[Foundation-l] Has Wikipedia changed since 2005?

[wiki-list at phizz.demon.co.uk]

On 20/09/2010 00:26, Robert S. Horning wrote:
> On 09/19/2010 06:48 AM, Andreas Kolbe wrote:
>>> the issue is not
>>>
>>>> restricted
>>>> to the English Wikipedia.
>>>>
>>>
>>> Let's assume there's a problem. What's your plan of action?
>>> How does
>>> it differ from the usual way of dealing with these issues
>>> (getting
>>> interested people together, setting up a wikiproject and
>>> getting to
>>> work)?
>>>
>> The problems in this area are
>>
>> (1) demanding subject matter, requiring some familiarity with the topic area to be able to contribute effectively
>> (2) the relative scarcity of editors who have prior knowledge in these areas.
>>
>> So "throwing more editors at the Humanities problem" through a WikiProject may not work in this case. Getting students and academics involved might.
>>
>> As reported in the press, there is an ongoing WikiProject to improve Wikipedia's Public Policy coverage, through collaboration with university professors and their students. It is funded by a $1.2 million Stanton Foundation grant.
>>
>> http://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Public_Policy_Initiative
>> http://blog.wikimedia.org/blog/2010/05/11/wikipedia-heads-to-school/
>>
>> The Foundation has said that it hopes this is only the first of many such collaborations with universities. Now, how do you go about setting a project like this in motion?
>>
> I'm not entirely sure how accurate this is, so I'm just making a raw
> conjecture here that is completely unsupported by facts other than
> perhaps by general observations:
>
> Is it possible that the problem with the humanities-related articles on
> Wikipedia has more to do with the lack of an existing culture of
> "copyleft" or public domain collaboration?  It has taken literally
> decades of effort that go back even a couple of decades earlier of
> similar efforts to put together what is today the "open source movement"
> that has produced things like Linux, the GNU tools, and software like
> Apache.  Wikipedia is a product of this environment too, where many of
> those who have participated in developing open source software don't
> hesitate to at least add a couple of paragraphs to Wikipedia.
>

Linux, Apache, and the GNU Tools were the work of a handful of people. 
Others have come along and added a bit here or there or fixed something 
or other but I bet that if I were to look at the core source code for 
Emacs to day it wouldn't be that much different from when I worked on it 
20 years ago.

Software changes either work or they don't and any change ought to be 
testable to demonstrate that it adds some new feature or fixes something 
broken. But there is a problem with software changes in that most 
changes tend to degrade the overall quality of the product in some way. 
Overtime, unless someone steps in and does a rewrite the code becomes a 
mess, and it happened one change at a time.

The same is true of wikipedia articles, edit by edit, they tend to 
degrade. There comes a point when they are 'done' and they knob 
polishers need to be told to bugger off and leave them alone.