What if the first stage of the Wikipedia project is complete?

Wikipedia's decision last week to implement an across-the-board "no follow" policy on links drew much criticism. It has been widely claimed that the move will improve Wikipedia's search rankings at the expense of the originators of the ideas that actually make up "the encyclopaedia that anyone can edit". The Wikipedians drew more heat earlier in the week for their reaction to Microsoft's (open and transparent) attempt to encourage an independent expert to rectify the worse errors in the "open document format" page.

The debate has been made an issue of power and control - a rod Wikipedia has clearly made for its own back with its vaunted claims of openness, but a distraction, perhaps, from the real issue.

When Wikipedia launched, almost any contribution made in reasonably good faith by any vaguely informed contributor improved the quality of information on the site. When (only a handful of years ago) the page on Peru still said  nothing more than "Peru is a country in South America", everyone benefited from whatever was added, even something as simple as "and the capital is Lima" or as unbalanced as "and has never won the World Cup". A philosophy of openness meant that most contributions to this minor, empty resource were positive.

So the question for me is not about control; "not do the Wikipedians wield too much power?" or "should Jimmy Wales control the web?". The question  for me becomes whether the average contribution today has a net positive or a net negative effect on what what has become a vital digital resource.

As Keynes so rightly said, "when my information changes, I change my opinion". There's no particular reason that the policy of openness that created Wikipedia should be a workable philosophy for maintaining it now it's here. If the average contribution today is vandalism, or linkspam, or bias, then Wikipedia is living in a very different world to the one in which it was created where the average contribution was filling up an otherwise empty page. Perhaps the information has changed. Perhaps the open-source stage of the project to create an encyclopaedia is complete. And perhaps that requires a different approach, and "no follow" and a rigorous defence of the conflict of interest policy is what will give the web the most useful possible encyclopaedia. 

Comments

[Dental Marketing]

I find there is nothing wrong with Wikipedia's openness. In short, the 1st stage of Wikipedia should never be ended. Moreover, the information from Wikipedia can always be verified by other free & random information sources such as from google results. The policy of moderating all changes before being published are simply more than enough at this moment.