Still I think, with the open source world having so much into it, if you try out you'll easily find people who would like to contribute and make the encyclopaedia come to life.
Content structure : look at the size of articles they have on the encyclopaedia. It is huge. Would it not have been fair to have it two paged rather than one paged. Paging of articles can help improve readability, decrease loading time and the most importanmtly improve the structure and looks of the text. It is strange that the usera make themselves new articles and link them to the original one to get the content spread. So again even if they try to write it structured it is not. they have a contents heading at the top. Why not make content that is bigger spread into pages across the same article. Everyone is using tabs fot this purpose. If not tabs they can use a set of navigation buttons around articles and its subheads. If even not that atleast add a + - tree button that could minimize sections of the article. That is the demand of readibility.
I don't write all this to criticize among the best things of the world wide web. i write this because I've seen this in wikipaedia and its my personal feeling. Everyone is free to write what he feels and as a computer science fan, i have just highlighted some basic technical stuff that wikipaedia could use.
