I have recently been reading the Ambassadors, by Henry James. Here is the version from 2005: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Ambassadors&oldid=32161591 Here is the current version http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ambassadors They are both very bad. So, two points. (1) Wikipedia was very bad in 2005. (2) It hasn't changed since 2005. This raises a number of important questions.

I thought you were awarding the post a score of 0 :)

Ryan Kaldari wrote: It would be all too cheap a jibe to attribute to a self-proclaimed philosopher an ignorance of scientific method and assert that blind adoption of the continuity principle is contrary to that method; however, it is fair to say that his interests largely lie in medieval philosophy and may not reach as far as the works of Karl Popper, let alone the Renaissance. So I will not level that accusation. _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l

How would locking Wikipedia down fulfill the mission to collect all the

Putting this in context.  If I were to donate, say £1,500 of gross income to WMF, it would be reasonable to ask what this money was for: how it was helping. The WMF goal is to "collect and developing educational content and to disseminate it effectively and globally".  Wikipedia is the main engine of this project, and is the reason I imagine most people want to donate money.  Would I donate such a sum of money if I thought that it was not actually helping develop educational content?  Hence my question: has Wikipedia actually changed since 2005?  Has any educational content been added (I am not including porn star bios as educational content, clearly). I had three answers: 1.  The first that this was seriously off-topic.  I don't understand why not. 2.  The second compared Wikipedia to going to the barbers, getting a nice trim, and then the hair getting all messy again.  That is clearly not a reason for donating money, quite the reverse.  How is the money actually going to help, if it all is going to be a mess again in 6 months?  I appreciate a lot of it goes to support the servers and IT and things, but wouldn't it be more efficient simply to stop people editing, clear up some of the mess, and lock Wikipedia down?  That would be much cheaper.  And I would be willing to fund a clean-up effort. 3.  I wasn't quite sure of Phil Nash's objection, I think he was trying to say that there is no evidence of Wikipedia failing to develop or grow.  To that, I say that if I am going to donate money, I would like clear evidence that Wikipedia is progressing in the direction I would hope. I would like to point out I do support a number of charities.  I help the Warburg institute with its library acquisition fund.  This makes hard-to-get books available to students.  I don't support WMF, and I won't until there is clear evidence the money would be used for a good purpose.  What do others think?  Why do people donate to WMF? Peter

>Only a tiny number of articles were considered of high enough quality to >be

>Can the content of all our projects be improved? Of course it can; even >our

>I'd suggest, however, that the progress of only a handful of the 12 >million

Risker >>In 2005, the English Wikipedia had less than half the number of articles it has now. Hs anyone made a serious study of what these articles actually contain? "featured" in 2005; that number has grown exponentially at the same time as quality standards for featured content has become more rigorous. I think the featured articles are generally of merit.  I would never deny that. highest quality content benefits from periodic review and improvement. My point was rather that the content in certain areas is abysmal and easily improved.  Linguistics, economics, sociology and of course philosophy are in a terrible state. articles and files across the WMF group is probably not the best way to assess the overall quality of the project. Well featured articles are a handful of the 12 million articles aren't they? The only way to deal with this issue is methodically.  Take any humanities subject, and compare the quality and proportionality of the treatment with any standard reference work on the same subject.  My strong sense, in my own area of specialisation, is that Wikipedia is very poor. Nathan >>You are, and have been, committed to several conclusions about Wikipedia - that the idea of an editable encyclopedia itself is fatally flawed, that it is unduly oriented to topics of interest to "the masses", and that the community and its bureaucracy are [sic] hopefully corrupt and ineffective. I don't see an argument here.  I don't think that Wikipedia is fatally flawed, by any means.  I have pointed out areas of weakness. On the point about 'the masses', surely you agree there is a balance to strike between appealing to the popular, and 'education'.  Education by definition is allowing people to acquire knowledge, stuff they wouldn't have got for themselves without help.  I have been a teacher, and I am strongly committed to that ideal. And there is strong evidence of corruption, but as I was banned for pointing that out, it is unfair of you to bring it up, I think.

It's always been my impression that you fundamentally disagree with the idea of allowing a popular reference work to be written by anyone who wants to participate, advanced education or no. Perhaps this is because you view Wikipedia as an attempt at educating the public.

