The Wikipedia Haunting Issues

"Wikipedia is the ideal place to start any search and get a global picture of a topic, however, it is not an authoritative source. In fact, one can check the facts they find in Wikipedia against other sources. Additionally, it is generally good research practice to cite an original source when writing a paper, or completing an exam. It's usually not advisable, particularly at the university level, to cite an encyclopedia." Nothing is perfect, and Wikipedia is no exception. This paper provides the complete sense of knowledge as well as awareness about it and at the same time, this paper clears the descriptive study over the issues, rising against it.

INTRODUCTION: Wikipedia is a free encyclopedia, written collaboratively by the people who use it. It is a special type of website designed to make collaboration easy, called a wiki. Many people are constantly improving Wikipedia, making thousands of changes per hour. All of these changes are recorded in article histories and recent changes. Wikipedia has transformed the idea of a “Reference Work.” It has multi-person editing capabilities (known as Wikis), and is a prominent staple in our Internet information culture. Wikipedia creates an account to use it to edit articles on this web site.’
 Wikipedia is an offshoot of Nupedia which is now an abandoned project. Wikipedia was publicly launched on January 2001 on domain www.wikipedia.com by Wikimedia Foundation in English. Later it was changed to www.wikipedia.org.  In May 2001 it was launched in other languages as well. Wikipedia has a large contributor base and it supports some advanced features as well. The inconsistent nature of Wikipedia and its wide variety of audiences and members makes it so that fairness and equal evaluation cannot be easily maintained. Certain articles remain in favor of others that are identical in terms of quality, merely because those who evaluate the latter do not like the article, or have a different perspective on the article being evaluated. Articles are sometimes plagiarized from other sources, infringing on (international) copyright, particularly when no credit is given. The Wikipedia: Copyright problems process only catches a fraction of these. Images are a particularly bad case, as it is difficult to spot plagiarism when the up loader lies, but the pedantry and bureaucracy of the tagging scheme leads to other usable and useful images being deleted and removed.


THE WIKIPEDIA:- AN UNRELIABLE SOURCE? Wikipedia is not always an unreliable source.  However, at times, it can have false or mistaken information.  This is generally more  true on esoteric subjects. Wikipedia can be susceptible to having errors because literally anyone can edit an article on the site.  This means that people can put in false or mistaken information and there are no editors who can check the statements.  Other users may fix errors that they find, but little-known subjects with few experts may not get fixed because there are few people who know much about the subject.
Wikipedia is also subjected to short-term mistakes.  These mistakes are generally corrected quickly, but people who look at Wikipedia while the errors are still up can be misled. Wikipedia is a very large database, with some useful information within it.  It is user friendly, and easy to navigate, with a huge volume of entries.  The fact that these entries are user-generated is the problem.  For example recently, a high profile politician goofed up on some historical facts during a public appearance, and her supporters quickly edited the Wikipedia entry for Paul Revere's Ride to sound as though there was no goof.  It was quickly corrected, but in lower profile entries, such as most of them are, it is difficult to check them all for accuracy before they are posted.
It's a good idea to be cautious of anything you read on the web, even here.  The internet is a quick and easy to use resource, but it's not infallible.
In fact there is always a debate  about reliability of Wikipedia. Often, Wikipedia is considered to be a good place to look. One can find accurate information there, or at least find information to get you started. For example, we can read the article and then look at the references. They will give an additional places to look. Pages on common topics are well monitored. Some people "adopt" pages and regularly review changes for inaccuracies.
TECHNICAL ISSUES RELATED TO USABILITY OF WIKIPEDIA

• Discussion (talk) pages are clunky and inefficient, trying to reuse the generic page editing approach for a multithreaded discussion. It may be possible to use it effectively, but it is very difficult to discover how to do so. Perhaps discussion forums would be a better method to talk about articles and their content.

• One centralized Wikipedia server lacks robustness against server or network problems. It also makes no sense given the distribution of users by language worldwide.

