Wiki-maailm

This week's exercise: "How can Wikipedia be improved?"

Wikipedia is a web-based online encyclopedia, where every user can contribute their knowledge. Whenever I need some information on any subject, I always turn to Wikipedia, because it has information on almost anything. But can it be improved somehow? Here is a couple of thoughts how this can be done.

Even though there may be a lot of text in every article, there is almost no way to verify, that what you are reading is reliable. This is a big drawback, because you cannot use it as a reference if you are doing some research. The problem is that everybody can edit the page anonymously, even without giving a reason why he did this or that change.
One way this can be improved is giving the person the ability to comment on the changes done, thus describing his motives.
Another way how this can be done is to restrict public editing. Everybody who would want to make a change, must log in first. Would be even better logging in with user's real name. This way users can be traced as individuals thus making them think first before article harassment.
One more way is that users would give opinions on articles. This can be done by commenting or "Like"-ing, as it is done with all activity on Facebook. 

Another problem with Wikipedia arises when you first hit the "Edit" button. If you would like to make a simple change, you will get a lot of cryptic text, semicolons, brackets, tags, also known as Wiki-markup. This may make it hard to orient for less experienced users. It would be better if there would be the possibility of using a WYSIWYG editor, to see your changes instantly.

But so far I, personally, have never encountered neither the reliability nor the editing problems.