Personally, I don't see what all the fuss is about. The article is fundamentally flawed - you can see it contradicts itself with no other knowledge or figures to hand.
They say that "The bulk of Wikipedia is written by 1400 obsessed freaks who do little else but contribute to the site", but then go on to say that "The bulk of the original content on Wikipedia is contributed by tens of thousands of outsiders, each of whom may not make many other contributions to the site".
Huh? Most of Wikipedia's content, as Swartz himself says (but apparently simultaneously claims otherwise) is created by tens of thousands of different people - there's no 'core' group here. The '1400 obsessed freaks', as he goes on to discuss, just seem to do lots of minor edits. So the opening paragraph is seriously misleading.
So it seems to me that Swartz's work backs-up Wikipedia as being a truly crowd-sourced project, and only goes against Wales' original remarks, which were a bit worrying in the first place. Or am I getting the wrong end of the stick here?
Heebie.
On Sat, Jan 3, 2009 at 5:53 PM, Charles Matthews < charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com> wrote:
Steve Summit wrote:
Inclusion and notability policies ought to be based neither on what an anonymous contributor is interesting in writing, nor what a self-appointed policy wonk deems "notable" or "encyclopedic", but rather, on what some nontrivial numbers of our readers are interested in reading.
I think that is "could be", not "ought to be". The mission is not to maximise readership: as of early 2009, it still to "write the encyclopedia". You know, the old Wikipedia some of us have thought we are writing for a few years now.
As usual, there is the argument that if this other version of the mission was interesting enough to enough editors, they could fork. Not likely to happen, but it's a clarifying thought: really, how different would it be?
Charles
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