On 29 August 2010 17:18, Peter Damian <peter.damian(a)btinternet.com> wrote: The answer is probably that we're not finished yet and need more participation from people interested in writing encyclopedically in the area. Basically, the answer is interested contributors bothering to put in the effort, same as any other area. Hard work over the course of years, as usual. There are things that could be done. Professors who set students to editing can help the content along very nicely. Getting the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy released under CC by-sa would increase the quality of the world's phiosophy knowledge nicely (it's not like it's a commercial website). Think of our successful areas and why they are successful. Our hard science articles are generally excellent, and sometimes almost readable by humans. Why are they good? Why did people with the requisite knowledge bother writing stuff up? How can we duplicate this in other lacking areas? - d.

As you did mention Eco's interview in another thread, you have surely noted all the Q&A related to collaboration and "consensus" in Humanities vs hard sciences. It seems that Humanities are overall a problematic area for Wikipedia, because less involved in consensus building, and much focused in the stratification of different interpretations. NPOV is probably not so fascinating or useful for humanisties, or at least their inside culture/procedures/habits does not involve collaboration as the Hard Science culture/procedures/habits. I believe that Wikipedia is touching a sensitive point here. (I know that I used general and broad terms, but the interview is much more clear.) Aubrey

From: "Andrea Zanni" <zanni.andrea84(a)gmail.com> I believe it was in history (or perhaps textual criticism) where the distinction between primary and secondary sources was first made. The idea of NPOV is fundamental to the humanities.

From: "Andrea Zanni" <zanni.andrea84(a)gmail.com> I'm very surprised at this. When I started editing Wikipedia in 2003 I immediately read the NPOV rules and was struck by their similarity to the way I was taught to approach writing a paper. Not surprising actually, as I think Larry drafted the original rules, and he has the same background as I. The same would be true for someone with a background in textual criticism or history. I think the real problem is that a subject like philosophy *appears* easier to learn and to write about than mathematics. I remember from teaching students they would write acres of self-indulgent rubbish and you had to gently explain that there were clear rules and principles, just like the hard sciences. I'll quote this again from a well-known philosopher who left Wikipedia some years ago "Philosophy: I'm a philosopher; why don't I edit the article on my subject? Because it's hopeless. I've tried at various times, and each time have given up in depressed disgust. Philosophy seems to attract aggressive zealots who know a little (often a very little), who lack understanding of key concepts, terms, etc., and who attempt to take over the article (and its Talk page) with rambling, ground-shifting, often barely comprehensible rants against those who disagree with them. Life's too short. I just tell my students and anyone else I know not to read the Wikipedia article except for a laugh. It's one of those areas where the ochlocratic nature of Wikipedia really comes a cropper".

On Sun, Aug 29, 2010 at 23:52, Andrea Zanni <zanni.andrea84(a)gmail.com> wrote: As someone with background in humanities, I can say that it is often hard to explain science to humanities scholars.

On 29 August 2010 18:16, <wiki-list(a)phizz.demon.co.uk> wrote: Yes: the problem with keeping idiots out of experts' faces. Unfortunately, credentialism doesn't work. Embarrassing Wikipedia in blog posts seems to work, one factoid at a time - d.

*I would have bought the 'not finished yet' argument 5 years ago. Perhaps even 3 years ago. But now? Every article in my area of expertise has stagnated.* <SNIP> *All I am saying is that there is a serious and growing problem and that someone needs to recognise it for what it is.* The problem you mention is actually the stagnation of edits. Any article that has some common public interest will be read and corrected by many people, which will generally be good for its quality. Sure, more interested people will equally mean a larger share of vandals and nonsensical edits, but a fairly small group of productive editors can keep a much larger group of vandals at bay without to much effort; Huggle is a proof of concept for this, since only a handful of editors are required to keep out most of the obvious vandalism. However, in cases where an article stagnates lower quality edits may go unnoticed for a longer time. Take our article's on faily unimportant secondary schools for example - most people interested in these article's are students and teachers of that institution, which means that the quality of the edits is likely to be fairly low (Students add themselves or attack the school, while teachers try to promote the school). Hence, the existence article was edited about 500 times in 3 years, which means that fairly little people are correcting changes or adding content. As a result it is more prone to degeneration then an article that is edited several thousands of times. More attention is better - even an edit war can be a good thing in this context, since both sides of the issue will try as hard as possible to keep their prefered version, eventually balancing the article into a version which adheres admirably to a neutral point of view. *But as someone else noted, it's like when a politician publicly helps a needy family for the sake of the newspapers, leaving millions of other needy families in a needy state. That's how I feel about fixing Wikipedia entries.* That is of course one way to view it - but i would argue that the politician example (hopefully) isn't accurate as it would suggest that people only edit in case they receive a personal benefit. Personally i hope that most people edit and improve for less selfish reasons. Or to phrase it as another comparison: A singular brick cannot build a house, and as of such people may deem carrying one futile, since would have to carry many times many bricks in order to build anything useful (Let alone fight decay). Yet if thousands of people carrying a single brick they can build a castle. There are many problems in the world, but is the amount a reason to say that fixing one of them is futile, just because there are many others? ~Excirial. On Sun, Aug 29, 2010 at 7:42 PM, Peter Damian &lt;peter.damian(a)btinternet.com&gt;wrote;wrote:

