User:Salasks

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

1 Special Pages I'm Viewing Often
2 Pages to work on
3 Pages to Create
4 Best Arguments I've heard about why Wikipedia is/will continue to be successful
5 Why doesn't Wikipedia use Associated Press Photo Service?
6 Visit my Website
7 {{User Pennsylvania}}

[edit] Special Pages I'm Viewing Often

[edit] Pages to work on

Gas chromatography-Mass spectrometry
Jugendleitercard
Non-resident Indian
Danny Almonte
New institutionalism
meta:User styles (will eventually do my own style - first must learn CSS :)
Bürgerliches Trauerspiel (translate)

[edit] Pages to Create

Unified Democrats (Republic of Georgia)
Ensenada Massacre
NBA Finals

[edit] Best Arguments I've heard about why Wikipedia is/will continue to be successful

1. I think that as wikipedia grows and becomes ever more popular it will bring it to the attention of people with more and more specific knowledge. They will tend to correct the errors, and wikipedia's accuracy will improve. I actually think that it may exceed the accuracy of printed books; including Encyclopedia Britanica; printed books are much harder to correct.-Wolfkeeper

2.On the accuracy issue, I often repeat an interesting analysis I once heard from another Wikipedian (although I've unfortunately since forgotten who.) Basically, it was the idea that the importance of keeping a page accurate and high-quality is proportional to the number of people reading it. However, the number of people looking at the page is also the number of people who will potentially catch errors on the page.

So you end up with a situation where pages that people actually read are kept clean and relatively error-free. Error-prone or otherwise poor pages are the ones that no one is reading anyway. The percentage of readers who come to Wikipedia and get accurate information is much higher than the percentage of pages that are accurate.

To this, I will add a comment from my own experience using Wikipedia. In many cases, it's important just to know that two things are connected, or that if I'm interested in subject A, I should be also looking for information on subject B. This is especially useful if I'd never heard of subject B before. Here, accuracy isn't an issue at all, since "fact-checking" the existance of a connection between two things is usually trivial once the connection is suggested. Isomorphic 02:27, 31 Jul 2004 (UTC)

both from User:Kate/WhyWikiPediaWorksNot

[edit] Why doesn't Wikipedia use Associated Press Photo Service?

It'd be much easier to post pictures for news/sports figures if we could use the Associated Press Photo Service. As it is, there are almost NO pictures for athletes on Wikipedia (not even Michael Jordan!) Salasks 18:00, 14 Jul 2004 (UTC)