On 28/12/06, Marc Riddell
<michaeldavid86(a)comcast.net> wrote:
OK - I'm learning. There is very much of the
technical aspects of Wikipedia
I know nothing about. It may seem like grasping, but it's really trying to
wrestle with, what I see is a large problem.
When you started this thread, I assumed you were an old Wikipedia hand
who knew his stuff. That's probably a compliment ;-)
But, I believe, with all of the
human, intelligent resources within the Wikipedia community, a solution can
be found. I'm just not willing at this point to leave it at "there's
nothing
that can be done".
Mmm. I think that you may be asking the wrong question: that is,
you're making the implicit assumption that a user page can be trusted
to ascertain whether a contributor to a page knows their stuff.
In practice, I don't think that's the case. On Wikipedia, the
contributors are listed in the history, and someone I don't know other
than a two-page detailed userpage is not necessarily a better writer
than an anonymous IP that puts in well-written statements of fact with
good checkable references.
When a reader views a Wikipedia page, they need to apply critical
thought to it, like they do to any web page. We can't take that
requirement away from the reader (and become a "trusted" source). But
with references, we can *enable* them to apply critical thought to
Wikipedia.
So it's all about the contributions themselves and the source material
that backs the contributions up. The contributors themselves are not a
focus at all. That's "no ownership of pages."
- d.
David raises a good point. Don't judge Wikipedia articles by the quality
of their contributors, but by the quality of the article - and the
sources in particular. Never trust an unreferenced article. An article
that provides a good number reliable, verifiable sources and is
well-written should be considered in the same light whether it's written
by anonymous users or long-time contributors. (Virtually all our
articles are a mixture of both).
-Gurch