Wikiquality/Portal
We want to make Wikipedia more useful, and we need your help!
Quality matters. We want to mobilize a global community of technologists, testers, editors, and donors to help us find innovative ways to improve the accuracy and reliability of Wikipedia and its sister projects. If you want to help make Wikipedia more useful, please read on.
What you can do: Donate to the Wikimedia Foundation
Wikipedia is run by a non-profit organization, the Wikimedia Foundation. By making a financial contribution, you ensure that we have the resources to continue the development of innovative technologies and large scale initiatives for quality improvement.
What you can do: Test article version tagging
We want to allow a subset of trusted users to identify revisions of articles that have been checked for basic vandalism and accuracy. To do this, we are working on a software extension called Flagged Revisions.
A demonstration wiki is hosted here: http://en.labs.wikimedia.org/ . It includes a full snapshot copy of the Wikibooks project.
FlaggedRevs has been in production use on the German Wikipedia since May 2008. As of June 2008, all wiki communities can request the feature to be enabled in accordance with a defined process.
What you can do: Try Prof. Luca de Alfaro's trust coloring demo
Luca de Alfaro is an Associate Professor of Computer Engineering at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is leading a research team to study the patterns in Wikipedia article histories. His team has created a demonstration which colorizes Wikipedia articles according to a value of trust, computed from the reputation of the authors who contributed and edited the text.
The Wikimedia Foundation is supporting Luca's work, and is considering different ways in which it could be usefully integrated into Wikipedia. See Luca's demo site, and send us your thoughts on the wikiquality-l mailing list. See also the page on Wikipedia.
What you can do: Edit the wiki. :-)
Wikipedia is and will remain open to editing. If you have never contributed to Wikipedia before, please visit our introduction for new editors. If you know how to edit Wikipedia but are wondering what to do, the community portal provides many links to get started. Why not join a WikiProject, for example, to systematically improve articles about a topic you know about?
What you can do: Share your ideas - and source code!
We've discussed methods for systematic quality improvements ever since Wikipedia got started. If you want to join these discussions, you can subscribe to wikiquality-l, a mailing list dedicated to these issues. If you are a PHP programmer, this is also a mailing list where people can point you to areas where you can make a difference. Finally, please see our wikipage of ideas, to see if your idea has been discussed before. If not: Why not edit the wiki and add it?
About Wikipedia
Since Wikipedia was launched in January 2001, our global community of volunteers has written more than 10 million encyclopedia articles in 250+ languages.
Wikipedia is free of charge, free of advertising, and free to use for any purpose: We believe that knowledge should have no boundaries, and that education is a fundamental human right. That's why Wikipedia is run by a charity, the Wikimedia Foundation.
We want to build your trust.
Wikipedia is a very unusual encyclopedia, updated in real-time by anyone. We want to make it as transparent as possible to you how many people have looked at a given article, and to what conclusion they have come about its quality. That does not mean that we want to abandon the fundamental principles of mass collaboration: low barriers to entry and flat, meritocratic hierarchies.
But when you look at a Wikipedia article, we want to tell you exactly what it is you are seeing. Think of it as food labeling for information. Without these labels, please always double-check, look at article histories, and follow sources where indicated.
Wikipedia belongs to all of us. Let's work together in making it the best encyclopedia it can be.