Wikipedia.org has been taking some slack lately. Wikipedia-bashing seems to go in cycles with the press and then the blogger ripples that follow, this time itself a ripple of the Web 2.0 hype. Wonderful.

The focus seems to be on Wikipedia's quality problems and an apparent willful ignorance of those problems by the Wikipedia faithful.

But honestly, if you really liked Wikipedia and you couldn't come up with a reasonable solution to improve quality, what would you do? You'd probably just keep trying to fight the good fight against users bent on creating chaos. Wikipedia is a great informal reference. Would I use it for anything serious? Not as a primary reference, no way. I don't think anyone in academia would either -- and that can't be a good sign.

Wikipedia cannot overcome its technical limitations that cause the quality problems. That's why it will never be an encyclopedia. The sad thing is that its technical limitations are a side-effect of its technical innovation -- the fact that it is a collaborative wiki that can be edited instantly by anyone.

A wiki can only be so reliable, so correct. There will always be saboteurs and there will always be a finite amount of time required to clean up after them. This is not an environment for a real encyclopedia but it's a great environment for an informal secondary resource.

I applaud what Wikipedia has done, I think it's great. I use it almost every day, and every day I learn something from it. But I don't think I'd dare call it an encylopedia, at least not a reliable one. It's pretty good, but that's just not good enough.

The good thing is that this is the first step in a long line of collaborative "fact repositories". The editorially-relaxed (nay, free) Wikipedia process was the only way collaboration of this sort could initially gain a foothold.

People have seen the benefits and downsides of massive collaboration. People have learned from Wikipedia. Now it's time to get serious about online resources that can leverage massive collaboration for comprehensiveness but can still be a reliable source.

A wiki just isn't going to cut it for that purpose, folks. We need some new ideas.