Message: 11 Date: Sat, 11 Sep 2004 18:50:47 -0700 (PDT) From: Daniel Mayer maveric149@yahoo.com
No. We. Don't.
We don't want them to read our content? Sorry, but you are in an extreme minority around here if you think that.
-- mav
You're misreading me.
We don't have to give them "that bit of comfort". They will get around to reading and trusting our content anyway.
Related posts: http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2004-September/030551.html http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2004-September/030552.html
Sorry for maybe not being clear.
-- Jens [[User:Ropers|Ropers]] www.ropersonline.com
--- Jens Ropers ropers@ropersonline.com wrote:
We don't have to give them "that bit of comfort". They will get around to reading and trusting our content anyway.
And yet they are not and are in fact warning others to stay away from it. My best friend, whose opinion I regard very highly, is a grade school teacher. She is very intelligent, liberal minded, and has listened to me describe Wikipedia and how it works. It pains me greatly to concede that she will not allow any of her students to use our content as a reference due to the fact that it is not approved by people with relevant degrees. She went so far as insinuate that the mere existence of Wikipedia is harmful due to the fact that children *will* innocently use it, thinking it is an authoritative source. The librarian at her school is similarly convinced as well as the two other librarians I've talked to about this.
We can only go so far with FA-like selection processes (granted that will often be upwards of 90% - the rest largely being perception). I in fact pointed to our FA list as an example and my best friend repeated the same objections. Again, each subject area board should formulate their own selection criteria and it is *they* who should decide what mix of criteria are needed to approve articles and who can approve them. Limiting what they can do at this point is a huge mistake.
-- mav
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----- Original Message ----- From: "Daniel Mayer" maveric149@yahoo.com To: "English Wikipedia" wikien-l@Wikipedia.org Sent: Sunday, September 12, 2004 12:07 AM Subject: RE: [WikiEN-l] A future for Nupedia?
--- Jens Ropers ropers@ropersonline.com wrote:
We don't have to give them "that bit of comfort". They will get around to reading and trusting our content anyway.
And yet they are not and are in fact warning others to stay away from it. My best friend, whose opinion I regard very highly, is a grade school teacher. She is very intelligent, liberal minded, and has listened to me describe Wikipedia and how it works. It pains me greatly to concede that she will not allow any of her students to use our content as a reference due to the fact that it is not approved by people with relevant degrees.
I'm sorry, but that is just ridiculous. Most books out there are not peer-reviewed, only a very small portion of books published by university presses are. Magazine articles are even less likely to be so.
Sam Howard
--- "Samuel J. Howard" samueljhoward@comcast.net wrote:
--- Jens Ropers ropers@ropersonline.com wrote:
We don't have to give them "that bit of comfort". They will get around to reading and trusting our content anyway.
And yet they are not and are in fact warning others to stay away from it. My best friend, whose opinion I regard very highly, is a grade school teacher. She is very intelligent, liberal minded, and has listened to me describe Wikipedia and how it works. It pains me greatly to concede that she will not allow any of her students to use our content as a reference due to the fact that it is not approved by people with relevant degrees.
<strawman>
I'm sorry, but that is just ridiculous. Most books out there are not peer-reviewed, only a very small portion of books published by university presses are. Magazine articles are even less likely to be so.
</strawman>
And similar objections are made to using those sources as references as well (but even then magazines have editorial staff who approve content and publishers also approve content). It is, however, ridiculous to mention other media and how they do things in this context when we are an encyclopedia; seeing what other encyclopedias do *is* relevant. It is also ridiculous to mention peer review since I did not mention that.
-- mav
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Fellow Wikipedians,
I agree with this proposal providing that all experienced users who over a period of time have made valuable contributions to the subject in question are eligible to approve edits after an election.
I would think that the editorial board would consist of a number of people with qualifications in the relevant area and people with an interest in the topic. For example while most if not all people in technical areas like maths and physics would have degrees if not advanced degrees, the people who write articles on areas of general interest such as sport or popular culture would be more varied.
It should be seen as a method of ensuring that we consolidate what we have and provide assurances that Wikipedia is a generally reliable information source rather than excluding anyone from making a contribution. The individuals contributions to Wikipedia rather than just credentialism should be the key to becoming part of the editorial board.
Daniel Mayer maveric149@yahoo.com wrote: --- Jens Ropers wrote:
We don't have to give them "that bit of comfort". They will get around to reading and trusting our content anyway.
And yet they are not and are in fact warning others to stay away from it. My best friend, whose opinion I regard very highly, is a grade school teacher. She is very intelligent, liberal minded, and has listened to me describe Wikipedia and how it works. It pains me greatly to concede that she will not allow any of her students to use our content as a reference due to the fact that it is not approved by people with relevant degrees. She went so far as insinuate that the mere existence of Wikipedia is harmful due to the fact that children *will* innocently use it, thinking it is an authoritative source. The librarian at her school is similarly convinced as well as the two other librarians I've talked to about this.
We can only go so far with FA-like selection processes (granted that will often be upwards of 90% - the rest largely being perception). I in fact pointed to our FA list as an example and my best friend repeated the same objections. Again, each subject area board should formulate their own selection criteria and it is *they* who should decide what mix of criteria are needed to approve articles and who can approve them. Limiting what they can do at this point is a huge mistake.
-- mav
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Daniel Mayer wrote:
--- Jens Ropers ropers@ropersonline.com wrote:
We don't have to give them "that bit of comfort". They will get around to reading and trusting our content anyway.
And yet they are not and are in fact warning others to stay away from it. My best friend, whose opinion I regard very highly, is a grade school teacher. She is very intelligent, liberal minded, and has listened to me describe Wikipedia and how it works. It pains me greatly to concede that she will not allow any of her students to use our content as a reference due to the fact that it is not approved by people with relevant degrees. She went so far as insinuate that the mere existence of Wikipedia is harmful due to the fact that children *will* innocently use it, thinking it is an authoritative source. The librarian at her school is similarly convinced as well as the two other librarians I've talked to about this.
Bear in mind that your sample is very small; don't freak out because not everybody understands the concept (and if they're gating on experts' blessings, whatever that's suppoed to mean, they don't understand it yet).
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.
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. 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.
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. 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
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
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)
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