Bod Notbod, when you say, "I see a lot of green", it's also worth looking at
what B actually means. The article on Doris Lessing for example, winner of the Nobel Prize
for Literature, is B class.
It is woefully inadequate. It says there are three phases to her writing, communist,
psychological, and sufic. Only the latter has any coverage at all, and it is generally the
least highly regarded part of her output. Everything there is on superficial
"controversies" (why did she write science fiction, is she a feminist).
Almost all the sources are newspaper articles; there is not a trace of the available
peer-reviewed literature on her output.
It is much the same in the article on Selma Lagerlöf, another Nobel Prize winner, which is
Start class.
Again, no trace of the scholarly literature. The only biography listed in the bibliography
is "Who’s Who in Gay and Lesbian History from Antiquity to World War II", which
is sort of typical.
I think there *is* a problem with the humanities, as well as with the gender imbalance in
Wikipedia.
It would be worthwhile to study the location of these deficiencies in more depth, and
perhaps to establish links to universities, similar to the recently launched public policy
initiative, to address the areas where Wikipedia's natural contributor base does most
poorly.
--- On Sat, 18/9/10, Bod Notbod <bodnotbod(a)gmail.com> wrote:
From: Bod Notbod <bodnotbod(a)gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Has Wikipedia changed since 2005?
To: "Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List"
<foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Date: Saturday, 18 September, 2010, 1:04
On Fri, Sep 17, 2010 at 10:58 AM,
Yann Forget <yannfo(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
I agree that the core content of Wikipedia should
be
educational, not trivia.
Well, here's our core content (5 thousand or so out of 3.x
million):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Vital_articles/Expanded
As it happens I've been proofreading articles of late;
under nobody's
say-so I've decided to work my through The Time 100:
http://205.188.238.181/time/time100/leaders/
I'm only through the first 12. I have to say, I've been
delighted by
what I've seen. 12 out of 3.x million isn't a much better
sample than
the two or three this thread has so far been offered. So
all we can
say at this point is that "one user thinks that nothing is
better
since 2005" whilst "another user thinks that what we have
in 2010 is
delightful".
Which brings us back the question: what is the quality of
our content?
Well this list of the 1,000 most important articles as
judged by
[waves hand, but I think we'll grant that they think
[[Biology]] more
important than [[Mr Hankey the Christmas Poo]] ] doesn't
give any
figures but does show the quality rating for each article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Core_topics_-_1,000
Scanning with my eyes I see a lot of green, where green =
B.
So there is your answer, probably. Wikipedia's grade is B.
What does B mean? Here we are:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:B-criteria
Hey, that sounds pretty good!
So: In 2010 we can say "Wikipedia is pretty good".
Unfortunately this still leaves the question: was Wikipedia
pretty good in 2005?
I find I feel absolutely no compulsion to attempt to answer
this. But
since it is a question of importance to Peter Damian he
will of course
present data of comparable complexity to mine after the
weekend.
Deciding whether to give money to an educational charity
that "has
made 1,000 educational topics available for free which are
pretty
good" is a matter for one's own heart.
Of course, the quality of most articles has
improved,
but I would like
to see some serious study about this unbalance
[between triv and educational content], and what WMF
intends to do to correct this.
Correction implies wrongness. There will always be more
television
programmes, long playing records, popular beat combos and
innovative
sex toys than there will be Einsteins, paradigm shifting
scientific
discoveries and philosophical enquiries. These are the
degraded times
in which we live. I suspect the popularity of Chaucer's
Canterbury
Tales in his day was rightly castigated for being nothing
more than a
tawdry narrative of Miller's arses. Society really started
to go
downhill in the 14th century and absolutely nothing has
improved since
then.
But since we must live with the triv/education imbalance
that Chaucer
burdened us with, we can at least pray that the twelve year
old who
religiously edits [[Numb3rs]] (sic) now might be editing
[[mathematical modelling]] in a decade's time; after all
the second is
wikilinked in the first. It's surely not too much to ask
that someone
clicks his mouse once each either side of puberty?
But I agree with Yann... we should remove our article on
[[Crazy
Frog]]. Isn't it horrifying to think how broad our coverage
is? I
can't tell you how angry I feel when someone tells me they
know of
Wikipedia. I'm glad at first, of course, but when they tell
me they
were searching Google for [[Hanson (band)]] and we were one
of the top
ten hits, I am repulsed. I am forced to think "Bleurgh! We
don't want
*that* *sort* *of* *person* here!"
And, no, I am not mollified when they say "I found out that
one member
had a [[pulmonary embolism]], I didn't know what that was,
so I
clicked. And there someone had spelt 'heart' as 'haert' so
I changed
it and from that point I got excited about Wikipedia."
This sort of story I find eminently vomit-inducing and I
generally
stalk their contributions waiting for them to do something
else
objectionable so that I can get the mods to ban them.
Unfortunately he
hasn't done anything that falls outside the guidelines yet,
these last
five years, but he will one day and I'll be there.
I estimate that about 70% of our content should be
jettisoned. That
70% of material does absolutely nothing but pique people's
prurient
interest in Wikipedia, it brings undesirable people on
board that then
have the temerity to add sourced contributions to core
articles, and I
suspect these people then go off and tell other people
about
Wikipedia. I mean, who needs it?
User:Bodnotbod
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