Erik wrote:
>...
>- In any case, it complicates all marketing operations significantly.
>It's difficult enough to explain what a wiki is. The probable result
>would be that we wouldn't even bother anymore to explain it and
>just point people to the stable version. That in turn would reduce
>the influx of contributors.
I've been basing this on the success of the distribution/project distinction
in the free software world where the end users benefit by a two mode process
(free software coders work on their own projects and the distributors put
that all together in a nice, easy to use and polished product, while making
sure that any improvements are incorporated into the free software projects).
However I do see the point that our end users are much more likely to become
contributors than are end users to free software due to inherent learning
curve issues in the coding world. But still, our stats indicate that there
are 30 views to each edit and I expect that ratio to increase as we become
more popular and more topics are filled-in and filled-out.
There will also always be a great many people who will not trust anything on a
wiki. So all this begs the question; are we here to make an encyclopedia for
the sake of making an encyclopedia, or are we here to make an encyclopedia
whose content will be used by and be most useful to, the greatest number of
people?
Having both stable and development versions of our content will make it most
useful to the greatest number of people. The best way to market that is to
make the distinction between the development and stable versions very clear.
IMO the best way to accomplish this feat is to host the stable content on
another domain with an interface that is optimized for content viewing.
Wikipedia, however, is optimized for content adding and editing - as it
should be.
Hosting the stable versions at Nupedia will slow down direct recruitment a
bit, but it will also greatly increase the number and quality of readers of
our content. A certain percentage of them will be interested in the
development end of our content and will enter the ruff and wild world of
Wikipedia to lend a hand. But most will just want of have reliable info. So
having a buffer between pure readers and editors should increase the average
quality of newbie editors.
Do we still need to be so oriented toward editing when we already have well
over 4,000 edits a day and nearly 200,000 articles? A slow-down in editing
and increased emphasis on getting things in stable form should become more of
a priority. IMO, the best way to market that - both internally and externally
- is by using nupedia.org to host the stable content.
Most people just want the reference material they use to fullfill their needs.
They can use Nupedia which would be optimized for them and their needs. Other
people are concerned about fullfilling the needs of the reference material.
They can use Wikipedia since it is optimized for them.
*Both will be joined at the hip yet have different specialties.
*Both will make it very clear their association with the other.
*Both will interoperate and encourage cross pollination.
*Both will be one click away from each other.
*Both win.
Is adding one single click to edit an article going to be that harmful weighed
against the marketing advantages of using Nupedia.org?
--Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
Erik wrote:
>One way to do that is to create a safe vector of entry on
>the regular Wikipedia, and to promote it prominently as
>such. What is now just an inconspicuous link on the Main
>Page -- Brilliant Prose -- could eventually be developed into
>its own navigational structure within Wikipedia, a structure
>which allows people to easily absorb the wiki experience
>while alleviating their initial fears.
Sounds vague (again back to marketing and use-specialization). But go ahead
and prove me wrong. :) If an internal stable version does not work then we
can try an external one at Nupedia.org.
IMO, my idea has a greater chance of succeeding in a big way and fast but it
also has a greater chance of causing some harm to Wikipedia by reducing
direct traffic (but no more harm than already occurs from other websites
legally hosting our material - see below). Your idea, again IMO, has less of
a chance of succeeding but also less of a chance of harming Wikipedia (other
than wasting a whole bunch of time by many people if it fails).
But even if we do go with your idea Erik, there will be nothing to stop
anybody from having exactly what I proposed except we would not be the one's
controlling it (thinking of all the third party users of our database).
I still say that the best idea is to use the Nupedia name and domain for this.
But I am willing to abstain from blocking your effort Erik. At the very least
the remains of such an effort could be reformed into a queue for articles
Wikipedians deem good enough for Nupedia.
-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
I completely agree with Mav. The emphasis now should be on improving the
quality, not the quantity, despite the views of some that every thing is valuable.
I would also discourage stubs, which are lazy, and expect others to do the
hard work
Jim
Erik wrote:
>....
>But before we move further into that direction I'd
>like to streamline the BP process, improve
>organization and build a culture of certification.
>Picking a proper name for the BP page is an
>important part of that.
>....
Why not call it [[Wikipedia:Candidates for inclusion
in Nupedia]]? We might as well do something with the
excellent Nupedia name. IMO making Nupedia into a
stable distribution of Wikipedia content would be a
great idea (this would be similar to how the Linux and
GNU tools are made into stable distributions; Nupedia,
of course, would be more like Debian than RedHat).
