I agree with Yaroslav that we should have a specific role for experts, or rather for the greater number of experts who may be interested in contributing, but who will not be attracted to participate in the classical back-and-forth wiki model.
But I do not believe that experts should have any special powers in the editing of articles.
Rather, I think they should be encouraged to act in a pure review capacity, assessing the existing work of Wikipedians, and making recommendations for improvement. This might also be partially implemented through flagged revs, and I could also envision a type of button at the top of articles that says "see last version assessed by an expert".
Really, what we want to encourage is a sort of organized external peer review of Wikipedia, possibly published through a new academic journal for the genre, which authors might have some prestige in contributing to.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:External_peer_review
Thanks, Pharos
On Wed, Mar 4, 2009 at 2:30 PM, Yaroslav M. Blanter putevod@mccme.ru wrote:
One of your points there was:
- The current experience (or at least my current experience) is not
really encouraging. The real top researchers just plainly have no time to edit articles, nor are they really interested. Those who come are mostly interested in editing article about themselves or about their immediate research, and view this as a kind of free PR.
The same might be said of articles about Wikipedia. If you don't get any responses within 48 hours you are unlikely to get any at all. I see one response there but that is most likely because of the message to which I am responding. Your comments are on "Temp17" of what is probably a much longer series of personal subpages. There is very likelihood that anyone will ever see it, let alone respond.
Ec
Actually, I only have Temp17, and I was preparing it in my personal space (so far provided links to several users), but on one occasion a couple of months ago I posted it in this mailing list. It there is any interest, I will obviously move it to the general meta namespace.
I did not yet check the comments, will do now.
Cheers Yaroslav
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