On 9/16/06, George Herbert george.herbert@gmail.com wrote:
On 9/16/06, Kim van der Linde kim@kimvdlinde.com wrote:
What I do know is that experts have in general a short life span at Wikipedia (if they join at all), and that is not going to change.
There are areas of Wikipedia where that generality is not true at all, and experts are quite actively involved and not being rejected or driven away at all.
I keep wondering what's different about those, compared to the areas where they are being pushed out, and thinking if there's some way to change that. I haven't figured it out yet.
-- -george william herbert
Short answer: the subject area should be obscure, or exceptionally ferocious.
Longer answer: there's an interesting *BSD phrase about "painting a dog shed", which pithily expresses the idea that if the masses can understand an idea/article/piece-of-software, they'll expect their ideas on it to be heard seriously. Of course, on Wikipedia, to be heard one must edit... link: http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/faq/misc.html#BIKESHED-PAIN...
Clearly, what we need to do is set up a bot to run all Wikipedia through a 1337 filter, or a pretentious Latinizing academic filter. Ideally, the average reader will be able to read a lengthy 20 page article on Britney Spears and have absolutely no idea what they just read.
--Gwern