Wikipedia:Wikipedia is failing

Is Wikipedia succeeding in its aim of becoming a reputable, reliable reference work? Here are some illustrations of ways in which it is not fulfilling that aim.

Assumptions

To assess the quality of Wikipedia's articles, some assumptions are necessary. Here it is assumed that:

• The criteria defined by the Wikipedia 1.0 editorial team at {{grading scheme}} accurately reflect the quality of the articles these ratings have been applied to.
• That articles which are not either FA or A-class fall below the standards that a reference work should demand of its content.
• That the sample of 300,000 articles assessed, with results listed at WP:1.0/I, is representative of the whole encyclopaedia.

Criteria which indicate substantial failings

Performance on core topics

See also the rebuttal to this argument.

Vital articles lists 1182 articles on topics that can be considered essential. These topics should have articles of the very highest quality - ideally a featured article. So do they? In fact, of those 1182, only 72 are featured articles. This means that 94% of the essential topics that should have excellent articles fall short of the standard, assuming that all vital articles that meet the FA criteria have been nominated for FA status.

Do they fall short by a long way? 131 are listed as good articles, which, according to Template:Grading scheme, means that 'other encyclopedias could do a better job'. Some editors have criticised the GA process as inconsistent and arbitrary, so the quality of those articles is further in doubt. 133 are listed as articles which are either stubs or have a cleanup tag. The rest, presumably, are B-class or start-class on the assessment scale; this indicates that many articles require substantial work before they will match or exceed the standards found in other encyclopaedias.

On current trends, how long will it take before all the Vital Articles are featured articles? On 1 January 2006, 41 of them were featured; by 1 January 2007, this had risen to 71. As FA promotion rates have remained approximately constant for well over a year it would be difficult to assume anything other than a constant rate of VAs becoming FAs. At this rate of approximately 30 a year it will take 37 years for all of the vital articles to reach the standards expected of them.

Performance on broader topics

See also the rebuttal to this argument.

There are about 1,300 featured articles. There are also about 1,700 good articles. However, there are currently 6,919,219 articles on Wikipedia. This means that slightly more than 99.8% of all the articles on Wikipedia are not yet been assessed as featured articles or good articles. In many cases this is because they are not considered well written, verifiable or broad or comprehensive in their coverage. The results of the largest-scale assessment of Wikipedia content, covering 18% of the total number of articles, can be found at WP:1.0/I. The results there show that 0.7% of the articles that have been assessed are either FAs or A-class articles.

A useful, informal exercise for a reader is to critically read ten random articles. The numbers above suggest that on average, you'd expect to find one FA or A-class article in every 143 articles you looked at (based on WP:1.0/I), or every 762 (based on total numbers of FAs and A-class articles).

Maintenance of standards

See also the rebuttal to this argument.

Do articles which are judged to have reached the highest standards remain excellent for a long time, or do standards decline as well-meant but poor quality edits cause standards to fall over time? There are currently 340 former featured articles, so that more than 20% of all articles that have ever been featured are no longer featured.

Many editors observe that an FA that is not actively maintained inevitably declines; for an example see Ryanair, which attracts large numbers of highly biased edits which have wrecked a formerly excellent article. Sun's lead section was reduced to a few short sentences by an editor who either hadn't read or didn't understand the guidelines on what a lead section is supposed to be, and no-one has restored the previously existing summary. A whole section of Mauna Loa was removed by a vandal in November, and was not restored for a month. Generally, if the primary author of an FA does not take care of it, checking changes up to several times a day, it is likely to have its quality compromised by unnoticed vandalism or, far more damaging in the long term, well-intentioned but poor quality edits.

Some or many articles may lose featured article status because they do not meet current standards, rather than because they have declined in quality. Without case-by-case analysis it is impossible to say what proportion this is the case for. However, we can note that the featured article review process has not been as successful as would be ideal at encouraging featured articles to improve in line with rising standards.

Rate of quality article production

See also the rebuttal to this argument.

Many argue that Wikipedia is a work in progress and that, given time, all articles will reach very high standards. Unfortunately, this is not borne out by the rate at which articles are currently being judged to meet featured article criteria. About one article a day on average becomes featured; at this rate, it will take 4,380 years for all the currently existing articles to meet FA criteria. If the current approximately exponential growth rate of Wikipedia (which will see it double in size in about the next 500 days) continues, then on current trends there will never be a time when all articles have been promoted to featured article status.

Should we even expect all articles to meet the featured article criteria? A majority of people who commented on one earlier discussion felt that the featured article criteria do indeed define the standards that all articles need to meet.

Is WP:FA a bottleneck? The rate at which articles have been promoted has remained more or less constant for well over a year (see WP:GAS, while article creation rates have increased exponentially throughout that time. If the system prevents large numbers of quality articles from being recognised as such, then that indicates that some kind of reform of the system is necessary.

Special:Recentchanges provides evidence that the rate of addition of substantial encyclopaedic content is low. You may find it informative to look at the last 200 recent changes and count how many of them are directly building the encyclopedia. That means observing reasonably sound content being added (and not under a 'trivia' header) to an article that is not a borderline AFD candidate. (The info on bytes added/removed narrows the search quite quickly.) Typically this reveals less than ten substantive article-space change in 200. One such analysis can be found at User:Opabinia_regalis/Article_statistics.

Questioning these criteria

Is it a bad idea to use Featured Article or Good Article status as criteria for judging the number of excellent articles in Wikipedia? It is possible that many or most articles that meet the featured article criteria or good article criteria have not been officially reviewed, because review is a time-intensive process that often suffers from a backlog of nominated articles. The Good Article process historically has had a much less rigorous promotion process than the featured article process, so some editors reject it as a measure of article quality. If these processes do not succeed in recognizing quality content, then this may be a failure of Wikipedia to perform accurate self assessment rather than a failure to produce quality articles.

Food for thought

If Wikipedia just aimed to be a social site where people with similar interests could come together and write articles about anything they liked, it would certainly be succeeding. However, its stated aim is to be an encyclopaedia, and not just that but an encyclopaedia of the highest quality. Six years of work has resulted in 3,000 articles of good or excellent quality, at which rate it will take many decades to produce the quantity of good or excellent articles found in traditional reference works. Over 1.6 million articles are mediocre to poor to appalling in quality.

Open questions

• Has the system failed to produce a quality reference work? If so, why?
• Is change necessary?
• If it is, then is radical change required, or just small adjustments to the current set-up?
• Does this matter, given that Wikipedia is one of the most popular websites in the world?
• What is Wikipedia really, and what do we want it to be?
• Are the statistical measures introduced here relevant to the conclusions drawn?
• Is Wikipedia's own criteria for success accurately reflected here?
• Are the Featured Article and Good Article designations useful for determining the number of quality articles in Wikipedia? If they are not, how can they be reformed?
• At what rate is the number of new user accounts increasing?
• Does the number of active users increase in the same way as new user accounts, or do significant numbers of editors leave the project?

See also

• Wikipedia:Wikipedia is not failing, a contradictory view.
• Wikipedia:Expert retention
• Wikipedia:100,000 feature-quality articles
• Wikipedia:Evaluating Wikipedia as an encyclopedia

And finally...

If this essay makes you feel angry, stressed or miserable, this one may or may not make you feel less or more so.