Openness versus quality: why we're doing it wrong, and how to fix it
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Wikipedia's motto, from its very inception in 2001, has been "The free encyclopedia that anyone can edit". This emphasizes the openness of the project, which stands today as the greatest example of crowdsourcing on the Internet. With 3.8 million articles, the English Wikipedia alone stands as the largest encyclopedia ever. Yet despite our success, trouble is looming on the horizon. Wikipedia's model, though highly successful thus far, creates an intrinsic conflict between openness, allowing the greatest number of people to edit, and quality, aspiring to clear language and the highest standards of accuracy. Which is more important? In making Wikipedia more open, you risk ending up with poor information, poor writing, and rampant vandalism – turning the project into a big joke. In becoming more restrictive, you gain respect and accuracy but risk alienating users through complex policies, guidelines, and policy creep, which inevitably leads to editor fall-off.
I penned an essay on my experiences with Wikipedia back in December 2009. There I reflected on my early fascination with the project, my experiences with its mechanism, and how editors fit into the overall model of the project. At the time I was optimistic about the future of this project, saying, for instance, that "time in itself solves all problems".
Now, two years later, I'm not so sure. Editor retention is a worrisome topic, and one that has been at the center of the Wikimedia Foundation's Strategy Initiative since 2009. The difference between the Foundation's numerical goals through 2015 and what has actually happened is quite stark, and earlier this month the Foundation's Director, Sue Gardner, brought the issue firmly into the limelight again in her presentation at Wikimedia UK (see the video).