whaa! Got a massive shock at number of replies when loaded into gmail
I'l print em off and read em on the bus 2morrow :P
Ok back on subject ...
On Sun, 12 Sep 2004 23:45:32 +0100, phil hunt zen19725@zen.co.uk wrote:
On Sat, 11 Sep 2004 22:29:46 -0700, Stan Shebs shebs@apple.com wrote:
Daniel Mayer wrote: To trot out yet another GNU comparison, most components of GNU and Linux have been disparaged by computer scientists and leading technologists ("just a hobby system", "no one would ever use it for anything important", etc). The interesting thing that happened is that over time, some experts (like me) got pulled into the projects, and in other cases, the less-expert simply tried imitating what experts did, sometimes several times before settling on something that worked in practice. The cumulative result has shut up a lot of skeptics (and I've had the distinct pleasure of some of them saying "Stan, you were right" - aaah...). But it did take a long time - GNU is almost 20 years old, and Linux is 13, at 3 1/2 years only the true believers worked on them.
Some people seem to have a deep-seated psychological block regrading the possibility of an unpaid collaborative project over the Internet achiveing anying worthwhile I suspect they have fundamentally pessimistic beliefs about human nature: people aren't good at co-operating, and no-one would do anything worthwhile unless they are paid to do it. It's sad that people have these delusions, however, as you point out, over time and with sufficient evidence, many will change their minds.
Is this a problem? The success of Wikipedia depends on Wikipedians creating articles. Those who don't like the Wikipedia concent aren't going to be creating articles anyway, so it is no loss. However, if they are in a position to sway others away from using Wikipedia, then some of those people who would eventually become Wikipedians won't do so, or will do so later.
Getting back to WP, one of the things I don't think people appreciate is the number of bonafide experts already reviewing WP articles on a daily basis. It would be very hard for someone to get something by me in the GCC or GDB articles for instance; I know articles in other areas also have experts' eyes watching intently.
This is probably most true regarding software, particularly open source software. There's a degree of truth in the jibe that Wikipedia is an encyclopedia built by Slashdotters.
It would be a pretty low impact simply to have a place to document the existing experts (real names with CVs, no hiding behind pseudonyms). The recognition alone, even without any special privileges, would attract some experts, and the power structure works right - editors will tend to defer to the known experts (that happens already) but still be able to challenge those who get out of line.
Good idea.
Going a little further, I could imagine pages having a link going to a list of real-name editors who have publicly declared themselves to be watching the article.
Yes, in the same way we have a "talk" page attaching to a page.
Those seeking reassurance can then peruse the list to see if they're sufficiently impressed. Conversely, it's an incentive to the watchers, whose reputation will suffer if the articles they're publicly watching are poor in some way.
Stan
-- "It's easier to find people online who openly support the KKK than people who openly support the RIAA" -- comment on Wikipedia (Email: zen19725 at zen dot co dot uk)
WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l