Can you give an example of what "appeal to the popular" means in the

I dont understand how information about pornography, computer games, tv shows... is not educational. If I want to know whether Berle Ives was ever a guest star on Bewitched, why wouldn't we fulfill a request like that in project ?

Quote: "Then you are misunderstanding the meaning of the word 'educational' I think. " Perhaps the word you want is "academic".

No I meant 'educational'.  I'm actually quite shocked by some of the things being said in this thread, and that the people who have said them are running Wikipedia. Does anyone else, apart from these two, have any views on what they have said?  The WMF goal is about "collecting and developing educational content".  Does that mean 'education' in the sense I have characterised it? I.e. bringing to the public subjects that are generally not ephemeral or trivial, and which are enduring and a monument to the human spirit, and generally noble and good, in a way that is interesting and accessible? I would be interested in other people's views.

----- Original Message ----- From: "Wjhonson" <wjhonson(a)aol.com> To: <foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org> Sent: Thursday, September 16, 2010 9:46 PM Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Has Wikipedia changed since 2005? No I meant 'educational'. I'm actually quite shocked by some of the things being said in this thread, and that the people who have said them are running Wikipedia. Does anyone else, apart from these two, have any views on what they have said? The WMF goal is about "collecting and developing educational content". Does that mean 'education' in the sense I have characterised it? I.e. bringing to the public subjects that are generally not ephemeral or trivial, and which are enduring and a monument to the human spirit, and generally noble and good, in a way that is interesting and accessible? I would be interested in other people's views.

Regarding 'academic' and 'educational'. These are not the same.  Friday's featured article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Today%27s_featured_article/September… is about the Ormulum http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ormulum . This is a well-written article, which identifies the salient points and presents them clearly and in a way that interests the reader.  It is not too long, and it covers a subject which is not trivial or ephemeral.  But it is not academic. It is not written in an academic style, it does not present original research, and so on.  It is a presentation of an academic subject intended to appeal to a mass audience.

I agree that the core content of Wikipedia should be educational, not trivia.

Of course, the quality of most articles has improved, but I would like to see some serious study about this unbalance [between triv and educational content], and what WMF intends to do to correct this.

From: Bod Notbod <bodnotbod(a)gmail.com> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Has Wikipedia changed since 2005? To: "Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List" <foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org> Date: Saturday, 18 September, 2010, 1:04 On Fri, Sep 17, 2010 at 10:58 AM, Yann Forget <yannfo(a)gmail.com> wrote: educational, not trivia. Well, here's our core content (5 thousand or so out of 3.x million): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Vital_articles/Expanded As it happens I've been proofreading articles of late; under nobody's say-so I've decided to work my through The Time 100: http://205.188.238.181/time/time100/leaders/ I'm only through the first 12. I have to say, I've been delighted by what I've seen. 12 out of 3.x million isn't a much better sample than the two or three this thread has so far been offered. So all we can say at this point is that "one user thinks that nothing is better since 2005" whilst "another user thinks that what we have in 2010 is delightful". Which brings us back the question: what is the quality of our content? Well this list of the 1,000 most important articles as judged by [waves hand, but I think we'll grant that they think [[Biology]] more important than [[Mr Hankey the Christmas Poo]] ] doesn't give any figures but does show the quality rating for each article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Core_topics_-_1,000 Scanning with my eyes I see a lot of green, where green = B. So there is your answer, probably. Wikipedia's grade is B. What does B mean? Here we are: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:B-criteria Hey, that sounds pretty good! So: In 2010 we can say "Wikipedia is pretty good". Unfortunately this still leaves the question: was Wikipedia pretty good in 2005? I find I feel absolutely no compulsion to attempt to answer this. But since it is a question of importance to Peter Damian he will of course present data of comparable complexity to mine after the weekend. Deciding whether to give money to an educational charity that "has made 1,000 educational topics available for free which are pretty good" is a matter for one's own heart. but I would like [between triv and educational content], and what WMF Correction implies wrongness. There will always be more television programmes, long playing records, popular beat combos and innovative sex toys than there will be Einsteins, paradigm shifting scientific discoveries and philosophical enquiries. These are the degraded times in which we live. I suspect the popularity of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales in his day was rightly castigated for being nothing more than a tawdry narrative of Miller's arses. Society really started to go downhill in the 14th century and absolutely nothing has improved since then. But since we must live with the triv/education imbalance that Chaucer burdened us with, we can at least pray that the twelve year old who religiously edits [[Numb3rs]] (sic) now might be editing [[mathematical modelling]] in a decade's time; after all the second is wikilinked in the first. It's surely not too much to ask that someone clicks his mouse once each either side of puberty? But I agree with Yann... we should remove our article on [[Crazy Frog]]. Isn't it horrifying to think how broad our coverage is? I can't tell you how angry I feel when someone tells me they know of Wikipedia. I'm glad at first, of course, but when they tell me they were searching Google for [[Hanson (band)]] and we were one of the top ten hits, I am repulsed. I am forced to think "Bleurgh! We don't want *that* *sort* *of* *person* here!" And, no, I am not mollified when they say "I found out that one member had a [[pulmonary embolism]], I didn't know what that was, so I clicked. And there someone had spelt 'heart' as 'haert' so I changed it and from that point I got excited about Wikipedia." This sort of story I find eminently vomit-inducing and I generally stalk their contributions waiting for them to do something else objectionable so that I can get the mods to ban them. Unfortunately he hasn't done anything that falls outside the guidelines yet, these last five years, but he will one day and I'll be there. I estimate that about 70% of our content should be jettisoned. That 70% of material does absolutely nothing but pique people's prurient interest in Wikipedia, it brings undesirable people on board that then have the temerity to add sourced contributions to core articles, and I suspect these people then go off and tell other people about Wikipedia. I mean, who needs it? User:Bodnotbod _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l

