--- Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
Karl Juhnke wrote:
I know from my father's reaction to Wikipedia (i.e. complete dismissal) how damaging it is to have poor articles, and how much preferable it would be to have nothing at all rather than garbage or a pathetic stub. On the other hand, now that I am a contributor myself, I can see how counterproductive it would be to try to remove everything that "lowers the average".
This is very interesting. Now how do you convince your father to contribute?!
Believe me, I am trying to get him on board! (I will hook him before Wikipedia is mainstream, i.e. he won't be last to join.) He is a historian, and was a college professor for over thirty years before retiring this past May. He would be the perfect Wikipedia contributor, as he has both expertise and plenty of time he can choose to dispose of as he sees fit.
Your father is likely the product of an educational philosophy that promoted the passive consumption of knowledge. What was then written in the texbooks was undisputable truth that you only questioned at your own peril.
On the contrary, he is a revisionist, you might say a subversive even. He believes in Truth, but also in disputation. He's a genuine scholar.
I am getting off topic, but I will share what happened when I tried to enlist him. Because he is a Mennonite (although not specifically an expert on Mennonite history) he went quickly to the pages on Anabaptists and Mennonites. To impress upon him how easy it is for anyone to contribute, I persuaded him to fill in a hole (Leader of Amish = Jakob Amman). But that was as much as he would do.
He declined to contribute further on grounds that the articles didn't need little fixes and additions, they were fundamentally flawed needed to be rewritten from the ground up. "Anyone who traces Anabaptists to the Zwickau prophets might as well be writing in 1930, and obviously hasn't read any modern research," he said. He then took me in hand and showed me how the article on Anabaptists in our old Collier's Encyclopedia (Written in the 1960's. On paper. Positively antediluvian.) was in every way superior scholarship. His conclusion: "Editorial accretion will never make a good article."
He is wrong, of course. Eventually the Wikipedia article will be superior to the one in our ancient Colliers. He hasn't seen articles improving, so he doesn't know the mechanics. But I think in general people who don't grok Wikipedia will judge it by comparing it to more static sources of information. The more expertise they have, the higher the quality of existing information Wikipedia will need to have to excite thier interest and participation.
Someday there will be a half-dozen historians contributing to Wikipedia who are interested in exactly the same topics my father is interested in. At that point he will want to be part of the conversation. But for now he has no inclination to cast his pearls before swine. "Why would I want to collaborate with someone who can't be bothered to look up Jakob Amman's name?" he says, and I can't blame him.
Peace, -Karl
P.S. Please understand that I am not casting aspersions on Wesley for his work on Anabaptists. I couldn't do as well myself. I'm just picking on that article to make a general point that most non-Wikipedians judge us based on our current content, not our process. Relating this back to stub articles, there's no way around the fact that people unfamiliar with the process will be turned off by stubs. To repeat a point from my previous article, we have to make every effort to _immediately_ re-edit and respond to anything a newbie does in order to initiate them into the joy. There is no way to adequately explain it; a contributor has to viscerally experience what it means to be involved in collaborative editing.
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