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