2.3.1 Poor data quality content: the Wikipedia example

Wikipedia is an easy example to illustrate the data quality issue with Internet content and introduce well the chapters coming afterward.

Wikipedia is one of the greatest collaborative world wide web project ever but on the other hand it has a couple of drawbacks. Those disadvantages are mainly arising from an absence of standards in data quality, here are some of those points:

– Everybody can provide his contribution and have the possibility to sign it as anonymous, so in theory a 3 year-old kid can write an article. According to Sara Baase: "Accuracy and quality are impossible. Truth does not come from populist free-for-alls. Some articles are biased and one sided"; (Baase, S. (2007). A gift of Fire. p352)

– Some articles without reliable sources can be validated by an administrator, Internet users may then take the displayed information for granted;

– The success of Wikipedia: word of mouth;

– Wikipedia's popularity (Baase, S. (2007). A gift of Fire. p351) made it ranks first on Google on most of the requests. It has a page rank of 9 out of 10 which corresponds to almost the maximum recognition Google can give to a website.

1st and 2nd results for "data quality" are Wikipedia websites