That looks like a very good article, though I’m no oenologist and I can’t vouch for the facts. Wikipedia does have many excellent articles. I don’t think anybody would claim that the majority of articles have errors, so looking at just one doesn’t say much. I doubt that even 10% have errors (though for scientific articles the rate might be that high). I’d like to see a bunch of knowledgeable people assess, say, 100 randomly chosen articles.
To give an example I personally am familiar with, I was working on an article for the British actress Thandie Newton. I referred to her as Thandiwe (which is her full name) at one point. On at least three occasions, people “corrected” the spelling back to Thandie. I finally put a note in the discussion page explaining that her name really is spelled with a “w” and Thandie is a contraction. But at this point it seems to have stuck.
Or another example. Someone had started a list of science fiction movies with military characters. And one person kept putting Alien should be on the list. Others would remove it and he would put it back on because he insisted the crew was “space marines”. I finally wrote directly to him and pointed out they were a civilian crew in the first movie. Confronted directly, he admitted he hadn’t seen the movie in fifteen years and might be remembering it wrong. He conceded the point and this issue died.
So my point is that most of these edit wars arise because people think they’re fixing an innocent mistake the other guy made. Few of them are caused by actual disagreements over the facts. In most cases where people stop and discuss the issue, one side demonstrates they know more about the subject and the other side bows out.
In other cases there’s a widely held misbelief that’s wrong and new people keep coming in and added the “fact” in the mistaken belief that it was unknown rather than disproved. In cases like this you usually end up seeing some kind of note where existence of the false information is acknowledged.
Wikipedia is an ongoing work in progress and it’ll never be “finished”. But as far as factual accuracy, I see it headed in the right direction. I think it’s clear that every day more errors are being eliminated than are being introduced. So every day Wikipedia is more accurate than it was the day before. Other encyclopedias are static; whatever mistakes they have are fixed and will not be corrected until the entire encyclopedia is replaced, if at all.
In cases where a fact presented/corrected isn’t well-known, I would comment the change as Fact changed, see discussion page for details/cite. Otherwise, your correction just comes off as your assertion.
If you read post #9, I link to the results of such an assessment. In any case, a pseudorandom audit is what I’ve suggested for a long time.
That’s good to know. However, although they give “quality” ratings by experts, we can’t derive an error rate from them. Presumably “quality” includes more than error rate, and in any case I don’t know how to go from a rating of 3.8 out of five to a number of errors per article, which is the question that led to my suggestion. Also, they compare only to Brockhaus (German language, I presume) and Encarta. I know nothing about Brockhaus, but Encarta sucked the last time I looked.
Damn, scooped again.