Dear all,
I've been away from active involvement with Wikipedia for many months now, though I occasionally still lurk on Wikipedia-L and make a casual edit on the website when I feel so moved.
My distance from the project, and some recent reading about Linux and open source software, has made something clear to me in the past few days: there is a profound disanalogy between the development of our free encyclopedias and the development of free operating systems and software.
In particular, the Wikipedia project has been defined in such a way that we have few official standards and no virtually requirements for quality of the rigorous sort that Linux had when it set out to rewrite Unix from scratch (and later remain compliant with stringent technical standards like the POSIX standard). Linus Torvalds' task had well-defined parameters that absolutely required a lot of genuine expertise. Our task, by contrast, is to write a very large, unbiased encyclopedia. What this task entails is far more nebulous (though I and others have worked very hard to settle on and explain what it does involve), and many reasonable people reasonably think that this doesn't strictly speaking require genuine expertise.
But it does. If you think otherwise, you're living in a fantasy world. The fact that there is no organization like the IEEE staffed by world-class experts defining a standard that we must follow doesn't mean that our work doesn't require expertise to finish credibly. I think writing *and finishing* a credible draft of an encyclopedia requires more and a wider range of expertise than the free software movement has. If our encyclopedia project doesn't get an infusion of that expertise, the quality of the result will suffer accordingly, which is a lot.
The problem is that, with several notable exceptions, highly-educated people aren't drawn to Wikipedia. It's not surprising why not: I would like to suggest that this is similar to asking veteran programmers working on Linux and its applications to work with, supervise, and put up with rank beginners and script kiddies. If they had had to do that, I doubt very much that the free software movement would have come a fraction of the distance it has.
Please don't misunderstand. My concern with expertise and knowledgeable participants does not reflect an overvaluation of formal qualifications, or academic elitism, by the way. (If you think I have enormous respect for someone just on the basis of their academic credentials, you *really* don't know me.) If someone without a degree (I can think of a few) can write and think well and convey what they know in a way that reflects expert knowledge on the subject, that's great. May their kind be fruitful and multiply (among our ranks). There's no reason for me to suggest otherwise, just as there's no reason to ask free software developers to have degrees in computer science before they get their hands dirty working on open source software.
Consider this. Eric Raymond might be correct that free software development is represented as a bazaar. What is perhaps less often acknowledged is that it is a bazaar full of extremely highly-qualified, knowledgeable people. In this bazaar, the bar to *productive* and *original* development is set very high. (Conveniently, it's not people that set the bar high but instead the facts of reality about how hard it is to develop software.) It is also less often acknowledged that there are necessarily elite groups--elites based on merit, but elites nonetheless--who are in charge of releasing new versions of important packages. That's as it should be.
Wikipedia is quite different. The bar to contribution is very low, and if there is any elite in charge, then with all due respect to everyone (and that's a lot--there are a lot of *extremely* smart and knowledgeable people here), our elite would seem rather less than impressive compared to the leading members of the intelligentsia that contribute to the likes of Britannica.
Along these lines I suggest there's another disanalogy between the free software movement and our free encyclopedia movement. The free software movement is organized and led by world-class computer scientists associated with industry and academia. The free encyclopedia movement is much newer, but (forgive me) it doesn't seem to be travelling in the direction of being led by world-class thinkers, scholars, and scientists, as a close analogy would seem to require. To be quite honest, it was good to lay me off when economic necessity required; now do the right thing and ask Jacques Barzun (before he dies), or some other distinguished intellectual, to head up the project properly.
If we really want to make the best encyclopedia in the world (the original stated goal of Nupedia, by the way), we must discuss a pressing question that I suspect very few people on this list are disposed to take very seriously: how can we arrange for our free encyclopedia movement to be led by representatives of the creme de la creme among the world's scholars and scientists?
Now, I would not dream of suggesting that *Wikipedia* change its policies of openness. Basically, I don't think Wikipedia should change. It is what it is and it has produced a huge number of *great* articles. It's amazing that it works as well as it does, and I continue to expect that it will result in a useful, interesting, huge body of work if we continue on in the same way we have been.
That said, all of my previous predictions of huge success for the free encyclopedia movement were based on the assumption that a Nupedia, or some other quality control mechanism, would eventually mature into something to inspire confidence among the leaders of different fields, so that contributions and editing would be of the highest quality. But if no such mechanism materializes, I would be much less apt to predict success, in terms of quality of articles, for Wikipedia. Wikipedia by itself will continue to go on to useful things, interesting things--but not great things.
So I don't propose we touch Wikipedia--but we have Nupedia. What I hope is that Nupedia can be changed and rearranged, somehow, to create an elite board of bona fide experts that is ultimately in charge of "releases" of free encyclopedia content.
Whatever the specific Nupedia article creation and/or vetting process might turn out to be--see the Nupedia-L archives for discussion ad nauseum--one thing is increasingly clear to me. Namely, unless there is a dramatic change in how the free encyclopedia movement is organized, Wikipedia will be stuck with, on balance, mediocrity.
Lest you think yourself insulted, let me offer an example of mediocrity: my many philosophy articles. They are full of content, they are basically correct, many of them (those that have been re-edited from lecture form) are reasonably well-written--but they are woefully inadequate and basically mediocre. I would be ashamed to bill them as anything other than what they are--very rough first drafts based on lectures to OSU undergrads, which sit there waiting for some experts to, probably, completely rework them, or even replace them.
But no expert will want to do that until the whole project is led by similar experts and therefore, to their mind, there is some guarantee that the project will not wind up being an enormous waste of time. Without that sort of leadership, I fear that my articles, and the many other fair-to-middling (but basically correct and perfectly contentful) Wikipedia articles, will never receive the vetting from qualified people that they really need.
(I acknowledge that an appropriate response to this is: "I agree, but what are you bothering Wikipedia-L about it for? Go post to Nupedia-L." Basically, Wikipedia is the only game left in town as far as the free encyclopedia movement is concerned. If enough of you get behind this, something might happen. To my mind, Wikipedia shouldn't change but Nupedia can and should, and Wikipedia might benefit directly.)
Larry