User:Shocktm

About Me

I am a software developer (mainly programming in Java) who lives in Reston, Virginia, USA.

International Travels

Spent years:	USA SAU
Months to Hours:	ARG AUT BEL BRA CAN CYP CZE DNK EST FIN HUN ISL ITA JPN LIE MEX NLD PAN SVK KOR ESP SWE CH THA TUR URY GBR VAT

My view of Wikipedia

I started using Wikipedia in the beginning of 2005, but did not state editing until July, 2005. After editing for a few months, I have come to the conclusion that Wikipedia is an unreliable source of information in its current form. This is due to the fact that anyone can change an article without any controls. Without controls, bad data is introduced to an article and it becomes the burden of the reader to determine what is correct/incorrect in an article. If the reader has no basis for this, they will likely believe everything in an article.

The only way I can think of fixing Wikipedia is to have two versions of each article - a draft version that anyone can edit (this would be the version of the article where changes can be explored) and an approved version that can only be edited by a few people (this version of the article would be the version that users can count on for accuracy). The approved version would be based on the draft version that has gone through an editing process - similar to how newspaper articles are published - where data is validate, POV issues resolved, and spelling/grammar checked.