Timwi wrote:
Daniel P.B.Smith wrote:
A weak point of Wikipedia is that people write about what they are interested in, so given several topics of apparently comparable importance, the length, depth, and quality of the articles may differ widely.
This is true. This is called "Systematic bias": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Replies_to_common_objections#Systemat...
This largely escapes notice in the web edition, but will become much more apparent in a print edition.
Is that really so bad, though? I'm sure most people will understand. :)
To get the language right, it is a "systemic" bias rather than a "systematic" one. "Systematic" would imply a wilfull application of bias in an organized way. No Wikipedially aware person is suggesting that.
The quality of articles is extremely variable. Many articles are clearly incomplete, and I blame myself for that as much as anybody else. In the electronic medium we can afford to leave something undone, and leave it for someone else to complete, or maybe come back to finish it next year. If you do that in a print edition it will magnify the amateurishness of the effort. We are all here as amateurs, but we also all want the print edition to be a source of pride in several different ways.
Using the "Medicine" topic to illustrate this was very good. We would do irreperable harm to the credibility of Wikipedia if we rushed into the creation of medical specialty articles just for the sake of making sure that we had something on them.
We can't expect the outsider who has just picked up a copy of the print edition to understand what has led to the article selection. From his perspective, it's not his problem.
Ec