Competent writing, enforced by actual editors, volunteer or otherwise.
David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG
On Thu, Apr 23, 2009 at 4:41 AM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
2009/4/22 Anthony wikimail@inbox.org:
On Wed, Apr 22, 2009 at 11:18 AM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.comwrote:
Perhaps "useful" is too strong a term, "useful enough to rival Wikipedia" would be better.
I think so. If you set your standards of success in terms of Wikipedia, there's simply no competition. Wikipedia has achieved an unrivaled success in terms of the standards it has set to measure success.
Yep. If you set your standards of success in terms of Britannica, Wikipedia is not quite there yet. But the point is that this doesn't matter in practice - it turns out that Wikipedia is more useful because people use it in practice at their desks every day, rather than admiring the impressive shelf of books they remember from high school.
Britannica was already suffering from Encarta (which was invented as demoware for the existence of CD-ROM drives) and the Internet - Wikipedia was the Internet having the temerity to use the word "encyclopedia."
So whatever out-innovates Wikipedia from below will succeed in some way we haven't thought of yet. What Wikipedia rules are there we could try breaking?
- NPOV (I don't think so, lots have tried this)
- Notability (possibly - our breadth is our key asset, and overapplied
"notability" rules trash this)
- NOR (maybe - note that not every Wikipedia has this rule)
- Expert privilege (Citizendium is trying this, we'll see how it goes)
What others are there?
- d.
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