• Mirrors are not always swiftly updated. Misinformation which is quickly corrected in Wikipedia itself may persist for some time in the mirrors. Wikipedia itself prevents any real solution to this problem by failing to encourage others to improve articles, instead demanding that Wikimedia be the cited source for any copy, even a vastly improved copy such as those that appear often at Wiki info.

• Wikipedia can run so slowly as to become unusable for editing or for consultation. PHP is simply not a fit basis for a serious online service of this scale.

ISSUES RELATED TO CONTENTS
Accuracy
•    This is the single biggest problem about Wikipedia .Anyone can add subtle nonsense or accidental misinformation to articles that can take weeks or even months to be detected and removed (which has happened since at least 2002). Unregistered users are also capable of this.
•    It can proliferate, rather than become refined, as rhapsodic authors have their articles revised by ignorant editors.
•    Some of the information can be misleading, but it can be fixed quickly.
Competence
•    People attach stub instead of finding information to add to the topic, which causes Wikipedia to contain an abundance of articles which are merely a line or two long. Editors who find stubs are often not experts in the subject but want to learn more. Consequently, if they do actually add any content, it might lack in quality.
•    Anyone can remove huge amounts of text from articles or even the entire article itself, ruining lots of work. This is referred to as "blanking" by those in the Wikipedia community, and is considered vandalism. Such "blanking" is typically fixed (by reverting to the previous version of the page, before the text was removed), within minutes. However, within those few minutes, or in the few cases where such blanking is first noticed by a viewer who is not aware of the history feature of Wikipedia pages, a page may seem to be severely lacking information, or be otherwise incomplete, due to this removal.
ISSUES REGARDING ITS READABILITY   
The writing quality of some articles is sadly lacking. In such an article, paragraphs lack any cohesion and trail off without conclusions. Entire sections are composed of orphan sentences, created by piece-meal additions from random users. Similarly formed are the monstrous super-sentences, whose loose multi-layer clauses require the utmost concentration to comprehend. Users whimsically write equation-sentences ("The event is what caused excitement in the scientific community" instead of "the event excited scientists"), knowing nothing of conciseness. Grammar, punctuation and spelling are very good, but style and clarity are ignored. Wikipedian embrace bad "correct" writing, only recognizing its faults when told (or not). Use of passive tense actually seems to be encouraged in an effort to be boring, even when active past tense would be far better. And direct quotes are also sometimes discouraged even when they are entirely appropriate or necessary to the article's claims, or where paraphrasing would be almost certainly misconstrued.
ISSUES REGARDING TRANSLATION:
•    Translations will always lag behind edits in other languages, meaning that those who read Wikipedia in different languages will get different versions of the facts. Some never get English versions.
•    Geek style of language. In languages other than English, we are often unable to express our self in a fluent written standard language, and prefer a heavily English-influenced, unpolished geek jargon. This sort of language is often unreadable or very displeasing to anyone who reads mainstream literature and press, and makes a singularly unprofessional impression. Besides, it roundly and soundly defeats the very reason why there should be an encyclopedia at all, i.e. providing scientific information and learning for the general public in an accessible language. Also, in small-language Wikipedia’s, the "anti-elitism" of the Wikipedia project too often translates into downright amateurishness.                                                                                                                                     In other-language Wikipedia’s written in endangered, small languages, the linguistic quality of articles can be severely compromised when well-meaning enthusiasts with very limited proficiency in the language try to contribute by writing new articles or tampering with existing articles. Such people can be unable to write a grammatical sentence in the language or even be so linguistically naive that they don't understand why it is so important to write grammatically. Their contributions can even drive away more proficient speakers from joining the community. In fact, the self-correcting nature of the project is turned upside down in Wikipedia’s.

