Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales wrote:
Andre Engels wrote:
This seems to be exactly the problem Larry Sanger
talks about - We
don't care whether somebody is a renowned expert on a subject or has
just read a few lines related to a subject in the past. If they can
write it down, we consider them equal.
Some in the community surely do feel this way. But I don't, and my
impression from talking to and meeting tons of wikipedia volunteers is
a very profound respect for learning, and a keen desire that we *get
it right*.
I haven't seen this either---especially in areas that would benefit from
(or even, arguably, require) strong expertise to do well, like technical
articles on mathematics, there is a tendency to defer to those who have
demonstrated they know what they're doing. If [[User:Michael Hardy]]
says something about mathematics that is contrary to my understanding, I
won't change it unless I'm *very* certain and discuss it first, while if
it's a random user, I may well assume I'm probably right and go ahead
and change it.
Perhaps what some experts dislike is that being an expert is only one
criterion the community uses to evaluate people. Not all experts are
good at writing articles for a general-audience encyclopedia, or working
with others on a collaborative project, and those are also criteria we
use. Which is as it should be---we're writing an encyclopedia, so we
need good encyclopedia writers, which is a different sort of work than
writing journal articles is.
I think you will find, though, that there will be a lot of deference
given to people who: have expertise in a field, write readably for
people outside their field, don't try to push particular controversial
viewpoints, and work well with others.
I do agree that better review systems are needed, but frankly, I'm not
sure how much we should pay attention to Larry Sanger on this matter.
He has, to my knowledge, not edited Wikipedia at all except for those
times when he was paid a salary to do so. When he stopped being paid,
he immediately left and seems to have spent most of his time since
attacking Wikipedia. If I recall correctly, he wrote his first "what
Wikipedia needs to do" manifesto approximately the day after he stopped
being paid.
Perhaps more importantly, (some of) his articles are a good case in
point for why we shouldn't give undue weight to experts in a field.
Take a look at [[en:Physicalism/Larry's text]], for example. This is a
philosophy article, a field in which Dr. Sanger has a PhD. By contrast,
I've taken a grand total of six undergraduate courses in the field, but
I could already write a better article than this in about an hour off
the top of my head.
The most severe problem is that it mis-defines physicalism within the
first paragraph, which is a rather inauspicious start. Dr. Sanger
defines physicalism as the position that the mental is reducible to the
physical, which is actually known as "reductive physicalism". There are
other physicalist positions, collectively known as non-reductive
physicalism, which happen to be among the more active areas of research
in recent years. (These positions claim supervenience of the mental on
the physical, but not reduction.) Dr. Sanger was either completely
unaware of this large body of work, and so wrote an inaccurate article,
or deliberately ignored it, and so wrote a biased article.
By comparison, the replacement article at [[physicalism]], which does
not appear to have been written by PhDs in philosophy, is a sparse but
accurate summary of the various strains of physicalism (which ought to
clear up the above paragraph for those left befuddled by my summary).
-Mark