Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2010-01-04/In the news

The misguided news articles that attempt to paint Wikipedia in a negative light because of random examples of vandalism always irk me. They prey upon the average reader's lack of knowledge about how the encyclopedia's inner workings function. Falcon8765 (talk) 01:08, 7 January 2010 (UTC)
 * Yet another premature death -> . Has there been enough for WMF devs and dictators alike to pull their finger's out thier arse and enable flagged revs?  « l | Promethean ™ | l »   (talk) 09:18, 7 January 2010 (UTC)
 * Agreed Falcon. BTW Promethean (and I do agree), you can now get a detailed breakdown of where the devs are with FPPR, see the techblog. - Jarry1250 [Humorous? Discuss.] 09:45, 7 January 2010 (UTC)

The FT article exhibits certain characteristics in common with some dodgy Wikipedia articles: parts of it are well written, other parts poorly written, and when considered as a whole it's bollocks. Columnist Andrew Waters strongly implies that Wikipedia has no existing peer review process whatsoever, which is an insult to those hard-working editors who spend much of their time assessing articles. Of course, giving Featured and Good articles preferential rankings over unsourced stubs in Google search results would not be a perfect solution, but it would surely be more meaningful than pie-in-the-sky ideas like having some Googlebot attempting to analyse and rate editors and articles. Mr Waters then tries to trivialise the WP:Flagged revisions/Sighted versions proposal, describing "a plan to improve the English-language version ... by subjecting changes proposed by newcomers to approval by more experienced editors and flagging up any revisions" as a "minor but highly symbolic innovation". Whether an effective end to the era of "the encyclopaedia that anyone can edit" would be an improvement is open to debate, but to describe it as "minor" displays a fundamental lack of understanding of the nature of Wikipedia. He goes on to observe "The problem is not necessarily that the average quality of articles is low; rather, that there is no way to tell which can truly be relied on." Much like newspapers, then. Contains Mild Peril (talk) 18:46, 11 January 2010 (UTC)