•    Net quality
Non-sensual articles. Wikipedia has a large number of articles which could be considered rather irrelevant for something billing itself as an encyclopedia, such as "teh" (a misspelling of the word "the"), It is not apply to the English-language Wikipedia with its large user community, but again, Wikipedia’s in smaller languages are very vulnerable to takeover attempts by extremist boarding-parties. Besides, the "geek priorities" problem is seen even here: impractical, extremist political views are extraordinarily common among unsociable geeks. politics often use Wikipedia as a way to introduce themselves to a wider public on their own terms.
•    Articles about controversial Internet personalities or reality television celebrities might end up deleted due to widespread grudges among Wikipedia’s against such persons, even though they fulfilled any reasonable notability criteria.
•    Absence of concrete examples in the mathematical explanations makes them extra complex to understand, the logical approach behind that.
•    Much nonsense is added, inspite of getting knowledge from it, the people get confused regarding the correctness of data.
•    In many topics, a lot of content is there, but it's not well linked together. New users simply do not understand that articles are supposed to be heavily inter-linked and almost everything is already defined.
•    Many users will associate accreditation and cite Wikipedia as a reference. Many institutions will not accept this as certified fact.
•    Edits by scholars and experts who disagree with some of its core values are repelled. This creates a very significant bias problem. Not least in articles about Why Wikipedia is not so great which by no means reflect all the Wikipedia: Criticisms that qualified people have levied on it.
•    Personal preference as well as just pure mean heartedness often out rules any sense of right and wrong. Admins are not immune to this either.
•    If a user is blocked indefinitely, their block log says "an expiry time of indefinite", which is a very insensible sentence. Similarly, when they try to edit a page, it says "Your block will expire indefinite". Wikipedia editors use fashionable jargon instead of meaningful language.

•    Editing of Wikipedia – Easy Access
•    Wikipedia articles are easy to edit. Anyone can click the "edit" link and edit an article.. Essentially, Wikipedia is self-correcting – over time, articles improve from a multitude of contributions. There is an entire infrastructure for people seeking comments, or other opinions on editorial matters, and as a result Wikipedia has got "consensus seeking" down to a fine art.
•    Errors to Wikipedia are usually corrected within seconds, rather than within months as it would be for a paper encyclopedia. If someone sees something wrong within an article, they can simply fix it themselves. Compare that to the long, arduous and tedious process that it requires to report and fix a problem in a paper encyclopedia, So it’s a kind of an advantage also.
•    Organizing Wikipedia
•    Wikipedia has almost no bureaucracy; one might say it has none at all. There are social pressures and community norms, but perhaps that by itself doesn't constitute bureaucracy, because anybody can go in and make any changes they feel like making. And other people generally like it when they do. So there aren't any bottlenecks; anyone can come in and make progress on the project at any time. The project is self-policing. Editorial oversight is more or less continuous with writing, which seems, again, very efficient. But in some cases, there will be "locked" articles, to prevent vandalism, on subjects like the President of the United States.
•    Life isn't fair, and internet communities usually aren't fair either. If some random administrator doesn't like you on an internet forum, you'll be gone from there fairly quickly, because they run the place so they make the rules. But on Wikipedia, everyone can edit by default.
•    In Depth working & Comprehensiveness
•    Wikipedia is by far the world's largest encyclopedia. It is considered the largest and most comprehensive compilation of knowledge that anybody has seen in the history of the human race. With the English Wikipedia now having more than four million articles, it is already well over twenty times the size of what was previously seen as the world's largest encyclopedia. With each new article, information is becoming more accessible than it ever has before.
•    Wikipedia's neutral point of view policy makes it an excellent place to gain a quick understanding of controversial topics. Want a good overview regarding any subject, Wikipedia is a great place to start.
•    Wikipedia is not paper, and that is a good thing because articles are not strictly limited in size as they are with paper encyclopedias.
•    Wikipedia seems to attract highly intelligent, articulate people (with the exception of repeat vandals) with some time on their hands. Moreover, there are some experts at work here. Over time, the huge amount of solid work done by hobbyists and dilettantes can (and no doubt will) be hugely improved upon by experts. This both makes Wikipedia a pleasant intellectual community (or so it seems to some) and gives us some confidence that the quality of Wikipedia articles will, in time, if not yet, be high.
•    Furthermore, because these highly intelligent people come from all over the world, Wikipedia can give the reader a genuine "world view".

