Die sozialen Grenzen der Wikipedia

Heute habe ich mal wieder vom limitless potential of Wikipedia gelesen und mich ein wenig geärgert. Sicher: Die Grenzen sind noch nicht klar beschrieben, aber deutlich vorhanden. Denn bei Wikipedia haben nach wie vor Menschen das Sagen. Und so freute ich mich über ein Wired.com-Interview mit Jimmy Wales, in dem dieser einige dieser sozialen Grenzen aufzeigt.

So very obscure celebrities who have appeared on–I remember one very good example was Philippine Idol. Its like American Idol, but its in the Philippines. Its quite popular there. And of course, we should have an article about the show, and we do.

But in some cases, we had articles about contestants who had been on the show for two weeks and lost and left. And there just really isnt very much information about these people, other than their puff bios from the official website of the show, which arent always 100% truthful.

And you know, you have problems then in terms of how do you maintain those articles over time? If the person is unfortunately killed in a car crash, does anybody ever notice that and update the article? What is it going to look like 20 years from now when it’s horribly out of date and it’s just some crust laying around that nobody even knows what to do with.

Of course, we can also delete things at that time, if the problem arises. But that’s one of the parameters that I look at.