Solutions, anyone?

What are the solutions to Wikipedia's problems? Sadly I think that I won't ever trust their articles on contentious issues; and with even casualty figures for individual battles on the Eastern Front during World War II attracting a large talk page and several edits and reverts, I wouldn't trust it for statistics and numbers.

I think that in order to preserve itself Wikipedia needs to move away from being a politically correct haven of squeaky clean open source mentality. They've started down this road by only allowing registered, traceable, users to create articles. But there needs to be much tighter control of editing as well.

When an article, such as that for Martin Luther King which was vandalised by racist thugs not so long ago, reaches a certain point of "perfection" it should be locked and any future edits be more considered. Essentially the leg work in getting the article on paper has been done, so now the refinement (a much more precise business) should be more strictly controlled.

An amusing take on the headless-chicken approach by Wikipedia's leaders came of the King article, which will henceforth be locked on the day dedicated to his memory. As was pointed out at the time, this only leaves 364 days of the year for vandals to wreck the article. This fear of clamping down somewhat on the abused principals of the open source encyclopaedia is a big problem for any of the necessary future changes to the way Wikipedia works.

Wikipedia works hard on "Featured Articles", which are crafted lovingly by teams of workers until, as a reward, it is featured on the front page. Many times when this happens the article is launched upon by vandals. I remember the article about the City of Bath in England was featured and by the time I got to read it there was talk of Nazi's and brothels.

Also, the busybody mentality needs to be toned down a bit. I don't really care about grammar or long debates over whether or not it was 100 or 101 men who died during the Battle of the Sub Editors. What I care about is getting something on paper and not having it ripped apart by self-important idiots who really don't know what they're talking about.

That's not to say that everyone over there is a self-important idiot, and the ideals of Wikipedia are noble ones. In the end however I'm sticking to Britannica and only wading over to Wikipedia when I'm researching technology and the culture surrounding it. If Wikipedia can implement some real solutions to their problems, such as tightening the editing laws, then it might just become a good source of information on some topics, and maybe one day even them all. But don't hold your breath...