世論 What Japan Thinks

Not that this has anything in particular to do with Japan, but since I wrote my Wikipedia NoFollow plugin for WordPress there’s been quite a bit of action.

First, Andy Beard was good enough to write it up and promote it around a few websites. In addition, he also pointed out I had a bug in my comment script, whcih I’ve hopefully now fixed.

Next, there’s a Drupal plugin written by greggles that does the same thing for that platform.

Paul Montgomery at Tinfinger makes a case for dropping Wikipedia from Google and Andy Beal at Marketing Pilgrim is whipping up support for cutting off Wikipedia. Google Blogoscoped describes how they prevent spam links and many others discuss the topic in many languages. Track the nofollow tag at del.icio.us for the latest news.

From this website’s perspective, looking at my top 10 search phrases there is just one that is in direct competition with Wikipedia, and if anything I stand to gain by the addition of rel=”nofollow” as the two above the Wikipedia entry, both linked from Wikipedia, seem to be more poorly linked to other sites, so I perhaps could very well stand to gain from them losing their Wikipedia links.

A quick note that I’ve just hacked up a plugin that you may like to use in response to this news.

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japan.internet.com recently reported on a survey conducted by goo Research into Wikipedia usage. 1,088 members of their monitor panel successfully completed the internet-based opinion poll. 47.1% of the sample was male, 20.9% in their twenties, 41.8% in their thirties, 26.5% in their forties, and 10.8% in their fifties.

This month, Japanese Wikipedia was chosen as the overall grand prize winner in the “WEB of the Year 2006″ (Japanese link) awards. In addition, on the 15th of this month it crossed the 300,000 article mark.

With Wikipedia, if I am looking up a simple fact I know I can most likely trust the article, but for not just anything remotely controversial but also others that require specialised knowledge I find myself often wondering if it is correct or not, and end up doing my own research to corraborate the data! Having said all that, I did refer today to two articles which referred to current events and I was pleased to find information that I found useful and trustworthy. On the other hand, did I find it trustworthy just because the information supported my stance on the matters concerned?
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You may remember a couple of months back I wrote about how the Japanese_name article in Wikipedia was a bit naff. Well, just today I’ve been having a number of hits from that article in Wikipedia, which seems mostly unchanged to me. So, rather than be negative again about it, I think I’ll point out all the bits that seem wrong to me.
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japan.internet.com, in conjuction with goo Research, carried out an online poll amongst the goo Research Monitors to find out what they thought about Wikipedia. They surveyed 1,060 people, 55.6% female, over a few days at the start of April. The age demographics were 24.6% in their twenties, 43.7% in their thirties, 23.7% in their forties, and 8.0% in their fifties.

I personally only trust Wikipedia to a small degree; to be honest, I can only fully trust articles I know myself to be correct, I trust items on non-controversial subjects to a lesser degree, so I suppose that makes me one of those who doesn’t really trust it. I edited the Takarazuka Theatre article, for instance, but I have seen some of my information removed, and now the article is descending into trivia, bad writing, and inconsistent information – I can see at least two mistakes in a quick scan. Controversial subjects are the least trustworthy, as the alleged “neutral point of view” ends up as being given to either the side who shouted first or loudest, or has the most friends in high places. As with a lot of Open Source, everyone wants to stamp their mark, but few want to just fix other’s stuff, and even if they do, they often unwittingly trample on the ego of those who want their information preserved.

A good example of the above is Japanese Name. This needs a complete rewrite, as the same information is repeated twice or even thrice, there is trivia galore, showing off (some valid, some invalid), falsehoods and slack wording.
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