[Wikipedia-l] German Professor on Wikipedia and scientific literature

[Bernd Kulawik]

Hello everybody,

the German IT news service "Heise" (www.heise.de) has a short article  
on an interview with a German Professor of linguistics talking about  
the advantages of Wikipedia.

The German text can be found under:
http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/59754

I try a short translation here (sorry for the bad English - but I  
hope its better than babelfish :-) :

"Following Wolf-Andreas Liebert, linguist at Koblenz, Germany, free  
internet encyclopedias like Wikipedia can complement the reporting on  
scientific subjects in the media. "Scientific journalism has to  
follow commercial restrictions. Wikipedia is still free of that", the  
professor said in an interview with the german press agency Deutsche  
Presse-Agentur (dpa). [unfortunately no link to the interview itself  
- Bernd] Wikipedia could cover subjects that in normal journalism  
cannot be sold or said anymore.

"In Wikipedia and other self-organizing systems support the  
discussional [?] character of science more strongly." Liebert  
declares. Science does not appear to be a uniform system producing  
truth, as it often appears in science journalism." In Wikipedia there  
are experts and normal people working on texts, that can be up-to- 
date and cover different positions. From this point of view it can be  
said that Wikipedia can fill up a special gap.

The big disadbantage would be that there is no coherent system of  
quality management. "We find articles of a very high level of quality  
besides bad articles." The reader has to decide, which articles he  
finds trustworthy and good. "In Wikipedia there are different  
strategies to deal with the problem", the professor said. He assumes  
that the operators of the database would have to take parts out of  
the self-organizing process and work with professional authors."


 From my point of view, the last passage shows that the professor did  
not fully understand what is one of the most important strengths of  
Wikipedia. It's the old discussion:
Who guaranties the higher quality of an article by a person named  
"dr." or "prof." in other encyclodias? Why should these persons be  
more trustable? In fact, the problem of the "inner circle filtering  
information" always comes up in these systems.
And: If someone finds articles that do not fullfill scientific  
standards - why not correct them immediately? Still people (like  
prof. Liebert) think of Wikipedia as any other top-down information  
system: "You have to give me information; it has to be correct - and  
that is YOUR responsibility!" - "No, it's yours too!" I would like to  
answer.

Anyway - I wanted to bring this to your attention because it shows  
that Wikipedia is not only subject to scientific analyses already,  
but also that - even in the eyes of scientists - it reaches the  
levels of "real" scientific encyclopedias and ist not considered only  
a "hobby alternative" to "popular" encyclopedias like ... the ones we  
know :-)
In fact, I believe, that Wikipedia can soon (2-5 years?) reach higher  
quality in the scientific in-depth treatment of subjects than any  
other encyclopedia - no one could hinter to publish articles of the  
quality of specialised encyclopedias in Wikipedia that may be  
interesting only for a small community of scientists dealing with any  
subject they like ... And that opens up the way to get more and more  
"experts" interested and convince them (hopefully) to co-operate in  
Wikipedia: Especially the young students from today will be able to  
see and rank the advantages of Wikipedia higher than the traditional  
system of "earning fame" in scientific publications. In fact, if  
someone does science because s/he is _interested_ in something and  
not because of the fame - s/he should see Wikipedia as _the_ tool of  
choice to contribute.

greetings

Bernd