• http://www.somethingawful.com/d/news/awfulpedia-babies.php

I ran across this parody of Wikipedia from somethingawful.com today. It pretty much encapsulates many of the problems faced by "the wikipedia problem" with SA's typical humorous bent.

A few examples include the lack of an entry for the term "girlfriend," "citation needed" for common knowledge (i.e. Cat babies are also known as kittens), edit wars, personal attacks, blatant inaccuracies and irrelevant commentary. Of course, the sources are none other than the SA forum goons.

Beyond the obvious humor lies a deeper question: what, if anything, can or should be done to remedy these problems? Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger bailed ship years ago, and recently unleashed Citizendium. Citizendium has a total of about 2000 approved articles, since the Wikipedia reposts were removed. Is this the solution to Wikipedia's problems? Abandon the original experiment and start anew?

In the general sense, I would say yes. However, Citizendium is not the answer. As Wikipedia's image continues to deteriorate, places like CollegeWikis.com are beginning to sprout up (it may be just be a new house for malware, who knows). Perhaps they will serve as beginnings for a "meta-wiki."

Such a "wiki about wikis," functioning much like a typical wiki, could connect to external wikis hosted by academic institutions/departments. The meta-wiki entry would allow members to enter commentary, and information about the wiki it connects to, but it would not allow for editing of the external wiki.

Although my idea has been openly criticized as attempting to "re-index the web," I do not view it as such. It is simply a natural evolution of an outdated system. And as that meta-wiki becomes outdated, someone will surely have created a new way of doing things.

My biggest hope, however, is that it will one day be parodied by Something Awful.