Wikipedia has all these problems... and yet it somehow DOES work.
I mean, I choose not to spend much time trying to edit it myself, because of these issues. But I use it ALL THE TIME to look stuff up. Don't you? And my impression is I'm getting at least as high quality information as from traditional print resources. I suppose it's possible I'm wrong, but we get into all sorts of epistemological questions there.
I said it in this thread before: if it's working for you, that's perfectly OK. I don't mean to imply you're wrong. Whether you believe Wikipedia is the pinnacle of what's possibly achievable with human knowledge, or whether you merely think it's a pretty good compromise that delivers satisfactory results - if you're within that spectrum I'm not talking to you.
If that's the case, my statements are not intended for you. I'm not trying to convince happy people that they're actually sad. I don't want to convince anyone that something needs to be done. I tried to reach out to people who already believe that it's time to start experimenting with alternatives. For everone else, absolutely nothing needs to change.
Yes, I use Wikipedia every day. But that doesn't mean I believe we can't do much better (at least for a deeply subjective value of "better").
You can use the parts that work and ignore totally the parts that don't work.
When I spot an error in an article I do not ever bother to correct it, even if it is a trivial uncontroversial spelling error. I certainly would not attempt to change something that needs references, even if I have excellent references and even if the current error is unsourced.
That's not how WP is supposed to work and any wikipedian reading that should say that WP is broken, but plenty of them don't and are happy with the status quo.
I mean, I choose not to spend much time trying to edit it myself, because of these issues. But I use it ALL THE TIME to look stuff up. Don't you? And my impression is I'm getting at least as high quality information as from traditional print resources. I suppose it's possible I'm wrong, but we get into all sorts of epistemological questions there.