Update needed: practical and radical ideas to keep Wikipedia reliable
🎥 Session recording: [https://youtu.be/IKDrJJMUDW8?t=6350](https://youtu.be/IKDrJJMUDW8?t=6350)
As Wikipedia has celebrated its 25th birthday, many articles start to show their age. The number of articles keeps growing, but the number of editors maintaining them is not. In some fields, including green energy, climate and medicine, reliability of information rapidly deteriorates. Dated information can be dangerous in health care settings, as people might take dated notions seriously. In climate change, dated information can exaggerate uncertainty which is a impediment to action. In energy, it can falsely imply green tech isn't ready to take over yet.
The session will be twofold: there will be a showcase of a couple of large projects that seek to update our most important articles (the cross-language climate denial review, the English Wikipedia Core Contest, the WikiProject Medicine Vital Signs 2026 campaign).
We then continue with workshopping more radical ideas to scale up these efforts in a period where editor numbers are slightly lower than they have been. For instance, should we follow Britannica and drop / delete articles when they're past their sell-by date? Should we trial partially blanking articles in areas where information gets dated rapidly, to stimulate "new growth" of content. Can we leverage wikidata more? Is there potential to use AI to prioritise finding dated and otherwise unreliable information? What practical solutions can you think of to change the tide?
