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