[WikiEN-l] Do experts have a moral obligation to contribute to Wikipedia?

[Samuel Klein]

Do experts have an obligation?  No.  Educators and those whose goal is
to improve the world's knowledge, yes.  And everyone has a motivation
to contribute driven by public interest, but not everyone recognizes
it.

On Sun, Aug 2, 2009 at 3:44 PM, Carcharoth<carcharothwp at googlemail.com> wrote:
> On Sun, Aug 2, 2009 at 8:14 PM, Charles
> Matthews<charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com> wrote:
>
>> How about the simpler comment that if you have expertise in an area of
>> public interest, you should consider writing something freely licensed
>> and putting it on the Web where someone can find it and help aggregate
>
> I'd agree with this. Publishing a reliable source and making it widely
> and freely accessible can be better that contributing to Wikipedia.
> Especially if you are the sort of expert that doesn't have the time
> and patience for Wikipedia. But equally we have an obligation to make
> sure that the trolls and POV pushers don't mess things up or distort

Agreed.  Publishing and promoting standards for how to 'announce'
anew publication to Wikipedians, without needing to learn how to edit
a talk page, would be a great start -- something like pingback for all
major mechanisms people use to publish their works online.


To the comment that Wikipedians adding {{cn}} everywhere annoys
experts : this is something we have an obligation to fix.  The request
for a citation is a way of making offered expertise more valuable, not
a way of challenging people for thinking they know something useful to
others.    We should make the process of getting cites friendly and
rewarding, not annoying and combative.

-Sj