On 16/02/2009, Charles Matthews <charles.r.matthews(a)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
--
-Ian Woollard
We live in an imperfectly imperfect world. Life in a perfectly
imperfect world would be much better.