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A few brief comments on following articles and pages:

• How and Why Wikipedia Works: An Interview with Angela Beesley, Elisabeth Bauer, and Kizu Naoko by Dirk Riehle.
• The Hidden Order of Wikipedia by Fernanda B. Viégas, Martin Wattenberg and Matthew M. McKeon.
• Wikimedia projects

 
Before I start to provide any of my usual criticism I must admit that the concept of Wikipedia must have been one of the most rousing innovations in the history of the Internet. Or in the history of public media. As a user, I find Wikipedia extremely useful personally.
 
The interviews got me pondering some interesting questions: What is the role of an ensyclopedic web service in education? Why Wikipedia is not accepted as reliable source in diploma works? Are our books more reliable then? Maybe we should not even try to make it an academically believable encyclopedia? In a world of ever-growing misinformation it is important that students question the sources of knowledge critically.
 
What I am saying, what comes to Wikipedia being an encyclopedic resource, that there is a dilemma. Not in particular with the most common reason one hears complaints about, that being the question of trust, but mainly because Wikipedia's unorganized approach of creation. The creation process itself is well organized but the selection of what to create is not. This is somewhat different for example from the free software movement where basically that gets done what is needed. How to determine what is needed in Wikipedia? Is it worth time spent to provide for example the most definitive description of the zombie apocalypse?
 
Also the question of quality got lot of attention in the interview. Is it even worth to strive for the perfect article? Or should we utilize more severe methods, like Stephen Hawking with his search for black holes and the ultimate theory? To my knowledge (which is a hunch) he claimed his theory, that he knew was far from perfect, to be right to stimulate other scientists to confront his ideas. Which they did. The result was a compromise of some sort but no one seemed to be wrong. Maybe there was too few experts who even understood what the debate was about.
 
I might be wrong with this but I got the impression that the mass of the articles tend to be short and unprofessionally written at first. They have a habit of following the majority of opinion added with some peculiarities that are yet to be proven wrong or right. Some specific sideviews that are not fashionable might be totally uncovered. Or when there is a debate on a particular article that cannot be solved the article gets eventually deleted. But which is better, an accurate knowledge or no knowledge at all? Or some knowledge that might be inaccurate? I am aware of the long tail and how it works. Over time things will get better. And of course it is better to have Wikipedia than no Wikipedia at all.
 
What about censorship? Is it present in Wikipedia? It is not just what is being written there, but how it is written. To me some of the most polished texts seem somewhat washed up in nature. Like I put it earlier, does Wikipedia knowledge eventually become an average of the knowledge? Similar ”average elitism” has been seen in photo communities where too striking works get voted out in a name of quality or good taste.
 
A few words about the other projects:
 
Projects that I find to be most promising and pleasing to exists are of course Wikiversity, Wiktionary and Wikimedia Commons.
 
Wikiversity has already lot to offer, but maybe it needs a bit different organization method than Wikipedias. The use is not the same so why the creation process should be? Also, it might be good idea to polish the UI a bit to differ from Wikipedia. Education is much more than reading an encyclopedia. To learn is to live! Sad that this doesn't yet show. Maybe I should do something about it?
 
Wiktionary is hugely ambitious project but maybe the most needed all over the web. Online dictionaries were one of the first really useful web services, but also the most likely to get commercial in time or vanish all together. Why in the first place one has to pay to know a word in other language? It just irritates me that this kind of services is not already freely available for all the people of the world! The collaborations with Wiktionary should be government funded (by ministries of education or such) by all nations with no strings attached. Would this contradict the main principles of Wikis?. I think not. The money for example from EU-projects is spent in countless useless projects compared to this.
 
Wikimedia Commons is the most fun to have and maybe the easiest to start collaborating with. There is a vast pool of public domain media that has not yet seen the public eye. Let's bring it to light and give it a new life!