Lawrence Nyveen wrote:
Hey, all -
Reader's Digest (Canada) plans to reprint a version of this article:
http://legadoassociates.com/wikipedi.htm
My job is to fact-check the article before it goes into the magazine,
and to do that, I would like to talk with some Wikipedia contributors.
Lawrence,
I very much appreciate your openness and willingness to work with the
Wikipedia community. Whilst the article gets a lot of things right, I
think there are a few parts which could be improved:
Firstly, I believe that saying that Wikipedia lacks editorial standards
is wrong: in fact, we even have an extensive Manual of Style: see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style for the top-level
page of the manual. What you might find interesting about the Wikipedia
Manual of Style is that it, like almost everything else in Wikipedia,
was collaboratively written from the bottom up by editors concerned with
improving Wikipedia's uniformity and quality of style, rather than being
imposed top-down by authority.
Of course, not every article meets these standards, due to the open
access policy, but we have a small army of copy editors who work hard
at improving the grammar, spelling, style and layout of articles to meet
those standards.
For example, we have many contributors whose skills in English are not
ideal, but can still add useful encyclopedic information. Their inputs
can then be copy edited by someone else (even if they are not expert in
the topic) into an article that is both informative and well-written.
The same applies to fact-checking. Many editors periodically review
articles in fields they know about, correcting details and removing
misinformation. The software supports "recent changes" "new articles"
and "watchlist" features to make this easier. The next version of the
software (coming soon) will have a new article-version rating system
which is intended to enable editors and readers to get feedback about
where Wikipedia is weak and strong.
Secondly, "paraphrasing the Encyclopædia Britannica" is very much
against the spirit (and letter) of Wikipedia's self-developed policies.
Whilst authors are encouraged to draw on existing sources and
references, plagiarism, direct or indirect, is severely frowned upon,
and direct copying is completely forbidden. Wherever possible, we are
trying to move towards citing primary sources, rather than other
encyclopedias. There is no negative desire to "destroy" other
encyclopedias; rather, there is a strong positive desire to create a new
kind of free encyclopedia that is intended one day to surpass the
achievements of previous works.
Finally, I think you might want to mention in more detail a key aspect
of the Wikipedia process, which is how the process of progressive
refinement works in practice. Here's how it works:
Although the original version of an article may be poor, it is likely to
be copyedited within minutes of creation by an experienced editor
watching the "recent changes" list. If it's drivel, it will rapidly be
deleted. If it's dubious, it will be put on a list of articles to be
either improved or voted to be deleted. Once it survives these early
stages, it is sure to eventually be read by someone who knows slightly
more than the original contributor, and will be just irritated enough to
improve it, however slightly. In some cases, this may involve a complete
rewrite, if the article is wrong enough. As time goes by, this improved
content will be read and edited by more and more people, and the article
will grow in size and quality. As the article becomes better, more
people will link to it, drawing in yet more readers, with progressively
greater expertise, who might previously have ignored it as being beneath
their interest. In this way, Wikipedia has a tendency to "suck in" not
only information into articles but also experts into the community, and
these new editors often go on to expand Wikipedia in other ways.
I hope this helps.
-- Neil