Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales has made an appeal to the site's users to start concentrating on quality, not quantity. According to the Associated Press:
With more than 1.2 million articles in English alone, Wikipedia already has met its goal of becoming a comprehensive encyclopedia, founder Jimmy Wales told more than 300 people at the start of "Wikimania," a three-day gathering of people devoted to Wikipedia and other community web projects.
But even while Wikipedia's vast scope exceeds that of traditional encyclopedias such as Britannica, Wales said Wikipedia would become even more valuable if entries were written less choppily, for example, or better identified their sources.
"Although we've always had this goal of Britannica quality or better, we're not there yet," he said. "We can no longer feel satisfied and happy when we see these (article) numbers going up.... We should continue to turn our attention away from growth and towards quality."
Does this mark a departure for the site? Possibly. So much has been written about the fluctuating quality of entries of late (some of it unfairly, some of it not) that it's clearly stung Wikipedians. There's also the upcoming project from Larry Sanger - the "forgotten founder" of Wikipedia - which is a more controlled version of the Wiki project.
We've written a lot about these issues... We interviewed Sanger about the scheme). And, of course, Andrew Orlowski wrote about Wikipedia's problems back in April, to some clamour.
