On Wed, Sep 1, 2010 at 5:16 AM, Peter Damian peter.damian@btinternet.com wrote:
----- Original Message ----- From: "John Vandenberg" jayvdb@gmail.com To: "Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List" foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Sent: Tuesday, August 31, 2010 12:21 AM Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Organization on Wikipedia that deals withcontent issues.
Irony. David Gerard disparaging CZ using a rationalwiki page as evidence.
Actually David wrote the page. I thought it was interesting ...
I agree it was interesting, and does include some valuable observations which highlight problems facing the CZ project. Credentialism is one of them, but David's assertion that it is a "pseudoscience haven" appears to be selective observation, or maybe selective writing in light of the CZ article about WP, which makes no mentions of the long history of pseudo-<x> problems on Wikipedia.
Pseudo-science, pseudo-humanities, etc are no stranger to Wikipedia, and our processes have not always been victorious over it. Simply put, the rubbish on Wikipedia outweights the rubbish on CZ, and I suspect that an academically sound study would indicate that, proportionally speaking, Wikipedia pollutes the interweb more than CZ. Compare the rationalwiki page for CZ and WP. I wonder how large their WP page would be if a similar level of critical analysis was applied.
... but as you say, byte for byte, there may be a similar level of 'pollution'. I wonder if it was 'credentialism' that was the problem, or just the lack of editors. I joined CZ when it was formed, with one other philosophy editor http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/User:Peter_J._King who had defected from Wikipedia. He was a good philosopher but had some kind of stupid row with Larry and left. I found it difficult to edit in a vacuum so I left also. And that was the end of "credentialled" philosophy on CZ. Larry is not a bad philosopher himself and has credentials but he was in a management role. He has this naive faith that academic philosophers would come flocking to CZ and fill the gap but they didn't. So in the end he lowered the entry barrier and the rest is history.
In summary, the evidence as far as my discipline is concerned is that Sanger wrongly expected the project to attract credentialled academics. It didn't. He allowed a number of uncredentialled or 'less credentialled' editors in, and the results are much as David Gerard describes them.
An important distinction remains. CZ requires real names, and as I understand it, the credentials of the contributors are a known quantity, which adds a dimension in 'patrolling' process. This obviously reduces the quantity of willing contributors, and contributions. I'm surprised you found the quietness of CZ (the vacuum) to be a problem, as your content on MyWikiBiz is usually written solely by yourself, and many of your WP pages have mostly been written by yourself.
-- John Vandenberg