Wikipedia and its stated ambition to “compile the sum of all human
knowledge” are in trouble. The volunteer workforce that built the
project’s flagship, the English-language Wikipedia—and must defend it
against vandalism, hoaxes, and manipulation—has shrunk by more than a
third since 2007 and is still shrinking. Those participants left seem
incapable of fixing the flaws that keep Wikipedia from becoming a
high-quality encyclopedia by any standard, including the project’s own.
Among the significant problems that aren’t getting resolved is the
site’s skewed coverage: its entries on Pokemon and female porn stars are
comprehensive, but its pages on female novelists or places in
sub-Saharan Africa are sketchy. Authoritative entries remain elusive. Of
the 1,000 articles that the project’s own volunteers have tagged as
forming the core of a good encyclopedia, most don’t earn even
Wikipedia’s own middle-ranking quality scores.
