On 19/01/2011 20:33, George Herbert wrote:
On Wed, Jan 19, 2011 at 11:56 AM, David Gerarddgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 21 December 2010 19:58, Tony Sidawaytonysidaway@gmail.com wrote:
http://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2006/12/wikipedia_will_1.htm
Prof Goldman has followed up saying he was wrong, though we still of course suck, though he still consults Wikipedia daily:
http://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2011/01/my_2005_predict.htm
- d.
I disagree with "though we still of course suck". I think he makes reasonably on point useful criticisms.
Several of them are things we've said internally, on this list and elsewhere...
There's still some spin in the punditry, though. Taking "celebrity" pages and "long tail" pages as two antipodal cases, as Goldman does, is OK, as long as you don't insist that the rate of updating should be comparable. The long tail pages are those that a print encyclopedia would think twice about revising for a new edition. They are there to say something intelligible about a topic; traditional encyclopedia compilers tended to copy them from an older encyclopedia. We have huge numbers of them - one of our strengths - and trying to turn them into one of our weaknesses by glib talk is a bit adversarial, really.
Charles