True. And these two thoughts have been true for the past decade. 
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It’s not clear that there is a professional cadre of managers-of-massively-distributed-online-encyclopaedias waiting to take over. I mean, there are encyclopaedia editors, but moving to a commission-and-edit-by-professionals model would throw away the virtues of Wikipedia (like timeliness and wide coverage) as well as its vices.
Librarians are society’s professional knowledge managers, but again I’m not sure that wrangling a massive online community of volunteers is really in the standard skill set.
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It’s a good question! It turns out we really don’t know the answer (at least as of 2015). As with many aspects of the chemistry and ecology of different animals, there is still a world of research to be done.
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An encyclopedia of 5 million stubs is more valuable than an encyclopedia of 50,000 complete articles and nothing else. Shallow coverage of everything trumps deep coverage on a few things. But we lost.
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And yet, they have zillions of stub articles like this:
apparently created by a bot from government databases.
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The Wikipedia culture is… interesting, to say the least. The Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) has a mandate to expand the reach of Wikipedia to everyone on the planet, and in my time there, I saw more than one initiative stymied by the Wikipedia volunteer editors pushing steadfastly for no changes to anything. There was even an active rebellion against making Wikipedia easier because it would bring n novice editors who would then “screw things up and make more work for the experienced editors”.
One of the key challenges with Wikipedia is that the content is 100% volunteer driven, and while major policy can be overridden by the Wikimedia Foundation, they loathe to do so except in extreme circumstances. The other force working against them is that the general concept of Wikipedia, in general, tends to attract anti-establishment, libertarian, more freedom-loving types who generally could care less what “the man” (WMF in this case) wants, and just want to do things their way.
As a result, the editor base remains predominantly the same group of people that it was originally: predominantly male, western, white, tech-savvy types, and the culture that comes from it. Despite efforts from the WMF to attract diverse editors from around the world, they aren’t able to make a significant dent in the culture of that editorial base.
Disclaimer: I spent a year working as Director of Tech Operations for the Wikimedia Foundation
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Call me a foolhearted optimist, but I hope you’re wrong on this one. 
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I’m also the victim of overreaching deletionists. We had a beautiful page on Wikipedia several years ago covering a demo scene archive that was very popular in the 90’s. They thought the sourcing was insufficient. I tried to fight it for a while but eventually gave up. 
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Oh. Darn! I was thinking… write a bot to automagically repost original articles! Yeah!
…oh, wait, the assertion is that’s the sort of thing that is wrong already, huh?
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This has also been my experience (improper flagging for speedy deletion, deleted by RHaworth) a few months ago.
I have now vowed to never contribute to Wikipedia again other than anonymous word-smithing. Yes it’s that bad. The deletionists are in the majority and it is much easier to delete pages than create them.
I would think there is a technical solution to this. With the open APIs available from Wikipedia, it should be possible for another site to ‘skin’ Wikipedia with additional edits and articles. Initially links would lead to identical pages, but over time as articles are added or edited a divergent git-type branch is created that would supersede the original. Its premise, I think, should be that nothing gets deleted - only versioned.
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You should’ve watched the Somalia article as it evolved 12-13 years ago.
Or… not.
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There are lots and lots of forks of wikipedia. Some notable one include http://en.citizendium.org/ which was forked by Larry Sanger and and http://www.scholarpedia.org/ which attempts to do just what you proposed. Unfortunately most of these folks don’t work, Citizendium has hardly any edits.
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A Raspberry Pi, a terabyte drive, install Mediawiki, and I’m happy.
US Commission on International Religious Freedom
(It’s all under the same CC attribution share-alike as Wikipedia, so if anyone wants to copy it over, fine, but not me.)
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I absolutely agree, and well said.
I know we have actual librarians about in here [as opposed to having just been the IT support (and useful to point people in the right directions) in one, like me], but I understand that ‘library volunteers’, and the wrangling thereof, is absolutely, positively, a thing.
Though I cede to The People Who Know More About Libraries than I, of course.
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For what it’s worth, if I came to Wikipedia wanting to find out about hemovanadin, my journey to your article would not have been wasted. While I wouldn’t have found tons of in-depth info, I did find a reasonable overview, and links to reputable sources of more detailed information from there.
To me, that’s a win, and a strong net benefit. (In truth, I’d be looking at the references anyway, to help me evaluate even a full article.)
I’ve never edited Wikipedia, but as an occasional user, that kind of stub is an asset.
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It’s a question of scale, I think. I used to work for the Quakers, so I’ve got some volunteer management skills. But on a 1:1 and 1:small group level, not a huge, largely self organised mass of online contributors. That seems to make it a qualitatively different problem.
Having said that, I’m sure that there are at least a few librarians who have skills in massive online collaboration (perhaps with experience of Zooniverse, or Stack Overflow, or Wikipedia itself) who would make awesome Wikipedia project leads. But I don’t think an MS in Library Studies necessarily has that career route in mind…
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Most of the Librarians (and other library staff) that I know are quite passionate about getting information to the people (well, okay, getting the people to the information in most cases, but it’s much the same) and while the current Wikipedia setup seems ‘designed’ to discourage, in different ground, we might well be surprised.
Well, either that, or they’d organise and take over the world, in a benign (information-led) dictatorship.
One of the two. 
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This. I started avoiding Wikipedia after the “Kate’s dress” fiasco:
Love or hate the royals, love or hate fashion, love or hate weddings, the dress was of historical and pop culture significance. I remember an article from the time which pointed out even rather obscure NFL players had Wikipedia entries, yet the entry for Middleton’s dress got slated for speedy deletion.
So no, I don’t find Wikipedia good for pop culture, because it’s too hit-and-miss on topics. And I don’t want to become an editor because of all the reasons mentioned above.
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