Hi Richard, Interesting read, I noticed a few things, though its possible that some may simply be that you are writing in American English.
"The article itself runs 14,000
words"
- suggest "The article itself runs to 14,000
words"
"That perspective is not of much
concern inside Wikipedia, for it is operated by and for the benefit
of the editors.i
Only readers who write comments
are listened to, and fewer than one in a thousand comments." That's an interesting point of view, I've heard concerns that we don't know enough as to what our readers want, however one of the primary motives of most editors that I know is to make humanity's knowledge freely available to the world, http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Editor_Survey_Report_-_April_2011.pdf&page=8 and I've met a number of editors who are extremely focussed on the number of people who've read their work and ways to acquire more readers such as getting their work on Wikipedia's mainpage. Your own later comment "
Working on Wikipedia was most rewarding because it opened
up a very large,
new audience" being a typical Wikipedian sentiment.
Neither of which accords with the idea that Wikipedia is operated for its editors. If you've found that to be the view of some of Wikipedia's academic critics it might be worth balancing that with information on the readership survey http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Readership_survey and the way that and other metrics have been used to try and find out what our readers want. I suspect that such criticisms also pre-date developments such as the Article Feedback tool.
"That task is handled by the
“Wikipedia community,” which in practice means a self-selected
group of a couple thousand editors." As well as adding an of I'd suggest that your numbers are out. Most of the vandal fighting, categorisation, new page patrol and spam deletion is done a relatively small community of a few thousand. But the people who add content are an overlapping and rather larger group. How you measure the size of the community is complex, and many people ignore the IP editors who actually write a large part of the content and focus on the currently active editors who have done over a 100 edits in the last month - at 3400 or so that group isn't far from being a couple of thousand. http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaEN.htm But it is much larger when you consider the number of people who have contributed content in the past but may be less active now. Our 2,000 most active editors accounted for 20% of total edits a little over a year ago, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Top_Wikipedians_compared_to_the_rest_of_the_community.png but even that grossly overstates our importance as the minor edits such as typo fixes are disproportionately done by us. Suggest: "That task is handled by the
“Wikipedia community,” which in practice means a self-selected
group of a few thousand frequent editors and a much larger number of occasional participants.
"Wikipedia editors almost never
claim authorship of published scholarly books and articles. That sort
of expertise is not welcome in Wikipedia; editors rarely mention they
possess advanced training or degrees" According to the editor survey 26% of our editors have either a masters or a PhD. Academic expertise is highly valued in Wikipedia, but it is best demonstrated by the quality of ones edits and especially your sourcing. Afterall most of our editors are here to share their expertise http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Editor_Survey_Report_-_April_2011.pdf&page=8
"Wikipedia editors will boast like
river boatmen about their output: how many years they have worked on
the encyclopedia, how many tens or hundreds of thousands of edits
they have made." There is some truth in that, but in terms of status within the community featured article contributions are a higher value currency than either tenure or edit count.
"They do not gain by selling their
product, and anyone suspected of writing articles for pay on behalf
public relations for an entity comes under deep suspicion.i
As a result how many people read an article, or how its audience has
grown or fallen, or how useful it has been to the general public are
not among the criteria used to evaluate quality." That's an interesting synthesis, there certainly is a distrust of those who edit for pay, especially if they are from the PR industry. But I would suggest that the distrust is more a product of people's experience with editors who have difficulty writing neutrally about topics that they are being paid to promote. A couple of good contrasts were mentioned in the translation sessions at Wikimania in Gdansk in 2010, Google and its charity arm Google org both presented about paid editing they'd commissioned in Indic languages. The uncontentious operation was done by the charity arm, translating English Wikipedia articles on medical articles into various south Asian Wikipedia versions. Rather more contentious was the commercial part of Google, they created missing articles for their most common search terms, this lead to criticism from at least one editor that they were writing an encyclopaedia and didn't need articles on Hollywood stars. But the criticism
"The Wikipedia community uses
kangaroo courts where the accused are brought before a
self-constituted jury, operating without formal rules or defense
counsel." That isn't too bad a description of the RFC process but ARBCOM is elected, and for things that don't reach Arbcom, only admins can block other editors and admins are not simply self selected.
"I taught military history but he
never wrote on the war of 1812, and usually skipped over it in my
lectures."
- Suggest dropping the word "he"
"That is a handful of established
editors strongly resist any new additions."
Suggest "That is when a handful of established
editors strongly resist any new additions."
"The Military History Project is
one of the largest and most energetic of these. It enrolls over 700
editors and is coordinated by Dank and a dozen volunteers who ride
heard on 51,000 different articles.
" I'm pretty sure it is the biggest WikiProject, and would suggest herd not heard.
"The problem is less severe in
military history because academia does not favor the field and much
of the next writing is done by self-trained scholars." next seems odd, best or new sound a little more plausible to me - but both would be guesses.
"My recommendation for improving
military history on Wikipedia is to set up a program to help the most
active military editors gain better access to published scholarship,
gain an appreciation of the historiography, and start attending
military history conferences." You might be interested in some of our GLAM outreach work, thus far I think that the military museums have been under-represented, but in London Wikimedia UK recently ran this: http://blog.wikimedia.org.uk/2012/07/wikimedia-uk-and-jisc-join-forces-for-world-war-one-editathon/
"Germany has a strong chapter that handles the German
language Wikipedia." I think you'll find that the Austrians and Swiss also get involved in DE wiki affairs, I suspect that there are several other languages where a chapter more closely aligns with a language. English of course has the UK, Australian and and Indian chapters as well as the three North American ones and many editors not covered by a chapter.
On a broader note, you might want to look through the logs for War of 1812 http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Log&page=War+of+1812 It was first semi protected briefly in February 2006, was open for anyone to edit for most of 06 and 07, but with a few short gaps has been semi protected continually since 2010. There are very few articles that have been semi protected for as long, and much if not all of its subsequent reduced editing level will be from that. Semi Protection is known to sharply reduce editing. There is also a theory that people are reluctant to edit articles that have gone beyond their expertise, and this article will clearly be beyond the expertise of many.
Regards
WSC
