K. Peachey wrote: "Sanger was one of the founders of Wikipedia, and of its failed predecessor Nupedia, who left the fold because of differences over the question of the proper role of experts." Strange, I thought it was because he stopped being paid for it. http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/My_resignation--Larry_Sanger "As you know, since the beginning of February, I've been working on Wikipedia and Nupedia as a part-time volunteer. I haven't been able to do nearly as much as I wish I could do, but job-hunting and money-making activities necessarily occupy a great deal of my time. Unfortunately, I do not expect to see, within the foreseeable future, any sort of compensation for the time and responsibility I've continued to hold in the projects. Now that I'm unemployed, I can ill afford to spend my free time this way. This is, I'm afraid, by far the most important reason for my resignation." He then forgot about Wikipedia completely for a few years, and re-emerged a critic once the media started paying attention to it. -- Tim Starling

K. Peachey wrote: they are is that they are edited by knowledgeable people to whom deference is paid, although voluntarily, but that some articles suffer precisely because there are so many aggressive people who 'guard' articles and drive off others (PDF), including people more expert than they are. The good articles are good basically because smart people take the trouble to research them and write them to a decent standard. The article on topic X is good, when it is, not usually because A, an expert on X, has filled it with A's expert knowledge, but because B and C and maybe others have looked at some literature on the topic and done a decent job of constructing a precis for the general reader. I would make an exception for some areas (e.g. mathematics, medicine) where an expert is going to have a view that is 1000% clearer than someone coming in from outside. The bit about "deference" shows a fixation on the more combative aspects of WP. Most articles aren't that contentious. is no reason to think that Wikipedia'a articles are on a vector toward continual improvement,' writes Sanger. No reason for Sanger to think that, since he continually misses the point of the wiki. Most articles, numerically speaking, just wait until someone who cares comes along and upgrades them. or its rejection of expert involvement, but instead by its freedom, openness, and bottom-up management and there is no doubt that many experts would, if left to their own devices, dismantle the openness that drives the success of Wikipedia. Yeah, we know about such experts, but they are not experts _on Wikipedia_! How about a little respect for the expertise of people who spend time doing it, rather than talking about it? experts can only be considered a failure of imagination,' writes Sanger. 'One need only ask what an open, bottom-up system with a role for expert decision-making would be like.' In other words, despite all appearances, CZ is superior to WP. Well, I think we saw where this was going a little earlier. The brass neck involved in implying that WP is "unimaginative", which is largely wrong, rather than too utopian, which is certainly an arguable point, is breath-taking. A propos FR, or other such things, there has been this constant debate in which the "pure wiki" model is held up against what amount to pragmatic suggestions for change in aid of the encyclopedic mission. This discussion goes on all the time. Charles

Maybe someone should write a typical history of which policies new users tread on. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Ken_Birman That guy is an expert, because he actually wrote software, and he is a professor at Cornell. [[gossip protocol]] and [[virtual synchrony]] are his pet projects. I found gossip protocol to be something like Artificial Neural Networks in 1990. Everyone was talking about them. Everyone had different ideas on what it means. (Still do). (Artificial Logic Networks) ALN's are a close cousin to ANN's. If you look on the history of his talk page, then you will see that it has shaped up more like a blog, which is at one point I could not find a welcome notice of any kind on his talk page, then there was some critique from KPBotany. Since I could not find a welcome notice, I put one up. That stuff ain't there, so maybe he was following my lead about how to maintain a talk page. I also told him about my {{prod}} for deleting [[gossip protocol]], saying at one point that he had a defender. I was not happy with what little that defender would learn from [[gossip protocol]], because it seemed to be ultimate -- optimal in one case and understandably short of optimal in practice. So, I went to work, trying to understand the math behind potentials, and lo and behold I found I had already written! evidence of "optimal" (exponential propagation) and "worst case" (everyone talking at once, which yields "in proportion to number of participants"). I needed a monographic example. I think Ken has decided to stay out of [[gossip protocol]], as long as it does not get deleted. I do not think he will decide to write my monographs into what is mostly his work. Tthe role of experts IN wikipedia is to learn from experts ON wikipedia. {{subst:uw-notcensored1}} Coulda fooled me, and I do not feel like arguing on either side.