Re: [Wikimedia-l] Stack Exchange vs. Wikimedia

I participate in StackOverflow - asking, answering, voting, editing existing answers. Voting is probably good for a site that is structured around short answers and short questions. I'm not sure that it would work for Wikipedia, where articles are expected to grow to multiple pages over a long time with contributions of different people. Also, StackOverflow answers often become the de-facto main source for answers to many questions, because many people ask about things that are not documented well. We are in an age when a good programming language manual is not really good enough if people need to spend a minute searching through its index, so people prefer to google or to ask on StackOverflow. And it's OK for software development, because if a good answer solves a focused problem, it is later useful to many people. It is not good enough for Wikipedia, which should not be the final source of information, even if in practice it actually is. So you cannot measure the quality of an article or the reliability of a person with votes. As for encouraging people to come back to the site and to contribute more - yes, it works nicely on StackOverflow and on similar sites like PerlMonks, Quora, Slashdot, and others, but for Wikipedia it would be too artificial for the above reasons. I am thrilled about the new Notifications (a.k.a. Echo) in this regard - the indicator at the top, which shows mentions and thanks is very encouraging to me as a contributor (and this has nothing to do with my capacity as a WMF contractor), and I hear many similar positive comments from other editors. -- Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי http://aharoni.wordpress.com ‪“We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore‬ 2013/9/23 Jan Kučera <kozuch82(a)gmail.com>