On Tue, Oct 12, 2010 at 11:20 AM, Ian Woollard <ian.woollard(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 12 October 2010 18:08, MuZemike
<muzemike(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Perhaps it's more of a misunderstanding that
this is still a wiki above
anything else - in particular, those understandings that literally
anyone else you write, and you can edit anything anybody else writes.
I believe those who have a good understanding of those two fundamental
wiki concepts tend to do better in a wiki environment (not just
Wikipedia) than most others who do not.
The problem comes when an expert (in the broadest sense) understands
something that most people don't get, or get exactly wrong, and where most
people can't or don't or even refuse to understand the literature on it.
In that case, much of the population of the wiki will be repeatedly editing
the material back to what they believe, rather than what is actually true.
The expert can try to explain the problem, they can revert it back to the
objective truth of the literature, but in the end they will be the ones seen
as problematic, rather than the majority of people that are repeatedly
putting the wrong information into the wiki.
The more careful experts are, the more likely that they are to get banned or
otherwise censured for 'causing trouble'.
The classic example of this is William Connolley.
He stuck around, but other experts have evaporated.
Long term I see issues though. The expertise needed to improve the Wikipedia
is ratcheting ever upwards, but I doubt that the admins are; if they see a
person 'causing trouble' they tend to attack the minority as being 'not
consensus', but people with genuine expertise are always in the minority.
The Wikipedia should be and needs to be becoming more expert friendly, not
as a matter of policy, but due to some of the subject matter being more
fine-grained and precise.
I suppose at the moment, the admins are acting as a plaza, whereas
specialist admins may be more and more desirable.
We have a danger here though; peoples bona fides are hard to verify
online in general, and on Wikipedia with its culture of pseudonymity
particularly.
An "expert" may not be who they say they are, and we may have no way
to tell either way even if they are. A large part of the system we
have is designed to mitigate not knowing the quality of the people we
have editing.
Various other online communities have tried to work around that with
different concepts (which is probably good) but failed for unrelated
reasons (rendering their approaches a no-test, as it were).
We have many experts using Wikipedia. Some really haven't gotten the
community part, some have. Some who haven't gotten it are working OK
in their areas anyways, for various reasons including good luck.
We also have a significant number of - for want of a better word -
kooks who feel they're experts and are attempting to meld Wikipedia in
their image. Every one of these does immense damage.
We also also have a very large number of editors who aren't kooky but
overestimate their skills and knowledge. These are usually not that
bad, as they usually can be reasoned with and pointed to better
sources.
We can't "just trust the experts" - for the reasons above - and
managing them is already part of the community and process. That this
drives some away is a problem - but letting them run wild without
sufficient gatekeeping and QA checks would be worse.
If this was an easy problem, we'd all be basking in our easy retirements now...
--
-george william herbert
george.herbert(a)gmail.com