Christopher Mahan wrote:
--- apw@ap-woolrich.co.uk wrote:
When more editors with my kind of background can be persuaded to contribute on a regular basis...
What do you mean, can be persuaded? Wikipedia is an all-volunteer organization. People here contribute because they want to, because they believe that this will benefit mankind.
I think he just means that there are a lot of experts who would be valued contributors, but have been hanging back because of various concerns, some valid, some less so. For instance, some might be avoiding WP because they've heard about the "edit wars and vandalism" that journalists like to write about because it's exciting, but in truth, experts adding to [[Abyssocottidae]] will almost certainly have a positive experience and not have their additions messed up by the clueless.
It's an unfortunate irony that on many topics WP is already the leading reference work, online or off, but aside from some being featured articles, that part of WP gets almost no airplay compared to the controversial topics.
It would be useful to collect and report statistics about vandalism and edit wars. I have 16,000 articles on my watchlist (too many, I know!) and vandals touch maybe five of those per day, with most of the edits occurring on topics familiar to the general public (Julius Caesar, Steve Jobs, RMS Titanic, etc). If you can tell ichthyologists that the fish area of WP is 99.99% troublefree, that's a powerful argument to move data from their own websites, which likely don't even have 99% uptimes, and no army of copyeditors fixing typos.
Stan