Stirling Newberry wrote:
On Apr 14, 2005, at 7:38 AM, Faraaz Damji wrote:
I disagree. I've found most people to be kind and helpful. Something like Wikipedia tends to draw people of a different intellectual and moral level than most other environments, and I think that a lot of editors have come to value that. If you think that there are serious problems with Wikipedia, there's nothing stopping you from starting another wiki encyclopedia with Wikipedia's content since everything is GFDL'd.
Of course the people who are left are happy, it is selection in action. However, in about 2 years when growth rates on en have flattened off it will be very visible, the pove growth curve will have long since outstripped the wikipedian growth curve. At that point it will be noticeable to the outside world and it will be your competition that notices it. Right now, of course, everyone is drunk on growth rates and ever argument is ended by "I'm happy" and "look how fast we are growing, clearly people are happy". This has happened before to numerous internet communities - intoxication on the flood of eyeballs.
Amen. For a serious encyclopedia, it should be just as important to track the knowledge level of the editing, and my unscientific observation is that expert-level participation has been flat at best, even though the number of editors has been increasing. For instance, we seem to have averaged only about one serious ichthyology active at any one time during the past two years. So we get a situation where there is no one writing about fish physiology, but hey, we have a "shark template".
I don't have anything against obscure football clubs or train stations, and have added my own share of trivia, but I could easily see experts flocking to improve Encarta because the process is friendlier to them, while WP becomes known as the preserve of soccer hooligans and trainspotters. :-)
Stan