On Dec 18, 2007 4:18 PM, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen cimonavaro@gmail.com wrote:
On 12/19/07, George Herbert george.herbert@gmail.com wrote:
cc'ed to Foundation-L.
On Dec 18, 2007 3:44 PM, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen cimonavaro@gmail.com wrote:
On 12/19/07, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
http://blog.citizendium.org/2007/12/18/why-the-focus-on-creating-quality-con...
Interesting thoughts on quality.
For me the telling line in that blog post is:
"Even if we don't get it right, someone eventually will, because it is possible and because there is such a huge potential demand for it. I look forward to that day!"
That is pretty much what citizendium is relying on. That there is a "huge potential demand" for perfection instead of "just good enough". I don't see that this is a gimme, but it could be true. I cast my lot with "just good enough", so will have to forego perfection.
Without getting absolutist, I think there's clearly a spectrum here.
We've picked one point; it works for us, and our editors and our readership, and we're taken credibly by outside organizations and society as a whole.
It may be that other points in the spectrum are both workable as volunteer projects (critical mass of contributors and content) and higher in the quality spectrum, and seen as more valuable by society as a whole.
This is something that the Foundation may want to keep in mind; "English Wikipedia" as currently structured may not be the only english language encyclopedia project worth supporting. Why let Larry and Google have all the fun exploring the corners and diversity options in the space we're in?
I think the problem with the approach that citizendium is taking, is the same one that many arm-chair physicists bang their head against.
It is nearly a cliche that people who want to ridicule quantum mechanics bring up the point that the way the equations are constituted, there is no "real" reason why a grand piano couldn't appear out of thin air, with nothing to impel it but pure potential.
While in some sense this is mathematically accurate, it misses the point. The chances of a grand piano appearing out of thin air, are scales of magnitude small enough to consider the age of the universe a batting of an eyelash of a gnat, if a gnat had eyelashes, to put it mildly.
Of course, the flipside of the argument is that what wikipedia is trying is not waiting for a grand piano to appear out of thin air, but instead giving the parts of one grand piano to a million monkeys, and waiting patiently for the monkeys to assemble them into a playable instrument.
-- Jussi-Ville Heiskanen, ~ [[User:Cimon Avaro]]
I think we're clearly accomplishing more than a bunch of monkeys would. Excluding obvious vandalism and single-purpose editors, everyone involved in Wikipedia collaborates reasonably well on the whole.
I agree that we're on a haphazard walk, but it's not a random walk. There's a common direction, the individual actors involved can see that and agree that it's generally somewhere over there, and the progress is overwhelmingly monotinically towards improved versions.