----- Original Message ----- From: "David Gerard" dgerard@gmail.com To: "Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List" foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Sent: Tuesday, September 28, 2010 12:38 PM Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Has Wikipedia changed since 2005?
You can hardly move on Wikipedia without tripping over experts in whatever topic you're editing. Why are there any experts on Wikipedia?
This is very telling. Someone is trying to select Philosophy articles for the Wikipedia 0.8 release.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Philosophy#Philosoph...
They have left a message on the Philosophy project page which seems to have elicited no response. Now look at the list of articles selected.
http://toolserver.org/~enwp10/bin/list2.fcgi?run=yes&namespace=0&pag...
Of the 22 'top importance' articles, 9 are start class, with tags like 'multiple issues', 'clean up', 'attention from expert required' and so on. 9 are C class, many also (e.g. metaphysics) have tags all over the place. 3 are B class (including one I wrote). Only one (philosophy of mind) is FA class, and that was written by a very good editor who has since given up.
Of the high importance, many of these have been wrongly categorised (in some cases, incredibly so).