On 29 August 2010 17:19, David Moran &lt;fordmadoxfraud(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: Take care not to conflate expertise with credentials. At best, credentials are a shortcut to finding an expert; at worst, they're a union card that people without workable expertise use to get a job anyway. Clay Shirky noted this important distinction: http://many.corante.com/archives/2006/11/20/social_facts_expertise_citizend… In practice, academics who are really interested in their field will happily listen to the uncredentialed on their topic, even if only for a moment, just in case they have something interesting to say. Academics who are not all that good will be very credentialist. Cranks, having no accepted expertise, will attach especial store to what credentials they can scrape up. This, btw, is how Citizendium became a pseudoscience haven: http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Citizendium#The_concept_of_expertise_on_Citize… - d.

On 29 August 2010 17:52, David Moran &lt;fordmadoxfraud(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: I was amazed just how actively negative credentialism could be - Shirky posited it as merely putting a dead weight on the project, not actually driving it backwards. Did anyone actually predict it would result in CZ becoming a crank magnet? If anyone wanted to advocate credentialism on Wikimedia projects, they'd first have to work out how to fix the pseudoscience problem on CZ. - d.

On 31 August 2010 00:21, John Vandenberg &lt;jayvdb(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: The links are there if you want to read them. Wikipedia has the help of LOTS of people to get closer to NPOV. CZ artificially limited its contributor pool in important ways. The WP article is about dealing with an imperfect successful thing, not analysing a failure. Your point is unclear. - d.

Hoping I am not straying too far off-topic. I looked at the article on Young Earth Creationism in CZ http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Young_earth_creationism . It comes in from some heavy criticism in the RationalWiki article http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Citizendium for being "heavily (and "expertly") edited by Conservapedia sysop RJJensen". But when I look at the article it is not so bad. It is actually quite refreshing. It is mercifully short, and tells me the basic facts I need to know about YEC, i.e. what it is, who has defended it and why, and a bit of history. I expect the same article in WP would come with a pack of disclaimers like the health warning on a fag packet, skull and crossbones and all, thousands of citations, statements that practically all scientists say it is complete rubbish, plus a few sentences later on by a rogue YEC that was not spotted by the police, together with other conflicting statements so it all reads like a confusing usenet thread. As I say, the CZ article quietly says what it needs to, and does not attempt advocacy. Indeed it says "The Biblical story was not a contentious issue until the 19th century, when theologians started reinterpreting the Bible as a historical document (rather than divine revelation), and geologists such as James Hutton and Charles Lyell developed evidence, based on their analysis of geological processes and formations, the earth was not a few thousand years old but, in fact, several millions of years old. The appearance of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species in 1859 and the associated Theory of Evolution, provided evidence that life was much older than 6,000 years. Most Protestant theologians by 1900, including those opposed to the theory of evolution, rejected the 4004 BC model and argued the earth was very old. Many evangelical theologians adopted a figurative interpretation of the first two chapters of Genesis." Quite right. I shall look at the Scientology article next. Peter

From: "Michael Snow" &lt;wikipedia(a)verizon.net&gt; Sorry. It began with the David Gerard's assertion that 'credentialism' leads to crank-magnetism, and a link to an article he wrote (with some other RationalWiki editors) comparing Wikipedia with Citizendium. You think this is not relevant? John Vandenberg also questioned whether a serious study comparing the quality of articles between the two projects would not find more problems with Wikipedia (I think he is right). Peter

