Larry Sanger wrote:
>In particular, the Wikipedia project has been defined in such a way that
>we have few official standards and no virtually requirements for quality
>of the rigorous sort that Linux had when it set out to rewrite Unix from
>scratch (and later remain compliant with stringent technical standards
>like the POSIX standard). Linus Torvalds' task had well-defined
>parameters that absolutely required a lot of genuine expertise. Our task,
>by contrast, is to write a very large, unbiased encyclopedia. What this
>task entails is far more nebulous (though I and others have worked very
>hard to settle on and explain what it does involve), and many reasonable
>people reasonably think that this doesn't strictly speaking require
>genuine expertise.
>
>But it does. If you think otherwise, you're living in a fantasy world.
>The fact that there is no organization like the IEEE staffed by
>world-class experts defining a standard that we must follow doesn't mean
>that our work doesn't require expertise to finish credibly. I think
>writing *and finishing* a credible draft of an encyclopedia requires more
>and a wider range of expertise than the free software movement has. If
>our encyclopedia project doesn't get an infusion of that expertise, the
>quality of the result will suffer accordingly, which is a lot.
>
So maybe I am living in a fantasy world, but my opinion is different.
First, I think many of the contributors to Wikipedia already have
genuine expertise. They have good knowledge about a number of topics (be
it because it's their hobby, work, study or interest) and - very
important - gain a lot of experience about how to write encyclopedia
articles from reading a lot of them, correcting them, talking about
them. And if there are more people needed for an article: they're there.
Next, "normal" encyclopedias are not written by the most highly regarded
experts either. There may be some, but in general these are not really
better qualified than many Wikipedians, in some cases there are
Wikipedians with better qualifications. In fact, the real experts will
not even bother to write encyclopedias, they'll work on topics in their
own field. Also, normal encyclopedias are usually written by a number of
people, where each person has his expertise. While his articles are
probably read by others, they're usually only written by one person.
So, while I think it would be great to draw some great minds to
Wikipedia, I do not think we have a problem just because we don't have
any (if that would be true). If these highly regarded experts think our
encyclopedia is bogus because they've read a lot of articles that are
bad, they are right and we can only hope these articles will be
rewritten (hopefully by these experts themselves). But if they judge it
to be a bad encyclopedia because there are no experts contributing
(which there are), it is these experts that are wrong, and not the
encyclopedia. Moreover, most people use an encyclopedia because they are
NOT a highly regarded expert. I find it much more important if they
think Wikipedia is useful. It is same as with the free software. If the
program is crap, nobody will download/use it, not even if it were made
by, say, Linus Torvalds or some other famous guy. However, if my
completely programming-ignorant neighbour would create a great program,
it will be used. Most people judge by quality of the product, not of the
producer. True, Torvalds may draw more people to download his crappy
program at first than my neighbour, but when word gets out of the
quality, that changes.
So my opinion is that attracting expert contributors because they're
experts is wrong; we should attract any contributor because he's
contributions are of (high) quality, no matter if he's a high school
drop-out or a guy with seven master titles and three Ph.D's.
Jeronimo
Hi all --
Please 'scuse the phone numbers on my last -- if there's any way to
edit out that part, I'd really appreciate it.
Here's my question. As you know, we've had LOTS of images uploaded
lately. Since Isis was one of the people doing a lot of uploading, I
asked her about the copyright. She claimed that,
"Yes, they're in the public domain because I've put them there now. I
created them from works that were not under copyright, most of which
(the paintings and such) were created 100s of years ago, and my work in
creating and manipulating the digital images makes them my own
work-product, just as a photographer owns the rights to the pictures he
takes but not whatever he takes the picture of."
Montrealis then asked about the use of videotape covers, etc, and this
was the response:
"They fall under the "fair use" doctrine for documenting sources in
scholarly works but, even if they didn't, the remedy for infringement is
disgorgement of the profits, and there are none here. (The covers are
like your face: When you're in public, anyone who wants to can take a
picture of you, but if they try to use it to make money, you can either
stop them from using it or make them pay you what they got from using
it.) But the question is academic, because as a practical matter it's
free publicity to entities that live on publicity. And if you've ever
tried to report bootleg tapes to the companies that own the rights, you
know that they don't care." isis
The thing is, this just sounds wrong to me, based on personal
experience. When I wrote my dissertation, University Microfilms was
very clear on using images from other sources. I couldn't. Not even my
own re-workings from reproductions of old maps. Isis may be a
lawyer and correct about all of this, but it just sounds iffy to me,
especially in light of the second answer, which sounds like "it could
be, but they won't prosecute".
Does anyone have a definite answer?
Jules
The boxes/question marks are almost always a result of pasting in text from Microsoft Word or some other program that uses "fancy" quotation marks etc. I always assume it to be the result of a copyright violation and google-test it (which I'll go do now). That would explain all three of your questions below--where they come from, why the contributor doesn't see them, and why they don't display.
There may be other explanations, which I'd like to hear.... (honestly)
kq
You Wrote:
>I noticed that Quercusrobur was writing articles with lots of boxes in them,
>and changed them to apostrophes. So I wrote him a note on his talk page
>including a row of box characters (which I generated with "160 128 do i emit
>loop"; I have no way to type them). I just checked the page and all the boxes
>have been turned into question marks! So I have three questions:
>
>1. How do people write articles with boxes?
>
>2. The people who write articles with boxes don't see them as boxes. They see
>them as apostrophes, dashes, ellipses, etc. How do we explain to them how to
>avoid writing boxes?
>
>3. What changed the boxes to question marks?
>
>phma
>[Wikipedia-l]
>To manage your subscription to this list, please go here:
>http://www.nupedia.com/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
On Sunday 01 September 2002 07:10 am, Stephen Gilbert wrote:
> But if our primary goal is to produce a
> general reference, generally educated
> people can do the job very well.
This has got to be one of the major reasons why Wikipedia is thriving and
Nupedia is moribund.
Just because I don't have a degree specifically in Chemistry does not stop me
from researching and putting a great deal of work into the elements and other
chemistry articles.
If we begin to give the impression that such expertise is preferred, then
Wikipedia will begin to share the fate of Nupedia.
WIth that said, I think that a Nupedia distribution of Wikipedia articles
would be great.
-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
On Sunday 01 September 2002 07:10 am, you wrote:
> I think this way you have the best of Wikipedia and Nupedia together.
> Every articel is still free to modify but you have also a layer of more
> static articels that are more trustworthy.
>
> Giskart
Draft, article, stable, and expert approved is almost exactly what I proposed
months ago when we had the great Beta/Stable debate on the list.
Please file your email away for future reference.
-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
I'm using Netscape 6.x. And upgrading's not /all/ bad; at least you can set per-site cookie permissions (always accept from wikipedia; never accept from doubleclick, etc.)
kq
You Wrote:
>lcrocker(a)nupedia.com wrote:
>
>>The practical upshot of this is that any code changes we make
>>that affect the HTML output should continue to be tested on MSIE
>>5 and 6 (both if possible), Gecko, and (alas) Netscape 4.
>>
>Hmm! No mention of Netscape 6.x - Maybe I should never have upgraded
>from 4.