Wikipedia hits defining moment in social media era

I am a long them Wikipedia editor, and will vote down any proposal to make it more like Facebook.

I am a long them Wikipedia editor, and will vote down any proposal to make it more like Facebook.

Good on you. I hope it never gets dumbed down to be so called popular. IMHO Social networking is for people who are silly enough to disclose their personal info to any one and are not worried about getting their data stolen by hackers.

Unfortunately many things de-evolve rather than evolve. Eg MTV used to have many different bands etc and now look at it 16 And Pregnant, Jersey Shores........... I hope wiki stays informative

Wiki was never made to be social, it was made to be functional. While anything that makes it easier to collaborate is good, almost everything except the visual editor is counterproductive. After all, not everyone actually knows enough to educate others.

Keep it free and open.

Wikipedia is not Facebook and it should not try to be Facebook. i have used Wikipedia to do a search for topics like the eruption of Krakatoa and other historical facts. I could never get that from Facebook. There have been at times when I went fact fishing on Wikipedia that there where problems with certain articles that need buffing up and fact verified. Unlike the standard encyclopedias that have writers and staff to fill in the factual information, Wiki does not and has to depend on contributing writer to fill in the fact gaps. I wanted to find a way into Wiki but found it not to direct and user friendly. I find that the layout and links could use some updating, maybe a better navigational tool that would help the user to get to related articles.

The headline is pretty misleading here and everyone missed the whole point of what they are saying.

They're not saying that they want to make it a social tool or anything like one. They're saying that they want to make it easier to use for people who aren't so computer literate.

Basically, if you want to be a contributor on Wikipedia, you have to have at least power user skills (understand links, tags, and formatting by scripting). What many want to do is make the site user friendly enough for normal users.

I personally think this would be a welcome advancement.