What would you suggest the Wikimedia Foundation do to address the coverage problem in the humanities? Employ academic experts to add content? Delete ephemera to improve the balance of topics?

You haven't demonstrated there is enough of a problem even to induce people here to jump into action, let alone the Foundation doing so.

There are lots of people who complain about our humanities content,

You've had several examples of the sort of quality survey that would demonstrate clearly not merely that there was a problem, but what its nature was and to what degree.

The usual way to fix such systemic bias is to get people actually involved in writing in the areas in question. This is hard, but it's also the method that will actually work.

There are various methods to bootstrap such a process. e.g. What's the financial model for the SEP? It's under an all rights reserved licence, but it doesn't generate an income in any way I can see. If it were placed under a CC by-sa licence, that would not take away from the prestige of the SEP and would help get its content somewhere it was read.

----- Original Message ----- From: "David Gerard" <dgerard(a)gmail.com> To: "Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List" <foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org> Sent: Saturday, September 18, 2010 5:46 PM Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Has Wikipedia changed since 2005? You say and then you say This seems contradictory. And in any case, the point you were replying to was that the main problem is recognising that there is a problem: your reply is symptomatic of that. The best suggestion is to take a list of what any humanities scholar would regard as the most significant or important humanities articles. 100 of these, for example (and NOT using the Wikipedia importance-assessment method which is grossly flawed). We don't have to rely on subjective judgment. For philosophy, I could take the top 20 (by coverage) articles in a standard reference work (The Oxford Companion would be a start). For assessment of quality there are various benchmarks that could be used, relying on standard reference works, for example, or other objective criteria. Andreas suggested one earlier: if standard reference works say that there are 3 components to a particular writer's work, does Wikipedia mention these? Does it assign due weight to these? And so on. How? Are you going to do this? How are you going to attract philosophers to Wikipedia? After 10 years, why hasn't the natural process of crowdsourcing already achieved this? In any case, the first step is to establish that there is a serious problem.

The SEP, as I have already pointed out, is not a good model for a mass publication like Wikipedia. The style and approach required are quite different. Peter _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l

I agree with that. The first step is to acknowkedge that there is a problem. But most people I have read about this topic even deny that. So we can't go further until this is accepted. BTW this is also the case on the French Wikipedia, so the issue is not restricted to the English Wikipedia.

(1) demanding subject matter, requiring some familiarity with the topic area to be able to contribute effectively (2) the relative scarcity of editors who have prior knowledge in these areas. So "throwing more editors at the Humanities problem" through a WikiProject may not work in this case. Getting students and academics involved might.