Peter Damian wrote: 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. If your intent is to discuss content issues in Wikipedia, then you need to actually explicitly discuss them. (Although 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.) --Michael Snow

Hello, I generally agree with Peter here. I think that there is a general problem of quality on Wikipedia articles, especially on articles about humanities, social sciences, etc. I also agree that letting the usual process to care about articles quality is not sufficient. In nearly ten years, there was enough time to fix the issue, if it the current policies would be appropriate for dealing with this problem. This also does not affect the English Wikipedia alone. For what I know, it also affects the French Wikipedia. So this list is appropriate to discuss this issue. Regards, Yann 2010/9/1 Peter Damian &lt;peter.damian(a)btinternet.com&gt;om>:

On 1 September 2010 00:27, John Vandenberg &lt;jayvdb(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: This appears to be a very inefficacious way for you to edit the wiki page you're talking about. - d.

On 31 August 2010 20:16, Peter Damian &lt;peter.damian(a)btinternet.com&gt; wrote: No, that section was substantially written by Trent Toulouse. - d.

From: "David Gerard" &lt;dgerard(a)gmail.com&gt; I did get the calculator out (sorry). There are 608 edits to the article. 252 were by you. I don't know what section you are referring to. I said 'page'. I concede you didn't write all the page, though. Peter

From: "John Vandenberg" &lt;jayvdb(a)gmail.com&gt; I looked at the two following two pages http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Alice_Bailey http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_Bailey The first of which (the CZ version) is mentioned in the RationalWiki page as an abomination. The CZ version is better. It is still too long for such a silly subject, but minute in comparison to the Wikipedia page, which is endless. So yes, a serious study comparing the "crank quotient" between the two encyclopedias would be interesting. I suspect WP would win (for crankiness, I mean) hands down. I attempted to document some of it here http://www.mywikibiz.com/Directory:The_Wikipedia_Point_of_View/Cranks but gave up, there is just too much. There are whole categories of it http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Theosophical_philosophical_concepts . And don't get me onto the subject of the gurus who are using the project to self-advertise http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Wilber . That gets me very close to what got me banned in the first place. (End of rant, sorry). Peter

On 08/29/2010 10:25 AM, Peter Damian wrote: Purely my personal take, but I've noticed problems on both the expert and non-expert sides in the humanities more than in science-related articles. On the one hand, people seem to more naturally understand that they need good sources in science, that a newspaper article needs to be used carefully (and weighted relative to better sources), etc. People don't always seem to sufficiently realize that, say, philosophy or sociology should also be treated similarly. On the other hand, though, I've noticed science and especially math experts to be generally more friendly in working with non-experts, though there are plenty of exceptions. I've *very* rarely seen a math professor resort to credentialism or looking down on inexpert contributors, even though we have some very well-credentialed mathematicians. Some have nearly saintly patience in explaining their edits and why the article should be changed in the manner they propose. But I've noticed depressingly many "ugh, as a PhD in [thing], I can't believe I have to argue with these idiots" elitist huffs from humanities professors and grad students. -Mark

From: "Fred Bauder" &lt;fredbaud(a)fairpoint.net&gt; To: "Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List" &lt;foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org&gt; Sent: Sunday, August 29, 2010 8:05 PM Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Organization on Wikipedia that deals with content issues. How would this system correct the obvious error in this article? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pro_hominem Which has been there 3 years.

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Pro_hominem&oldid=369721624 ----- Original Message ----- From: "Fred Bauder" &lt;fredbaud(a)fairpoint.net&gt; Well only if they can read Latin, which is not that usual these days. No: the error is more subtle in that it may be 'dog Latin' i.e. an error in common use rather like 'strictu dictu'*. How would the proof reader know that? The problem is that it has been there for so long that it is difficult to tell whether the Google search is turning up uses that have actually been *caused* by Wikipedia, so that Wikipedia is actually degrading human knowledge by introducing false information, in the manner of an urban myth, or whether the error predates that. Either way the issue would have to be noted in the article. I think it is beyond what simple proof-reading would give you. Who is going to do that? It comes back to my earlier point: there simply aren't enough people with the right knowledge to do this. There needs to be some way of making Wikipedia more 'knowledge friendly', but hard to see how that could be practically achieved. Peter *I have just noticed there is no entry on 'strictu dictu'!