Improving Wikipedia

From our investigation, Suugii and me decided to use template messages to find inaccuracies on Wikipedia. These are little messages that are added by people looking at a page and thinking there might be an error, but not having time to fix it. The advantage of finding inaccuracies using this is that we make use of other users' help, and it also allows us to go through a lot of pages: we just need to quickly scan each article, even ones we don't know a lot about.

Our method is detailed below:

1. Go to the "Contents" page from the main Wikipedia page
2. Choose a category, and then a sub-category. You should be looking at a section containing about 50 articles.
3. Look through each article for template messages such as "The accuracy of this article is disputed," "This article's point of view is disputed," "This article does not cite any references or sources."
4. Check each article or ideally, section, which is marked with a template message. Look up the information for that article/section on the Internet and in books. If you find an inaccuracy, rewrite the section. If you do not find any inaccuracies, simply add reliable sources to help improve the article.

Using our method, we decided to look up the "Environmental articles" section of Wikipedia. It was a controversial topic so was likely to contain lots of inaccurate facts, but the problem was that it was too big - over a thousand articles! These articles were however organized into letters, so we decided to check all of the articles starting with G, which was roughly 50 articles.

As we thought, many of these articles contained template messages, the most common being "This article does not cite enough sources." In many cases, sources were cited but in the wrong format, either linked or put between parentheses instead of footnotes. After some quick scanning, we eliminated all the articles which simply had one or two facts disputed or seemed too hard to research. This left us with about 5 articles, out of which we decided to follow the "Gaia hypothesis." It's a theory about the way living creatures on the planet interact, and the article seemed pretty biased. We decided to look at the Controversy section and try and improve it:

Controversial concepts

This section does not cite any references or sources. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (May 2009)

Lovelock, especially in his older texts, used language that has later caused fiery debate. For instance, many of his biological critics such as Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Dawkins attacked his statement in the first paragraph of his first Gaia book (1979), that "the quest for Gaia is an attempt to find the largest living creature on Earth." ^[19]

Lynn Margulis, the coauthor of Gaia hypotheses, is more careful to avoid controversial figures of speech than is Lovelock. In 1979 she wrote, in particular, that only homeorhetic and not homeostatic balances are involved: that is, the composition of Earth's atmosphere, hydrosphere, and lithosphere are regulated around "set points" as in homeostasis, but those set points change with time. Also she wrote that there is no special tendency of biospheres to preserve their current inhabitants, and certainly not to make them comfortable. Accordingly, the Earth is a kind of community of trust which can exist at many discrete levels of integration. This is true for all multicellular organisms which do not live or die all at once: not all cells in the body die instantaneously, nor are homeostatic "set points" constant through the life of an organism.^{[citation needed]}

This part contained a lot of weasel words (unclear statements), seemed rather subjective and did not cite any sources so we thought it likely to find a factual inaccuracy in it.

Wikipedia contributors. "Gaia hypothesis." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 18 Feb. 2010. Web. 23 Feb. 2010.