LDC wrote;
The problem is that, with several notable exceptions,
highly-educated people aren't drawn to Wikipedia.
I don't know about everyone else but I think that statement
was a bit insulting.
If you think so, then you don't know Larry very well. I also
think he's entirely correct, and I can't imagine how anyone
can disagree. We don't attract very many highly educated
people; I can think of maybe one or two dozen that would qualify.
Well, I don't know Larry either - and that shouldn't matter - but I
think agree with Stephen Gilbert that the statement was slightly
insulting. If I look at many Wikipedians' user pages, I see a lot of
students, people with degrees, Ph.D's. If they're not highly educated,
who are? Only professors?
What bothers me even more is that we don't even
seem to be
attracting non-academic experts either. Take a non-academic
I think everybody is an expert. Everybody lives in a country, a city
worth writing about. Everybody likes some kind of music, movies (or
films, whatever). Most people practise a sport or have other hobbies.
OK, I may not be able to write about the social-economic effects of the
Reformation in the Netherlands, but I sure can tell you something about
the country that is required for encyclopedia. I know the main policital
parties, know what's going on. As an apparently not high-educated
person, I have had lessons at school about history, geography of my
country. Apart from that, there are some areas where I consider my self
to be an expert, or at least pretty close to it. And this holds for
most, if not all people that regularly contribute here. We surely don't
have experts yet on *all* areas - maybe we never will - but they can
still come.
But unlike Larry, I don't think there's any
systemic reason for
our dearth of experts; I think it's just that the project is
still young and small compared to what it needs to be to achieve
our goals. Yes, we need an approval/review mechanism, and that's
one of my goals for software development, but that in itself won't
attract the experts. I think the only thing that will attract
them is a proven record of success. And that will come with time,
Yes, success is the only thing that will help us grow. And as I said,
success is based on quality, which is not dependent on the number of
people with a Ph. D. hanging round as a Wikipedian.
We may already be the largest Wiki in the world, but we
simply
aren't big enough yet to do what needs to be done. We need 5000
regular contributors, not 200. And we need to make sure the system
can support them all, and do the things they need done to make
good articles. For example, I really like the idea of having
"staff" specialists in things like image processing, copyediting,
and other tasks that we shouldn't necessarily expect subject
experts to be good at. And we need to make it easy for authors
to contact and work with those other people (that's why I wanted
the e-mail and user talk page features, for example--I think
they're critical to the collaborative process). If we build it,
they will come.
Yes, if we really want 5000 contributors, we need more infrastructure.
The current one is already insufficient for our 200 editors. I also see
that we may need SIGs or expert groups, who can take care of a specific
subject or groups of subjects. Such groups already informally exist, be
it small. If we could improve the infrastructure for such groups (making
communication and decision making easier, for example), it would be
easier to lift a certain subject to a high level.
Jeronimo