Wikipedia gets a kicking

This week's craze has been kicking Wikipedia, the open source encyclopaedia. Everyone's at it now. Some of the criticisms are valid: it's good at technical, poor at the arts; it's badly written; and it's often inaccurate. The Guardian
has been at it today, getting experts to look at the Wikipedia entries for their specialist areas and seeing how well they measure up to their own expert knowledge. Unsurprisingly, the entries don't do too well, with haute couture getting 0/10 from the editor of Vogue.

But here's a thought. Wikipedia is supposed to be a community effort, right? People who know about specialist areas are supposed to add their expertise to the encyclopaedia, making corrections when they spot mistakes, or improving the writing when it slips to Buffy-fan level. In all these critical articles, I've never seen any of the critics actually go in and change the articles when they've spotted mistakes. They've never edited the writing to improve it. They've just laughed and moved on.

Understandably, being busy, professional writers for the most part, they probably want to be paid for their efforts. But it seems churlish to me to criticise people with less expertise who are willing to give their time when they themselves are the very people who should be writing the Wikipedia entries.

And yes, for the record, I have amended several Wikipedia entries that I found were wrong. I'm not telling you which ones though.