----- Original Message ----- From: "Michael Snow" wikipedia@verizon.net
The post I was responding to was nothing but an assessment of a Citizendium article. It made no comparison, favorable or unfavorable, to an equivalent article on Wikipedia. At most it engaged in some speculation about what Wikipedia *might* have.
It was explicitly contrasting how Wikipedia actually is, or tends to be like, as compared with the corresponding CZ article. I think the observations were accurate and reflect pretty well what controversial Wikipedia articles are like, namely festooned with supposedly reliable citations, and bearing obvious battlescars from years of edit-warring. The contrast was specifically prompted by a claim by Gerard that Wikipedia's relaxed attitude to 'expertise' leads to better articles. I don't think it does.
If your intent is to discuss content issues in Wikipedia, then you need to actually explicitly discuss them.
I don't want to discuss content as such. I want to discuss generic and systematic problems with the way Wikipedia is organised that lead to poor quality articles. There needs first to be some recognition there is a quality problem and that it is serious - I think there is an element of denial that is evident from some of the replies here, as well as elsewhere. Once the problem is recognised, there needs to be a careful examination of possible causes for this. And then a further examination of how policy and governance could be changed to address some or all of these causes. Does that sound reasonable?
I might suggest that you should familiarize yourself with some of our other mailing lists and consider whether another list, like wikien-l, is better suited to have this conversation, since foundation-l exists for issues related to the Wikimedia Foundation and the overall movement surrounding its projects, not just Wikipedia.)
I consider this is the best mailing list for the purpose. What do people here think?
Peter