•    Vandalism
•    Wikipedia, by its very nature, resists destructive edits (known as Vandalism). All previous revisions of an article are saved and stored. Once vandalism is committed, in three or four clicks we can have it reverted. To vandalize a page extensively, we would probably need around thirty seconds (unless it involved simply blanking the page). Compare that to the five to ten seconds it takes to revert an article. Couple that with IP blocking and dedicated souls that monitor edits to the encyclopedia, and you have a solid resistance against destructive edits.
•    There is only a slim chance of encountering destructive edits that you can't immediately spot. Most vandalism involves blatantly replacing parts of the page or adding immediately visible nonsense to the article – very few cases involve introducing misinformation, and even fewer misinformation and hoax edits actually slip through.

SUCCESS FACTORS
•    Wikipedia's success mainly depends on its users, the Wikipedians.
•    In theory, everybody can be a Wikipedian, but does the theory hold true in practice?
•    The idea is that the Wiki-community of Wikipedians is a special group of people who have special characteristics. To account for these special characteristics, we have provided the following factor model:
•    User factors
•    Openness, Computer skills, Motivation, Neutrality, Flat hierarchy.
•    Knowledge factors
•    Type of knowledge, Fast changing rate, Peer review.
•    Technology factors
•    Easy usability, Fast access, Infinite reaches, multilingual, Flexible structure, Safe.                                                                                            All of these factors play together to accomplish the goal of successful knowledge creation and knowledge sharing.
There are many reasons why Wikipedia represents a flawed model for publishing accurate information. These 10 reasons critique Wikipedia and will hopefully provide some impetus for improvement.
1.    The theory that everyone’s contributions to a topic are equally valuable sounds good, but is clearly nonsense.
2.    Wikipedia has no way of recognizing expert knowledge over inexpert knowledge. The members with most authority are the ones who have spent the most time working on Wikipedia – their “knowledge” is often just a combination of Google results and prejudice.
3.    Wikipedia gives people’s opinions undeserved authority by virtue of its search engine rankings and authoritative presentation and identity.
4.    Too many people (especially students) who use Wikipedia believe the articles will be reliable – and Wikipedia’s stance as an encyclopedia encourages this misguided belief.
5.    At the core of Wikipedia is the idea that bad articles will eventually be edited by the community until they become good (i.e. factual and well-written). In fact, they are likely to be edited until all but one member loses interest or gives up trying.
6.    “If you don’t like an entry, you can fix it yourself” But I came here for information, not to provide it.
7.    “Wikipedia pages have become increasingly complex and other technical aspects of Wikipedia effectively prevent many people with valuable knowledge from participating.
8.    The lack of any required standard of writing, error-checking and fact-checking means that many Wikipedia entries are poorly-written and contain factual inconsistencies.


THE END NOTE: It is acknowledged that, given the collaborative nature of Wikipedia writing and editing, "there is no guarantee an article is 100 percent correct," it is estimated that the site is shifting its focus from growth to improving quality, and that the site is a great resource for students. "Most articles are continually being edited and improved upon, and most contributors are real lovers of knowledge who have a real desire to improve the quality of a particular article." Thus, what we have to do is to take strong stand over it,  it is now very necessary to take severe act over it, otherwise it will soon lose its remaining value.
REFERENCES:
1.    Wikipedia- The missing manuals, The Wikipedia Revolution.
2.    India Today, Current affairs.
3.    The Hindustan Times, Business Standard.
WEBLIOGRAPHY:
4.    World Wide Web: Google, e-papers. 1:00 pm, 21/1/2013
5.    www.google.com  10:00 am, 22/1/2013
6.    http://www.smoblogger.com/wikipedia-sucks/ 1:00 pm, 23/1/2013
7.    http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-19148151 10:00 am, 24/1/2013
8.    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Why_Wikipedia_is_so_great 4:00 pm, 24/1/2013