Wikipedia:Wikipedia is failing

Is Wikipedia succeeding in its aim of becoming a reputable, reliable encyclopedia?

To address this question, we must agree on criteria by which we can judge Wikipedia's success or failure. By common agreement, the quality of any encyclopedia is gauged by several standard criteria, including overall size, organization, ease of navigation, breadth of coverage, depth of coverage, timeliness, readability, biases, and reliability. Therefore, we should evaluate Wikipedia's success or failure according to these criteria, ideally in comparison with existing encyclopedias such as the Encyclopædia Britannica.

We begin by considering some arguments suggesting that Wikipedia is failing its mission. We then consider the encyclopedia criteria systematically, to place these indications of failure in a larger context.

Observations suggesting that Wikipedia is failing

Assumptions

To assess the quality of Wikipedia's articles, we make five working assumptions:

• that only articles recognized as Featured Articles are "excellent";

• that only Good Articles are indeed "good";

• that all other articles are "not good", or indeed "poor";

• that Wikipedia will continue grow exponentially for the foreseeable future, and

• that Wikipedians will not change their habits.

These assumptions are not universally agreed with.

Fraction of good articles in Wikipedia

There are roughly 1,300 featured articles and 1,700 good articles. Given that Wikipedia currently has 6,938,984 articles, slightly more than 99.8% of all the articles on Wikipedia are not good, by our working assumptions above. Moreover, as described below, the rate of producing new articles is faster than the rate of making excellent articles at present, suggesting that Wikipedia will never make all of its articles excellent. Moreover, given its large base of editors and its six-year history, it is disappointing that only 3000 articles have been certified as "good" or "excellent".

However, this reasoning neglects the fact that many articles have not been rated for quality yet. Moreover, editors customarily nominate their articles only once they have reached a perceived apogee of quality and completeness; articles still under improvement may be good without being complete or finished, and therefore may not be nominated for certification as a good or featured article.

An alternative statistical approach is to read ten random articles critically; an initial survey suggests that the coverage overrepresents popular culture, while others have found that poor writing and lack of referencing are common. However, this "random-article" argument is misleading in a few respects. First, even if all the articles were well-written, that would not guarantee that they were of high quality. Second, Wikipedia is growing exponentially and, therefore, a significant fraction of its articles were started recently. Naturally, such new articles have not had sufficient time to be improved to high encyclopedic quality. Therefore, it is better to compare Wikipedia to an established standard encyclopedia, such as the Encyclopædia Britannica, which provides a more absolute scale for assessing Wikipedia's coverage.

Coverage of core topics

The Vital Articles page lists 1182 topics considered essential to Wikipedia's quality. Although these topics should have articles of the highest quality, only 72 are featured articles, implying that 94% of the essential topics fall short of excellence. There are also 131 good articles, meaning that roughly 83% of the vital articles are not good, by our working assumptions. Indeed, 133 articles (11%) are listed as either stubs or have a cleanup tag. Presumably, the remaining 72% are B-class or start-class on the assessment scale, meaning they require substantial work before they will match or exceed the standards found in other encyclopaedias.

The rate at which encyclopedically valuble content is being added may be assessed statistically using the Special:Recentchanges feature. Readers are invited to examine the 200 most recent changes to Wikipedia and to count how many edits make a significant contribution, and are not merely minor changes, vandalism or articles likely to be deleted. Minor changes may be distinguished from major changes by examining the net change in bytes to the article. According to one Wikipedian's assessment, this experiment suggests that only 5% of edits contribute significant content to Wikipedia. Therefore, either such content is being added relatively infrequently, or piecemeal in minor edits.

To resolve this question, we may examine the rate at which excellent articles are being produced. Presently, there are roughly 1300 featured articles and roughly one article per day is promoted to featured article status. An appropriate comparison is the 4207 articles of the 1974 Macropædia, which have roughly the same size as Wikipedia articles. By this reckoning, it will take Wikipedia roughly 8 years to match the 1974 Britannica although, naturally, the two sets of articles will not agree.

Fraction of excellent articles in the English (cyan) and German (blue) Wikipedias.

It is important to note that the rate of producing featured articles in the English Wikipedia has not kept pace with the overall production of articles. Therefore, its fraction of featured articles has been declining steadily, although the same trend has not been observed in the German Wikipedia.

Maintenance of excellent articles

Excellent articles are often written by one or a few principal authors, who also maintain their high quality after their promotion to featured article status. A key question for Wikipedia's future is what happens to such articles when they are no longer watched over? If such articles inexorably decline due to vandalism and/or well-intended but inexpert edits, then Wikipedia would eventually decline even if it ever achieved its goal of being a reliable encyclopedia.

To address the question, one may examine the 340 former featured articles, which represent roughly 20% of all articles that have ever been featured. An initial survey that these articles were de-featured mainly due to rising requirements for featured articles, most notably, more stringent requirements for exhaustive referencing of facts.

However, vandalism and inexpert edits have taken a toll on some excellent articles. For example, the formerly excellent article Ryanair was wrecked by a large number of biased edits, while a whole section of Mauna Loa was removed by a vandal in November, and not restored for a month. Similarly, Sun's lead section was reduced to a few short sentences by an editor who either hadn't read or didn't understand the guidelines on what a lead section is supposed to be, and no one has restored the previously existing summary.

Food for thought

If Wikipedia just aimed to be a social site where people with similar interests could come together and write articles about anything they liked, it would certainly be succeeding. However, its stated aim is to be an encyclopaedia, and not just that but an encyclopaedia of the highest quality. Six years of work has resulted in 3,000 articles of good or excellent quality, at which rate it will take many decades to produce the quantity of good or excellent articles found in traditional reference works. Over 1.6 million articles are mediocre to poor to appalling in quality.

Open questions

• Why has the system failed to produce a quality reference work by the present time?
• Is this a simple matter of Wikipedia being a work in progress?
• What should be done to change the system?
• Is radical change required, or just small adjustments to the current set-up?
• Does this matter, given that Wikipedia is one of the most popular websites in the world?
• What is Wikipedia really, and what do we want it to be?
• Are volunteer editors suitable to meet our future objectives?
• Are articles really NPOV?
• Are the statistical measures introduced by this essay relevant to the conclusion drawn by the essayist?

See also

• Wikipedia:Wikipedia is not failing