The Economist: "The other tech giant Wikipedia is 20, and its reputation has never been higher"
Note that there is no author given.
And yet they continue to pathetically beg for donations, right on the front page. And once again, that 2005 Nature study is being waved around as "proof" of WP "magic". This is a really smooth stretching of the truth:Wikipedia’s value and influence are hard to compute. Its revenues come from charitable grants and donations from its users. “Wikipedia is an example of what I like to call ‘digital dark matter’,” says Shane Greenstein, an economist at Harvard who has studied the site closely. Like parenting and housework, contributing to it is a valuable service that, because it is unpaid, remains mostly invisible to standard economic tools.
A few researchers have tried to guess. One study in 2018 estimated that American consumers put a value of about $150 a year on Wikipedia. If true, the site would be worth around $42bn a year in America alone. Then add indirect benefits. Many firms use Wikipedia in profitable ways. Amazon and Apple rely on it to allow Alexa and Siri, their voice assistants, to answer factual questions. Google uses it to populate the “fact boxes” that often accompany searches based on factual questions. Facebook has started to do something similar. This drives traffic to Wikipedia from those keen to learn more. AI language models of the sort employed by Google or Facebook need huge collections of text on which to train. Wikipedia fits the bill nicely.
The "other studies" I've seen have been all over the place in this area. Ultimately all you can really say is that Wikipedia has good content and bad content. And some areas are biased as hell (look at the Kazakh-language WP sometime).Yet despite a string of notable embarrassments—and its own disclaimer that “Wikipedia is not a reliable source”—it is, on the whole, fairly accurate. An investigation by Nature in 2005 compared the site with “Britannica”, and found little difference in the number of errors that experts could find in a typical article. Other studies, conducted since, have mostly endorsed that conclusion.
And there's another Economist article, claiming that the editor decline since 2007 has stabilized. Give how erratic their statistical analyses have been lately, this could be true or false. Ask a WMF employee and you'll get nothing but cult talk.
"Wikipedia has transformed knowledge – so why is it still looked down on?" in The Telegraph. Sorry, behind paywall.
You are going to see more crap like this for the next couple of weeks. Although it's likely to be buried by the Trump-related insanity in media coverage. Much of which you will find reflected on Wikipedia. I could go on like this for dozens of pages.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia ... p%27s_hair
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia ... handshakes
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia ... omination)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia ... omination)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia ... ting_video