On 28 September 2010 12:38, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
You can hardly move on Wikipedia without tripping over experts in whatever topic you're editing. Why are there any experts on Wikipedia?
I predict Wikipedia's biology articles will far outshine its philosophy articles for the simple fact that the biologists bother:
http://www.ploscompbiol.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pcbi.1000...
They bothered paying author's fees for publication in a peer-reviewed specialist journal in their field, just to increase the quality of Wikipedia articles in their field. They're hardly going to rack up citation credits for an article on how to teach biology to the general public.
With some fields going to this effort and not others, ultimately it's up to the specialists in the fields themselves to bother. So what do the biologists have that the philosophers - or other fields that are ill-represented in Wikipedia - lack?
(That article is great, by the way. It gives strong reasons for experts to put in the effort to bother.)
- d.