I think the Wikipedia can be a decent source of information for some things. Like I mentioned I use it more for quick and shallow looks at a subject. Maybe a starting point if I can’t find anything else. I don’t click on Wikipedia links in search results either. If anything I pass on the link because it’s leading to the Wikipedia and I already know how to get there.

I tend to trust The Economist, The Christian Science Monitor – even though I’m an atheist, BBC and England’s “Guardian,” Canada’s “Post & Mail” and a few others. I keep an eye out for them, but take what I can get, and occasionally that takes me to Wikipedia. Either because I can’t find info elsewhere, or because in a lot of cases, WP has much longer, and sometimes more detailed articles.

So, pretty much any time I wind up reading a Wikipedia article, I’m in WP mode. I’ve either exhausted other sources, or, sometimes I’m looking for software development info, which is easily testable. And that’s one place they tend to excel.

Oh, yeah, and I heard Google is toying with the idea of re-labeling the “I feel lucky” to “Take me to Wikipedia.”

I am a little tired of seeing it show up at the top of every search result, though.

Do you go directly to Wikipedia looking for things or do you go there through search results pages?

They seem to like automated solutions … looking into bots crawling my site lead me to an article on the surging bot population at WP. Most of them scan a “recent changes” page for all kinds of spam and general vandalism. It seems fitting they would turn to bots for a solution, or part of one, to the trust problem.

You make some good points about what the color coding won’t show. Even where it did show what it considered untrustworthy text I wasn’t really convinced the particular text was any less trustworthy.

I agree that the color coding won’t tell the whole story, though I think any transparency is good with the Wikipedia. What I think the color coding and the wikiscanner can do is start to raise the questions even if they can’t answer all the questions they raise.

The thing is, I don’t trust Wikipedia, and for reasons this application won’t show. The”reputation” of an editor is a many-splendid thing. The main thing that drove me away from Wikipedia-land is “page ownership” where editors stake their claim and put in more time than any normal person is willing to, to reverting changes made by others. There’s a three-revert rule that takes away a person’s editing rights for the rest of the day, but this is easily bypassed by scrubbing instead of reverting. After encountering this in several corners of Wikipedia, where I unfortunately knew more than the page editors, I gave up and left.

The editors got their way, and have been able to make long-standing changes to the effect that proper diet is a sometimes-lethal eating disorder(!), the Soviet Union is “Western,” persecution of Christians has only ever been perpetrated by Muslims, Saddam’s cause of death may have been hanging, and Lake Tahoe is in central Utah. That last one, enough non-biased editors were brought in from other sectors to restore order.

Wikipedia’s problem is they let the inmates run the asylum. And sadly I think this new software will only tell us which words have the backing of the in crowd, the popular clique. That’s a very different thing from what’s trust worthy.