Wikipedia's Co-Founder Wants to Make It More Useful to Academe

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By JEFFREY R. YOUNG

Mr. Wales has been outspoken about his view that his creation, the online encyclopedia that anyone can add to and edit, should not be used in academic settings, especially by students writing papers. But he says articles flagged as faculty-approved could alter that.

Q. You've said that Wikipedia is working to improve the reliability of its content. Is it good enough yet for use in the college setting?

A. Wikipedia has gotten better. If you go and take a sample of any 100 Wikipedia entries, and you go back and look at what they looked like two years ago, or five years ago, across the board it's remarkably better.

Q. What do you mean by better?

A. More detailed, more accurate, hopefully better written, fleshed out more, with more references and more citations. Whereas in the past, you may have read a paragraph that made some claims that were true but you don't know whether you can believe it or not, now there should be two or three footnotes to tell you where to go and check it. Over time the community has gotten more and more rigorous about sourcing.

But I still would say that an encyclopedia is just not the kind of thing you would reference as a source in an academic paper. Particularly not an encyclopedia that could change instantly and not have a final vetting process. I think in the future we might move to that.

Q. What do you mean?

A. One of the features that just got introduced in the German Wikipedia is a "flag revisions" feature, which allows the community to flag a particular version of an article.

It can have a flag that says this version is one that a committee has actually vetted. We'd still allow further editing, but if you really wanted one that as of three months ago we had three Ph.D.'s look at it, and they checked it off as being good, you could see that. We may move in that direction.

Q. How soon might that happen?

A. The software's there, but I don't know how the community's going to want to use it. We never have a plan, we just wing it. There's a lot of interesting questions about how well is it going to work. Is it convenient for people? Are people even going to use it?

Q. And you think flagged versions would work better at colleges?

A. The flagged versions could be cited more comfortably by an academic. Or maybe by a newspaper or something.

Q. Are there more academics writing for Wikipedia now?

A. I'm sure there are. I don't know if the percentage has changed materially, but there's more of everybody.