The Future of Wikipedia: Will It Ever Be A Reliable, Citable Source?

Yesterday, as I was working on a research paper about Ethics, I turned to my office mate and said emphatically,"I wish Wikipedia was a reliable source!"

"Actually," he said, "I have a hope that one day Wikipedia is the requirement for all internet reliable sources: in order to be a reliable source, you must have in some way contributed to the repository of all knowledge. If you are an expert on something and you don't care if the information that non-experts are reading is reliable, then you don't deserve to be called an expert." 

An interesting idea. I think to myself in my head. So what then? Everyone who is an expert on something must have written an article in Wikipedia? No, that doesn't make sense. Many different people are experts on the same thing. And the point is not necessarily to add more articles to Wikipedia, but to expand those which are already there. In addition, how do we prevent people from claiming to be experts, when they are not?

How could this work? We can't ask people to contribute to the "repository of all knowledge" without some sort accountability or association.

It could work like this:

1. Wikipedia creates a logo or a little moving image or something you can't just screenshot and take.

2. When an expert wants to validate their expertise, they contact Wikipedia and provide their credentials.

3. They offer to read, edit, or provide information on X # of articles on X topics.

4. When they have completed the work, they receive a "registration logo" which expires after a certain period of time. If I click on that logo on said expert's website, it takes me directly the page/pages that he/she is associated with.

5. Upon expiration, they must complete the process again (potentially with the same articles and information) unless they have evidence that they have continued to monitor their associated articles over that period of time.

On the other hand, this method has its drawbacks. For example: what about experts whose expertise is restricted for legal or confidential reasons? What about people who have restricted access to the internet? Or who don't have academic credentials? Academia doesn't own the truth. In addition, the individuals would need to be able to cite sources other than their own experience, which might make it difficult to motivate them to join the group. What about press releases? Those often contain a large amount of useful and reliable information, but no one who writes a press release is going to want to be forced to contribute to Wikipedia, just so that their press release can be considered a reliable source. 

It seems that there are a few possibilities, but the internet is changing and morphing rapidly everyday. Here are Wikipedia's five pillars. How do the ideas above relate or disagree with Wikipedia's values?

What do you think? What is the future for Wikipedia as a source of information?

Nerd Blog Frog: Steampunking Dr. Seuss

Nerd Frog is feeling quite chipper today. He says that the rain always makes him want to go play outdoors. He especially likes to play hopping games on the long stretches of warm black rock that appear in random places, although he did have one friend who never came back after that. 

Nerd Frog's Nerd Blog of the day is Nancy's Nerd Blog called Dressmaker's Muse! She writes about costume design: making dresses from the early 1900s, building sweet hats, and steampunking! Steampunk is awesome. If you want to see Nancy's steampunk, you can visit this post, Steampunking Dr. Seuss, where she explains how she uses steampunk to enhance Seussical the Musical! If you would like to go see the show, click this link to find out dates, times, and location.


If you are a nerd, you are likely interested in Steampunk (or you think it's dumb)! If you don't know about steampunk, you can visit the Wikipedia Page, or read Girl Genius, the steampunk webcomic!

Look at this hat. This is Nancy's Steampunk Hat, for the character Maizie in Seussical the Musical.

To visit Nancy's Blog, go to http://dressmakersmuse.blogspot.com/

Now, I Nerd Frog, am going outside to play.

Yes. You've got wrinkles, too. Make sure to name them appropriately.

Everyone gets bags under their eyes and wrinkles. Take Dave for example: he's only twenty four, but give him two weeks of working 12 -15 hour days, and suddenly the bags under his eyes are as big as Chandra's twin black holes, the gray hairs around his ears start reproducing exponentially, and he's got Mariana Trench-sized wrinkles.

The word wrinkle is a funny word, especially if you look at it too long. Like this:

WRINKLE

Or say it too many times like this:

wrinklewrinklewrinklewrinklewrinklewrinklewrinkle

See what I mean? If you google the word, the first thing that pops up is an ad for anti-wrinkle cream; the second is Wikipedia, which only discusses wrinkles on the skin (no disambiguation!), and the third is the Merriam-Webster dictionary which explains that the aging process is not the only definition of wrinkle: it's also a change in a customary procedure or innovation.

This morning I experienced a wrinkle. It started with this picture (which is awesome):

As I gazed at the picture I suddenly noticed, in the upper left hand corner, the word "supershell". To my great horror, I had no idea what that was. Wrinkle! 

So, you ask, what did I do? Well, I took my only possible course of action: I googled it. To my horror, once again, there was no Wikipedia article! In fact, there were no articles at all! Only research papers. Research papers are wonderful things, but please tell me how I'm supposed to learn anything from this: 

"H1 aperture synthesis maps of the LMC have revealed an ISM with a turbulent, fractal structure that is self-similar on scales from tens to hundreds of pc [18], likely due to the energy input of OB stars and supernova explosions. "

I kept looking. The whole process is enough to give me wrinkles.

As far as I can tell, a shell is just the outermost blanket of a star, the burning hydrogen. When a star is dying, it blows off this layer (as I explained here). This is also how stellar winds are created. Really, really, really big stars, like the blue supernovas, emit so much gas and dust that they create bubbles of hot gas-- also called stellar wind bubbles, which explode away from the star during its process of fusion reactions. Supershells are the result of a number of stars right next to each other, all exploding hot gas and dust simultaneously. Some scientists suggest that the Gum Nebula is actually a supershell.

So next time you look in a mirror and worry about getting wrinkles, just be glad that when you die you don't explode into giant clouds of gas and dust. Instead, just for posterity, you should name a wrinkle after every person that you know...