*The problem is that until someone sits up and notices the serious errors that are propagated through Wikipedia (and which are now becoming part of the folk wisdom of the internet), no one will be bothered. * I think my problem with suggestions like this is that the assumption at the heart of all of them--that "experts" with degrees are preferable as information authorities to nonexperts without--is deeply problematic, and I'm not convinced it won't create more problems than it solves. I am not myself an academic, but I've worked in an academic setting for over a decade (I'm in college textbooks), and I work closely with college faculty and ... quite frankly the number of them I would trust to edit an article I wanted to read is very small.
Academic qualifications generally just mean you stayed in school long enough to get them, and little else. I'm not trying to spout anti-intellectual nonsense, I'm just saying that academia churns out an awful lot of people with degrees every year, a really astonishing number actually, and an awful lot of those people are no more deserving of the term "expert" than the guy driving the 2 train that took me to work this morning, or the girl who served me coffee at Dunkin' Donuts. I'm worried we'd give the imprimatur of extra scholarly specialness to the edits of a bunch of people who honestly would not deserve it.
I don't really see this as a problem with Wikipedia anyway. Wikipedia's detractors do, but that's generally because they object to the mission in general, and its democratic nature in particular. Here we value the quality of the work, not the letters on a piece of paper obtained in exchange for $100,000 in tuition.
FMF
On Sun, Aug 29, 2010 at 10:38 AM, Peter Damian peter.damian@btinternet.comwrote:
Gerard writes: >>The trouble is that attempts to make something that lures experts but keeps idiots out of their faces have so far failed and/or attracted no attention, even from the experts (Citizendium, Scholarpedia). That is, they sound like a good idea; but in practice, Wikipedia has so far been the least worst system.
True. But is there not some way of making Wikipedia just a little more attractive to people who have studied the subject? I used to propose things like credentials based on trust earned on Wikipedia (which would require getting trust from other trusted editors, much like in financial markets). These all naturally got shot down, and silly of me to have tried. But is there not some way of just making it a little easier?
The problem is that until someone sits up and notices the serious errors that are propagated through Wikipedia (and which are now becoming part of the folk wisdom of the internet), no one will be bothered. The problem is that no one *knows* there are problems, and so no one can be bothered. I've started documenting the problem in a small way, e.g. here http://ocham.blogspot.com/2010/06/william-of-ockham.html and here http://ocham.blogspot.com/2010/06/avicennian-logic.html , but this is only in my own area of expertise.
What is the very smallest thing that could be done, I wonder?
Peter
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