Nupedia could then also be tasted with creating a
paper version of our content in addition to having the
full web-hosted versions of articles. Since space on
paper is not cheap, many articles would have to boiled
down to their basics for a paper version. A separate
project would be better suited to do that so that
Wikipedians could concentrate on what we have and
continue to do best - add more content to Wikipedia
and fix errors. This would also generate a great deal
of interest among Wikipedians to make their articles
shine enough for Nupedia-inclusion.
Of course all proper credit (and then some in the form
of diffs comparing the Nupedia version with the
current Wikipedia version) will be given to Wikipedia
(Wikipedia's name should even be the subtitle of the
revived Nupedia project).
-- mav
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----- Original Message -----
From: erik_moeller(a)gmx.de (Erik Moeller)
Date: Friday, December 12, 2003 9:37 am
Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Brilliant prose rename brainstorm
> The idea that articles can have different degrees (or different
> categories) of certification also has a certain appeal. But I
> prefer to
> make small steps to a full-fledged certification system, so that
> we can
> always turn around if something goes wrong.
Much agreement. IMHO, a cert system would be a good idea for one very simple reason: As it stands, NONE of my profs will trust ANYTHING from Wiki. I imagine many professors and teachers are like that; It would help immensely if there was some credibility built up.
Really, really annoying when Wiki has a fact I can't easily find anywhere else.
John
replace "tasted" with "tasked" my second para.
Also note that Nupedia would /not/ be an open wiki and
the /only/ editing on Nupedia would be to boil down
content for the paper version.
Nupedia would simply be a read-only mirror of just the
best of Wikipedia. Wikipedia would be where everything
is all the time and where the content creation
happens.
--mav
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Geoff Burlin wrote:
>Frankly, I feel that the argument that corporations or businesses buy
>experts to support their POV all of the time has gotten worn to being
>threadbare. No inteligent professional is going to sell her/his credibility
>for a paycheck; what they are going to do is find an employer whose POV
>most matches their own. Much in the fashion no one who has doubts about the
>infallibility of the Pope will become a Jesuit. To ignore this is to
>promote an _ad hominem_ attack in disguise.
It's true that funding doesn't usually _create_ bias, as Geoff says.
Mostly what it does is _select_ and _amplify_ bias. However, that's
bad enough. A good example is the case of fen-phen, the diet drug
that was taken off the market after it was linked to heart valve
damage and other serious health problems in people who took it.
Wyeth-Ayerst marketed fen-phen through a company called Excerpta
Medica, which got paid $20,000 for each "scientific paper" that it
placed in medical journals promoting the drug. Excerpta then hired
ghostwriters to write the papers, and after they were written paid
respected university professors $1,000 to "edit" the articles prior
to publication. When the articles appeared in medical journals, the
name-brand professors were the ones listed as the authors of the
studies, and the ghostwriters' names didn't appear. After
Wyeth-Ayerst got sued by people whose health had been destroyed by
the drug, some of the name-brand professors got called as witnesses,
and in court they said that they didn't even know Wyeth-Ayerst was
paying for the studies; they thought they were simply being hired to
do some light editing on the side for Excerpta. They didn't see
themselves as "selling their credibility for a paycheck," but they
obviously didn't give much scrutiny to the articles either, yet they
didn't mind having their names appear as lead authors.
For even more egregious examples where "intelligent professionals"
clearly _did_ sell their credibility for a paycheck, look at the
tobacco industry's activities, which are extensive and notorious. In
one of my books, I wrote about the case of Gary Huber, who "built a
career for himself as one of the contrarian scientists who regularly
disputed the growing body of scientific evidence about tobacco's
deadly effects. Over the years, he received more than $7 million in
tobacco industry research funding, and although his reputation as a
'tobacco whore' cost him the nrespect of friends and colleagues, in
industry circles he was something of a star, hobnobbing with top
executives, fishing with senior attorneys and participating in legal
strategy sessions."
After my co-author and I submitted that passage to our editor, he
objected that we shouldn't be calling the guy a "tobacco whore" and
advised us to find a more polite phrase. We responded by sending him
documents in which Huber himself talks about his work for the
industry. A few years ago he had a change of heart and now testifies
as an expert witness _against_ the industry in tobacco liability
lawsuits. When asked the reasons for his change of heart, he pointed
to two events: the death of his own father from tobacco-related
cancer, and the advice of his daughter to dissociate himself from the
tobacco industry. Her exact words were, "Dad, you've got to be
careful. These guys are pimping you."
