User:Jim.henderson/Make Wikipedia more accurate

== How could Wikipedia ensure more accuracy in its content? What are some simple mechanisms that could be put in place to ensure that truth is maintained even with such a large and oftentimes biased opinion from readers? == A question in Quora, my answer 22 Feb 2022

Inaccuracy in Wikipedia articles comes from inattention. The more the people reviewing the writing, the less likely it is to retain an inaccurate statement. Most articles are little read, because their topics don’t interest many. For example, articles about people or organizations often arise for promotional reasons; someone decides that the world isn’t paying enough attention to the subject, and a Wikpedia article will bring that deserved attention. When the world still does not pay much attention, or more particularly when only a few of the many thousands of Wikipedia fact checkers pay attention, then lies, errors, obsolescence, propaganda, and other bad contents are able to survive.

So, if what is important is the prevalence of inaccuracy in the articles in Wikipedia, we need either more fact checkers or fewer facts. That’s why some of us checkers look for an opportunity to kill articles. If an article is gone, it won’t attract vandals, liars, promoters, and other enemies of accuracy.

From this arises a tension between “deletionists” or minimalists who want to pare down the encyclopedia to more manageable proportions and “inclusionists” or maximalists who want to expand to include undeservedly ignored subjects. I more often side with the minimalists, with a preference towards the softer, redirectionist version of deletionism. Obviously if we had more checkers, and if more of them were precise, consistent, industrious checkers, this tension could relax and allow a larger, more accurate online encyclopedia.

Wikipedia has competitors with a different balance between inclusion and deletion. Citizendium is much more on the side of minimalism, with restrictions on who is qualified to edit and what may be covered. As a result, CZ is very small and has large gaps in coverage, but my impression is that the number of checkers is so small that the error rate isn’t much smaller, either. Another competitor, Everipedia, is much more on the side of inclusionism, with the result that it has many “vanity” articles on topics that Wikipedia does not cover, that attract few readers and fewer checkers, and more errors.

So, if you want to improve the accuracy of Wikipedia, you can go the direct route, becoming a checker. There is no qualification to be allowed to check; just find an error and hit “Edit”. Or, if it isn’t an outright error or the article is protected from new editors or for some other reason it’s a complex situation, ask in the article’s Talk Page. Once you have some experience in this direction, you might want to join the discussions on whether a particular article ought to exist.