--- Ray Saintonge <saintonge(a)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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