I read the article Wikipedia founder admits to serious quality problems with interest, given that I’m in the process of setting up my own wiki over at InvestEd … the Investing Encyclopedia (aka Pedia).
I haven’t yet figured out how we guarantee the quality … but some of the key differences with our project is that, while it will be visible to all users (including non-members), we will only be allowing members to add content, and even then, only members who we are sure understand how we want things to be done.
Naturally this will lead to potentially biased content creation – I don’t apologise for that, but I do aim to keep it as “opinion neutral” as possible (similar to Wikipedia’s NPOV goals), and as much as possible, educate people about “facts” or at worst about the various opinions and schools of thought, and leave it up to the individuals to make up their own minds.
I know many people are simply looking for the “answers”, but they are never going to find the magic formular here – and they really need to be spending time with suitably qualified professionals if they want someone else to do all the thinking for them. What I’m aiming for is to try and help those people willing to think for themselves, and present as many options and opinions as possible, in a form that helps them make up their own minds about which strategy is best for them.
The whole topic of education and teaching with a bias is a huge topic on its own, and something I will probably spend some time investigating as I continue my studies as part of my Masters of Education in Adult Education. I might write some more about that sometime.
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