On 18 September 2010 17:19, Peter Damian peter.damian@btinternet.com wrote:
Normally it is the first step that is the main difficulty. As it is in the present case: I don't see any consensus here (apart from a handful of other posts, such as Andreas above) that there is any problem.
You haven't demonstrated there is enough of a problem even to induce people here to jump into action, let alone the Foundation doing so. You've had several examples of the sort of quality survey that would demonstrate clearly not merely that there was a problem, but what its nature was and to what degree.
There are lots of people who complain about our humanities content, enough to say "perhaps there's a problem on the anecdotal evidence." The usual way to fix such systemic bias is to get people actually involved in writing in the areas in question. This is hard, but it's also the method that will actually work.
There are various methods to bootstrap such a process. e.g. What's the financial model for the SEP? It's under an all rights reserved licence, but it doesn't generate an income in any way I can see. If it were placed under a CC by-sa licence, that would not take away from the prestige of the SEP and would help get its content somewhere it was read.
e.g. A comparison would be the mathematics articles on en:wp. These were brought to higher quality by the goal of making a free content competitor to Wolfram Mathworld. They're not perfect, but they're really pretty good (if written at rather a high level). This was done by a group of mathematicians who bothered. So a start might be to get a group of philosophy experts and target the SEP.
- d.