Why Does Wikipedia Suck on Science?
Wikipedia is, by all measures, one of the great accomplishments of the Internet Age. I'm willing to say it stands alongside Google, eBay, GoogleMaps, IMDB and Wired.com as among the greatest resources on the Web (ok, that last one is self-serving).
Context & Ripple Effects
This critique lands eighteen months after Jimmy Wales himself conceded serious quality problems at Wikipedia, and after Nature's 2005 head-to-head found Encyclopaedia Britannica comparable to Wikipedia on scientific accuracy — a result that made science coverage the site's most scrutinized territory. The Epidemix piece accepts that framing while pushing back: the author ranks Wikipedia alongside Google, eBay, GoogleMaps, IMDB and Wired.com among the Web's greatest resources, then asks why the same site falls short specifically on science.
First-order effects
- Wikipedia's science entries come under renewed editorial scrutiny from exactly the audience — domain experts and science bloggers — whose goodwill the project depends on for sourcing and corrections.
Second-order effects
- The critique pressures the Wikimedia community to answer whether volunteer-driven review can match expert-edited rivals on technical subjects, or whether credential-based review mechanisms become necessary to defend the credibility established by the Nature comparison.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, crowdsourced reference projects face a structural fork between openness and expert gatekeeping — the recurring tension that has defined debates over Wikipedia's governance since Wales's 2005 admission of quality problems.
The trend: Crowdsourced knowledge projects are entering a credibility phase where the open-editing model that built them must now prove it can sustain expert-grade accuracy.