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(a)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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