One of the biggest points of critique addressed to Wikipedia, is that, because of its open source nature, the reliability of its data could be questioned. At one hand, people do not trust on Wikipedia, because anybody can put something on it or amend it. At the other hand, it’s that what the power of Wikipedia is: many eyes make all bugs shallow. This means that when more people are involved or at least viewing it, chances are higher that flaws and mistakes will be discovered. There has been a lot of discussion about whether this is true, but according to CNET News, Wikipedia is as accurate as Britannica, which is an encyclopaedia written by a selected group of experts. You can find the article here:
http://news.cnet.com/2100-1038_3-5997332.html
But even when Wikipedia would supposedly be as accurate as Brittanica, there’s still room for improvement. One way is to appeal to the contributor’s reputation and the importance of its value. When analyzing contributors motivation, one of the most important motivations is building reputation. The next step would be to involve their reputation with the accuracy of their input. This can be done by putting their (user)name with each piece of text/data directly behind it, so people can immediately see who wrote it. And what people can do then, is rate the contribution, which should also be available to see. If a contributor has more than one contribution, all of his or her ratings should be counted and an average rating should be visible on the contributor’s personal page. In short, all the ratings on the input, should form the average rating of the contributor.
