At 05:29 PM 8/31/02 -0700, Larry Sanger wrote:
In particular, the Wikipedia project has been defined in such a way that we have few official standards and no virtually requirements for
quality... 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. 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.
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.
The free encyclopedia movement is 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. [T]he right thing [to do is to] ask Jacques Barzun (before he dies), or some other distinguished intellectual, to head up the project properly...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?
But no expert will want to [contribute] 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.
Yes, is there traction where the rubber meets the road? The community I live in has a number of retired and semi-retired people living in it and from time to time I talk up Wikipedia to them. I wonder what they think when they log on. I spoke to a man who edits books that are published by university presses yesterday. He had been following a cricket match on the internet back in his home town in England. I suggested he might write an article on cricket. (He brought cricket up since the word wikipedia made him think it had something to do with cricket).
I doubt he will contribute, might not even log on. The question I had as I talked to him and later was how would wikipedia fit into his life, perhaps as an occasional pastime, perhaps as an avocation. As a professional editor, he would be a fine catch, but to him that's work and work that he's paid for. But he is just one of millions of highly qualified people who might potentially contribute.
One key is respect. We don't know when a former editor of the New York Times logs on and edits a bit on an article, but if he comes back and his contribution is trashed and he has to argue about nonsense, it's doubtful he'll return.
It's true that bad software won't run, sometimes won't even boot, but an encyclopedia also has it everyday threshold of success and failure: is it useful to its range of users, providing accurate basic information and leading the user on to useful external and hardcopy resources? If it is, it will be used and relied on. Range of users, that's a good topic.
Fred