----- Original Message ----- From: "David Gerard" dgerard@gmail.com To: "Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List" foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Sent: Friday, October 01, 2010 9:43 PM Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Has Wikipedia changed since 2005?
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.)
So here am I looking for systematic reasons why philosophy, and humanities in general are under-represented in Wikipedia and you are saying that it is because philosophers - and by implication specialists in humanities - don't bother? Interesting. I once got puzzled why certain plants wouldn't grow in my garden. I got frustrated and thought perhaps the plants weren't bothering. Then I found that because my garden is north facing and has acid soil, the plants that like sunlight and don't like acid soil, weren't flourishing.
Anyway David, I said earlier that there are several stages to the process. The first is to see whether Wikipedia does have a problem with the humanities in general. There needs to be a scientific methodology to assess what counts as 'under represented', there needs to be a survey to determine whether certain subjects are under-represented, and perhaps a paper in an appropriate journal. That's step 1.
Step 2 - if the answer to step 1 is that there is a problem - is to determine whether there are underlying reasons (similar to sunshine, acidity of soil) that certain subjects are under-represented. It could be the reason is chance (this seems to be what you are saying, that in certain subjects experts bother, in others they do). If it is not chance, what are the reasons.
Step 3 - is there anything the WMF can do - either directly or by persuading the community - to address the problem.
Peter