Larry Sanger, one of the cofounders of Wikipedia, is working on a more realistic Wikipedia which will ultimately end up being a real boon to the public. Wikipedia has been fraught with problems for a while now, the lastest one was this one that score a lot of diggs on Digg. The anonymous, partisan childishness is actually pretty extreme, as can be seen in cases like this one where a Wikipedia group was going after bloggers with Wikipedia entries. I know of at least one equally "asinine" profile that should be deleted, in fact it was written by a guy I went to college to describe his aim username, but I won't get it into that here.
If Sanger has the right people and resources, it shouldn't be hard for his project to eclipse Wikipedia in two to three years. The balance of having expert opinion weigh in and things like user-approved pages that are child-safe should prove to be very valuable factors in differentiating the two. Maybe it'll actually help take away from the legitimacy battles that are common on any Wikipedia page that is a "controversial" subject. That and the lack of anonymity just might mean that the contributors are actually held accountable and a certain degree of academic integrity will be the norm.
Leave a comment