We pointed out to our editor that if the guy's own daughter thought
he was being "pimped" by the tobacco industry, we were certainly
justified in saying he had a reputation as a tobacco "whore." The
editor agreed, and the passage was published as we originally wrote
it.
I think the point Geoff is trying to make is that someone's source of
research funding isn't in and of itself proof that their research is
invalid. If that's his point, I agree with it. However, there is
plenty of evidence showing that research funding correlates
positively with bias, and for that reason funding should always be
publicly disclosed.
--
--------------------------------
| Sheldon Rampton
| Editor, PR Watch (www.prwatch.org)
| Author of books including:
| Friends In Deed: The Story of US-Nicaragua Sister Cities
| Toxic Sludge Is Good For You
| Mad Cow USA
| Trust Us, We're Experts
| Weapons of Mass Deception
--------------------------------
Dear Vicky and others who wrote me
It is not me who sent this message, but someone with a different adress
If you look very carefully at the heading of the email, you will see that the adress used is not mine (I have always been at yahoo, as anthere5, anthere6, anthere7 and now anthere8).
The person/bot used Anthere as nickname to appear to be me.
The person/bot also used a copy of a mail I send as Anthere6 to the mailing list last february, as an answer to a mail from Eclecticology, on a game issue.
That email was send at my anthere6 adress, as well as on the english and the main list. I had only three though, I am surprised you had 4 Vicky :-)
Yes, it appears to contain a virus.
Yes, it should have been stopped by the anti-virus anti-spam stuff of the mailing list. Either it was not, or someone thought it was a mail from me, and freed it.
I will insist that my email adress is very well registered on all mailing lists. And if I could ever send a mail from another mail adress, I can very well go to the admin interface and liberate the message myself . So should any other messages from someone looking like me be blocked, be careful before freeing it people. And perhaps be careful for any usual editor blocked email as well these days :-)
Vicky, please look at Brion comment on the topic as well.
My Macintosh is well behaved and does not breed with PCs to make ugly little dummy and deadly emails :-)
She is just yearning for Brion new friend.
Vicki Rosenzweig <vr(a)redbird.org> wrote:
I got a "virus detected, repair failed" message on four of the
messages you sent to wikipedia-l yesterday.
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I'm convinced that for Wikipedia to be a feeder for a free, open source
encyclopedia WHICH READERS CAN HAVE CONFIDENCE IN, we must have some
sort of certification system. Again, precisely what that system will be,
I don't know. I'm a software engineer, and I can't predict the design of
a system before I start coding it; just knowing the requirements is
never enough.
The first thing I'd like to try would involve /specific versions/ of
Wikipedia articles, which if I recall correctly was central to Larry
Sanger's "sifter" proposal. This, of course, raises the question of how
we decide which version to certify. But, being a software engineer (and
a very confident, optimistic person :-) I see no reason not to go down
that road even if I can't see past the first turn.
Two roads diverged in a snowy wood
And looking down one as far as I could
.
.
.
I took the road less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.
Ed Poor
Erik,
Thanks for bringing up the brilliance/excellence issue again. I note how
you have related it to 'completion', 'trust' & 'certification' as well.
It reminds me of Larry's idea of the Sifter project, and both your idea
and his really go back to the original Nupedia project.
A WikiWiki is always going to have quality control problems. If any user
can edit any page any time, then there's really no way to guarantee the
conformance of ANY ONE PARTICULAR ARTICLE to our standards.
Of course, on the whole, we can still be confident of having 99.5%
adhering to those standards (here I assume that only 1 in 200 are out of
whack at any given moment). But many people find that statistic
unsatisfactory.
As an American, I have a 99.98% chance of NOT dying in a car crash next
year. 45,000 out of 250,000,000 people, however, WILL die that way,
though. So a lot of people think cars should be made safer, and the auto
industry, highway engineers and legislators have been making slow
progress: the death toll has dropped 5,000 in recent decades, althought
the total population has increased.
I think we ought to revive the concept of certification. I'm not saying
I have a completely satisfactory proposal in mind, of course. But I
think if we all put our heads together we can come up with something.
Ed Poor, aka Uncle Ed