On 09/19/2010 06:48 AM, Andreas Kolbe wrote: I'm not entirely sure how accurate this is, so I'm just making a raw conjecture here that is completely unsupported by facts other than perhaps by general observations: Is it possible that the problem with the humanities-related articles on Wikipedia has more to do with the lack of an existing culture of "copyleft" or public domain collaboration? It has taken literally decades of effort that go back even a couple of decades earlier of similar efforts to put together what is today the "open source movement" that has produced things like Linux, the GNU tools, and software like Apache. Wikipedia is a product of this environment too, where many of those who have participated in developing open source software don't hesitate to at least add a couple of paragraphs to Wikipedia.

On 09/19/2010 06:52 PM, wiki-list(a)phizz.demon.co.uk wrote: While I appreciate extending the analogy, you are missing my point here. Geeks have been used to the philosophy of collaboratively written documents (including software) for quite some time and this was ingrained into at least a significant sub-set of technologically minded people for quite some time. It is this culture of sharing with one another and having no stigma of sharing your work and letting potentially millions of others poke at your work, tweak it or even trash it. It isn't just this software but the tens of thousands of other applications that have been built and shared with the world. Wikipedia was formed from this community where sharing this kind of information was even a second nature. Indeed it has been encouraged for people of a technical nature to share the information they know with one another. What I'm trying to point out is that a similar sub-culture within the community that works on arts and literature is such a minority that you might as well not really pay attention to it. Certainly academia isn't embracing Wikipedia for multiple reasons. That may be part of it as those in an academic situation tend to be a minority in technical fields but tend to dominate those with studies in the humanities. They are also hesitant to work collaboratively and even when that happens it tends to be very small groups... not groups of dozens or hundreds involved. A paper on physics may have hundreds of co-authors, but a similar academic paper on Greek Mythology may only have a couple authors or a single author. This is a cultural difference that can't be understated.

On 09/19/2010 06:52 PM, wiki-list(a)phizz.demon.co.uk wrote: While I appreciate extending the analogy, you are missing my point here. Geeks have been used to the philosophy of collaboratively written documents (including software) for quite some time and this was ingrained into at least a significant sub-set of technologically minded people for quite some time. It is this culture of sharing with one another and having no stigma of sharing your work and letting potentially millions of others poke at your work, tweak it or even trash it.

It isn't just this software but the tens of thousands of other applications that have been built and shared with the world. Wikipedia was formed from this community where sharing this kind of information was even a second nature. Indeed it has been encouraged for people of a technical nature to share the information they know with one another. What I'm trying to point out is that a similar sub-culture within the community that works on arts and literature is such a minority that you might as well not really pay attention to it. Certainly academia isn't embracing Wikipedia for multiple reasons. That may be part of it as those in an academic situation tend to be a minority in technical fields but tend to dominate those with studies in the humanities. They are also hesitant to work collaboratively and even when that happens it tends to be very small groups... not groups of dozens or hundreds involved. A paper on physics may have hundreds of co-authors, but a similar academic paper on Greek Mythology may only have a couple authors or a single author. This is a cultural difference that can't be understated.

Bod Notbod, when you say, "I see a lot of green", it's also worth looking at what B actually means. The article on Doris Lessing for example, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, is B class. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doris_lessing It is woefully inadequate. It says there are three phases to her writing, communist, psychological, and sufic. Only the latter has any coverage at all, and it is generally the least highly regarded part of her output. Everything there is on superficial "controversies" (why did she write science fiction, is she a feminist). Almost all the sources are newspaper articles; there is not a trace of the available peer-reviewed literature on her output. It is much the same in the article on Selma Lagerlöf, another Nobel Prize winner, which is Start class. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selma_Lagerlöf Again, no trace of the scholarly literature. The only biography listed in the bibliography is "Who’s Who in Gay and Lesbian History from Antiquity to World War II", which is sort of typical. I think there *is* a problem with the humanities, as well as with the gender imbalance in Wikipedia. It would be worthwhile to study the location of these deficiencies in more depth, and perhaps to establish links to universities, similar to the recently launched public policy initiative, to address the areas where Wikipedia's natural contributor base does most poorly.