It greatly depends on the area; in mathematics it is reasonably accurate, although there is no balance when it comes to the amount of information they give on different topics. In many other areas (as I hear from other researchers and professors) it is not accurate enough to meet academic standards.

Oh boy. My area of expertise

I'm an administrator on Wikipedia and have been for a couple of years. It's really hard to explain all the ins and outs of it, so if you have more questions you can ask or you can just check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia: ... objections

The system evolves and largely polices itself. Let me give you some specific examples. People want to vandalize articles, and they want it to be seen, so what do they vandalize? Articles about famous politicians, current events, etc. Of course, because these pages are so high profile, editors will have them on their watchlists and other editors will view them as well, meaning the vandalism will be cleaned up faster.

Regarding reputability and fact checking, Wikipedia has really cracked down on getting people to cite sources. If you go into any article of reasonable length or about an important subject, you're going to see tons of citations from books, papers, etc. I teach at a university and I let my students use Wikipedia as a source. Of course, they're just writing papers for class and not for a journal or anything. I think there are also studies by magazines (I think one was Nature) that showed that Wikipedia was more accurate and more thorough than Encyclopedia Britannica about various subjects.

About my involvement in Wikipedia... I started editing 3 years ago when I was working on my Masters thesis. I was studying some pretty esoteric crypto stuff and wrote some pages up about it. Later that year I was made an administrator. At that time there were something like 300 administrators of the English Wikipedia (about 600,000 registered users and millions of anonymous contributors). I wrote most of the articles on poker players there. I did a lot of vandalism patrolling, which basically consists of looking at every single edit that all the users make and then fixing it if it's wrong. Well, last summer I just couldn't keep up with it. A couple of edits a second I can handle, but it was growing too fast. So, I wrote a program that's commonly used by administrators there to catch and filter vandalism, called . It's pretty cool and I won't get into the details, but I won a prize at a computer engineering competition for it. Now that poker has taken over my life, someone else has taken over development of the project. A friend of mine runs PlanetMath and I also started a content importing project at . My user page is and articles I've worked on are .

Anyway, a little more regarding use in classrooms. Various universities and high schools do use Wikipedia for projects and you can find some of them listed here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:School_projects . Sometimes projects may involve something as simple as citing Wikipedia or doing research on it or may be as complex as creating a group of pages about a subject that Wikipedia is lacking.

Man you gotta love BTP. I'm wondering about editors and then one of our members is one!!

Thanks Derk. Great points.

BTW, how's does someone get so many things after their name at your age? LOL Nihan, sir!

Tim

Wikipedia seems to quite often be hacked or hijacked - I have a screen grab of the bio page of all-time great French footballer Zinedine Zidane which began "Zinedine Zidane is a gay twat who fucks his mum all day". Despite the symantic inadequacies of this statement, it still made me burst out laughing when someone emailed me the link at work.

Is this a common thing Derk? I also saw a basketball page which suggested that Goro (the boss from mortal kombat) was a centre for the Lakers, which (I assume!) is factually inaccurate. I still love wiki, though, it's a terrific idea and I guess is going to be a common part of life for years to come.

Very nice answer Derk. How is it funded/ generate revenue? Can't remember seeing any ads.

Molina

Well, pages that don't receive a lot of traffic are likely to have vandalism exist for a longer time. I know that at least 50 times I came across vandalism on pages that nobody would probably visit and that the vandalism existed for several months. Even if the page is not something strange, like the Lakers, vandalism can be kept around if someone vandalizes the page and then someone else comes along and makes another good edit a little bit later. Those who check the articles on their watchlists typically on look at the most recent edit and if it's good, they go on with it.

If you hit up the George W. Bush page, you might find vandalism because it's a common target (usually once every few minuates at least, and sometimes a couple of times a minute), but because it's such a vandal magnet, it's also fixed quickly.

There have been numerous studies and a couple of years ago it was that the average vandalism was found and corrected in fewer than 3 minutes. It must be faster than that now because of the sheer number of people doing vandalism patrol. In December 2004 you might find 3 or 4 people doing vandalism patrol. By the summer of 2005 it was up to a dozen. With the tools that have been created and the natural growth, I would guess it's 20 or more now.

The real bad vandals are those who know how to play the system. Wikipedia has rules for administrators, what they can and cannot do, and sometimes someone plays the system so well they can be a pain in the ass but you can't get rid of them. Others know that moving lots of pages rapidly will essentially halt the database, amounting to a DOS attack (although this has been dealt with for the most part). Others write fake articles that look good but are totally bogus. I worked a lot in the math area and there was one guy who would put up pages on these theorems that nobody had ever heard of before and it took a while to get rid of him cause he kept coming back other under names creating similar articles.

As far as revenue, Wikipedia is solely funded by donations and fundraising drives. No ads are on Wikipedia nor will there ever be any. To do so would taint Wikipedia in such a way that a lot of editors would probably leave. In fact, there was a rumor about 4 years ago when Wikipedia was really starting to grow that there would be ads, and it was taken so seriously that half of the editors on the Spanish language Wikipedia quit. When I first started out at Wikipedia they were doing one of their first fundraising drives for $20k. It took them about 10 days to get that. Their more recent fundraising drives have been for $250k or more and they can easily get $25k a day in donations. Also, some hardware is donated. I know Yahoo! gave us some servers in Korea, and we've got some in France and The Netherlands, but the primary stuff is in Florida. There were talks with Google to provide some servers in the US but I haven't been around and I don't know how that turned out.