On 16/02/2009, Charles Matthews charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com wrote:
The good articles are good basically because smart people take the trouble to research them and write them to a decent standard. The article on topic X is good, when it is, not usually because A, an expert on X, has filled it with A's expert knowledge, but because B and C and maybe others have looked at some literature on the topic and done a decent job of constructing a precis for the general reader.
To be slightly more accurate, the wikipedia does indeed depend heavily on experts and smart and knowledgeable people, but only after their material has been published; and only then if the publisher is judged to have good filtering processes in place to minimise the non negligible chance that these people are wrong or unbalanced about what they say.
Looked at like this, Sanger wants to take this a stage further- he wants to actually *weaken* the fact checking by using unfiltered experts saying more or less whatever they want. I would expect that this can result in poorer articles than the wikipedias model, in addition to the many obvious problems about how you find and validate and keep these experts engaged.
Charles