Talk:Improve quality content/en

The Strategic Planning Guiding Summary has this statement on quality:

"The perceptions and realities of “quality” have been and continue to be a major barrier to address. Wikimedia is now a vital source of information for millions of people a day around the world. To the extent to which it is understood, the quality of the content appears to be very high. However, actual quality is not well measured (aside from the fact that people use Wikimedia extensively) and popular perception appears to hinder usage, particularly in educational and other institutional environments."

To me this looks inaccurate; this will be an average of two different positions: 1) the content is not written in a reader-friendly way (leading to the preconception "I am sure it is all very learned, full of healthy information, but it is not written so that I can understand it") and 2) there is too high a rate of error ("we are not going to use Wikipedia for education"). Both could be combatted by an author who understands his topic and can express it clearly in straightforward language. However, Wikipedia is not geared to do that, or even to allow that. In many cases both problems have the same cause: there are a lot of users who strive for a certain look, and they will happily insert jargon (that they do not understand and use wrongly) and references (that they have not read, do not understand or do not represent accurately), without bothering about content. Time and again I have found that very many users will prefer a detailed-but-wrong statement over a general-and-correct statement. Also, there is an unlimited amount of users who will prefer a beautifully-idiomatic-but-wrong phrase over an odd-looking-but-correct sentence. Unfortunately, in the present Wikipedia culture. asking a user to check a fact in the literature is regarded by many as an indecent request, or even an insult to be wiped out by blood. Coupled with those who are pushing a commercial or ideological interest or want to recreate what they learned from their (oversimplified) schoolbooks, there is a very real ceiling to the quality a Wikipedia article can have. An article is open to be edited by anyone, and genuine quality will simply not be tolerated. - Brya 12:41, 23 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Core reference

I believe there is a classification error here. Yes, a dictionary can be considered a "supporting" role in that it is used to unlock knowledge found elsewhere, but it is an essential key to "share in the sum of all knowledge", is fundamental to primary curricula everywhere and, as any librarian will readily confirm, is most certainly a core reference resource. The foundation would do well to treat Wiktionary as primary content and aspire to making it rival the best of the non-free dead-tree dictionaries. ~ Ningauble 20:57, 14 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I agree entirely. In fact, the very title of this page shows a fundamental lack of understanding in English usage: the page talks about improving content quality, not quality content.

Wiktionary is already being used in other applications - to provide dictionaries and references within standalone programs and as plugins and extensions. Wikilook allows FireFox users to look up either a word on Wiktionary or a Wikipedia article, and Wiktionary lookup can work on any Mediawiki installation and in all browsers (and will soon be released as a blog-plugin script.) Wikipedia will probably never have the secondary use role that Wiktionary is destined for; it's just a reference, it won't go on to become a part of every desktop environment.

But Wiktionary can, if given a fraction of the support. - Amgine 05:52, 18 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]