>>There are the obvious display problems: Wikipedia pages look like a dull grey textbook. Almost every page is an over-long stream of text with hardly any video or even images. Pages about movies don’t even have trailers. This has big implications for kids brought up using visual media like Instagram and YouTube who are not interested in getting information about their favorite movies, musicians and celebrities from a textbook.
Wikipedia's aim may not be to become popular by just being an eye-candy. One of their features, what you call there as "dull grey textbook" is what I like very much. It allows the reader to read the thing comfortably and it also helps the pages load faster.
>>As the quote goes: Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.
May be for some people this is true. But many people serious about studying a topic actually may find written material quite important and helpful. Wikipedia is about providing knowledge about topics, so if music is a topic it can provide knowledge about it and knowledge about something is not only that thing. There are many meta properties (outcomes of analysis, comparisons etc) that can be described meaningfully and concisely only in writing and are important.
>>Over the past few months Newslines writers have added over 22,000 posts without a single edit war or controversy.
If you stick to only some news (e.g. celebrity news) you won't get much controversy. But wikipedia is not for just news topics. It has provided space for many oppressed groups to post their views which are sure to generate controversy. (e.g. see these pages [1],[2],[3])
Your comparison of that site [4] with Wikipedia is therefore not has much foundation.
I don't say that there is no need to improve Wikipedia but it requires better and deeper understanding and appreciation of Wikipedia, its readership and its goals.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apostasy_in_Islam [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulag [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critique_of_Marxism [4] http://newslines.org/
The format may suit you, but text, especially text in the long-form articles that are standard for Wikipedia is a poor format for the news-based articles that are the most popular on Wikipedia.
>If you stick to only some news (e.g. celebrity news) you won't get much controversy. But wikipedia is not for just news topics. It has provided space for many oppressed groups to post their views which are sure to generate controversy.
Wikipedia is a very expensive (time and energy) way to get information out to the public. Sending a video to Twitter and Facebook are easier and more shareable.
>I don't say that there is no need to improve Wikipedia but it requires better and deeper understanding and appreciation of Wikipedia, its readership and its goals.
Even with this, good luck getting any meaningful change from the Wikimedia Foundation.
It sounds like you want an entertainment website more than a site that explains and presents often complex information accurately and neutrally. On most issues, even news items, if you want these qualities then you have no choice but to give context.
Of course, Wikipedia is not a news source - you seem confused on this matter. Wikipedia documents events as articles which may appear to be news, but most of the time it updates articles on topics to incorporate events that make up the news.
As for accuracy and neutrality: Bias and PV pushing is a direct result of the wiki system, and its objective of creating long-form articles. The desire to create the perfect article is part of the problem, because much of the data does not suit an article format. The problem is compounded by the wiki software, which encourages bias, by allowing the most powerful group to determine what happens on the page. It also give too much power to incumbent groups, who can veto changes too easily.
On my site, the pages are built up news event by news event leading to a far more neutral and unbiased view of events. Compare these two pages [1][2]. The Wikipedia page, including its title, is completely biased to the viewpoint of the most powerful group on the page (I'll let you guess who they are). The Newslines page, which is neither "entertainment" or "dumbed down", is simply a catalogue of the news events. Each news event comprises only the factual information extracted from (often biased) source articles.
In the Wikipedia page the desire to build the perfect article leads inevitably to POV pushing, as editors veto the work of opposing editors. In an ideal system that may result in some kind of balance, but Wikipedia is far from ideal - every page's content is determined by the most powerful editors on that page. However, in the Newslines page, there is no article, so such POV pushing is not as easy. The end result is that the analysis of the events is left up to the reader, not the editor. A further advantage of atomizing the events on a page is that they can be sorted and filtered (using buttons at the top of the page), something that is completely impossible on a Wikipedia page.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mattress_Performance_(Carry_Th... [2] http://newslines.org/emma-sulkowicz/?order=ASC
Your site is interesting and definitely a different take to Wikipedia, but ironically it's often longer than the long form Wikipedia articles. But I do like it - and actually I might even use it :-)
It also doesn't cover broad topics that aren't news based. I don't know how you could use your site to cover Zoroastrianism, Jesus, Trigonometry, C++, the word "the", or psychoanalysis.
You are covering two different things that have overlap. I see a lot of validity in your project, but it doesn't cater to all topics - what it does do well is cover news well! Better than most sites I've seen actually.
Wikipedia pretty much nullified the Encyclopedia Britannica's claim that they were competing with them and trying to put them out of business by merely stating that they weren't in competition and that they would use them for sourcing information.
I'd run the same technique - there's no real need to compete and the market is big enough for both you and Wikipedia.
Substantially, I am so glad that Wikipedia is governed by the community. Otherwise, it would be a matter of time until some young, bright and dynamic manager decided to implement a subset of the "improvements" you propose - with a disastrous effect.