[Wikipedia-l] [Nupedia-l] Discussion and a proposal (fwd)

This might be of some interest to you. This is a discussion, posted on Nupedia-l, of some problems Nupedia is facing, together with a proposed solution. One part of the solution is to add a link to Wikipedia article pages saying (something like) "Submit this article to Nupedia." This would take you to a page where further information would be solicited. Successful submission of an article to Nupedia would be noted on the Recent Changes page, as would final approval of any Wikipedia-originated Nupedia article. This *isn't* approved yet. It's just FYI. If you want to discuss it, it would be better that you do so on Nupedia-l rather than Wikipedia-l. You can subscribe to Nupedia-l here: http://www.nupedia.com/mailman/listinfo/nupedia-l --Larry ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Mon, 8 Oct 2001 16:42:38 -0700 (PDT) From: lsanger(a)nupedia.com Reply-To: nupedia-l(a)nupedia.com To: nupedia-l(a)nupedia.com Subject: [Nupedia-l] Discussion and a proposal Please, read through this whole thing before responding to any part of it. I know it's long, but it sums up my thinking on the issues pretty well. I. First problem: bottlenecks I've been looking over all the many comments about the future of Nupedia with great interest. One strand of the discussion, started by Andreas Flack, is that Nupedia's system can be improved in various ways. One of these ways was to create reminder e-mails. As Magnus said, we already have many such e-mails (it took Toan and I some weeks to design them properly, last January and February, I suppose it was). It's worth noting that most people simply delete these reminder e-mails as soon as they receive them. Some of the other proposed changes are fairly cosmetic changes that would very likely speed things up somewhat, but overall, not very much, I suspect. I designed the process with the help of people from advisory-l and nupedia-l, and Toan and I designed the system to implement the process. I've also addressed problems at every step of the way. As I said (in great detail, which I am not going to repeat) last spring, there are bottlenecks at *every* step--dozens of potential bottlenecks, really. Getting rid of a few of them will speed things up, yes, but not significantly over the long haul. This is why I'm opposed to confining our changes to the system to relatively cosmetic changes. Another point discussed by Andreas and others and replied to by G. B. Lane is that we should do what we can in order to find replacements for delinquent reviewers and writers. As G. B. well said, this is a heck of a lot harder than it sounds. Finding a qualified reviewer for a single article might be easy for the most distinguished leaders of a field, but it can be quite difficult for people who are not so high on the academic/research totem pole, particularly when one must sell the *project* at the same time. On this point, I think we should all defer to the experience of G. B.; if you're not an editor, you don't understand the problem as well as he does. In sum, even our most dedicated, motivated members have complained of endless bottlenecks in the process. I don't think that removing just one or two of the bottlenecks is going to speed things up very much. The problem is not cosmetic, to be solved by small tweaks to the system. II. Second problem: lack of adequate credibility Many people, both potential and former participants, have been turned off by the fact that participation in the Nupedia project requires that people do for free what they would do elsewhere for pay. Brad Eden's comments are typical in this regard and totally understandable. The fact that Nupedia is an open content project--that our articles are freely distributable to anyone by anyone, and not just by the website Nupedia.com--does not seem to matter to them. And why should we expect it to matter to everyone? Just because *we're* convinced, that doesn't mean they will be. In response, we can sing the praises of open content, that it involves contributing free information to the world and that this cause is worthy. But, of course, there are many people who won't be convinced, and we shouldn't wring our hands if they're not convinced; we should instead regard their skepticism as a constraint on how we design our projects. It's difficult enough to organize academics to do difficult academic work, for which they'd ordinarily be paid, for free. It's even more difficult to get them to do that sort of work if they feel, as Brad feels, that their time is being wasted because the system forces them to work with people that they feel are underqualified. I'm *sure* that's one of the weaknesses of the current system that runs Nupedia--let alone Wikipedia. (This is not to say, however, that I agree with Brad's dim assessment of the state of Nupedia's music category at present.) I don't think we should simply dismiss these concerns. We can pontificate all we like about the virtues of open content, but that's not going to change the *facts* about the people we would like to have involved. I know that Jimbo and others are very concerned about making Nupedia more open, like Wikipedia, and I *completely* sympathize; but I think we should resign ourselves to the fact that the people whom we want to write for Nupedia don't want to be part of a wide-open project. Instead, we should make it as easy as possible for them to get to work in their *own* element. I don't think we can *expect* many academics to work closely with nonexperts--and that's what we ask academics to do if we ask them to join a fully bazaar-like model, like Wikipedia. It seems to me it would be best to have as efficient (but still high-quality) article-creation model as possible for them to use, and if they become impressed Wikipedia along the way, grand--we can welcome to Wikipedia with open arms. If we make it easier for Wikipedians to submit good Wikipedia articles to Nupedia, we will thereby expose Nupedian academics to the virtues of Wikipedia. III. The range of options open to us Therefore, the way I see it, if we want to redesign Nupedia's editorial process, we can choose revisions from a continuum with (at least) two extremes. At one extreme, Bomis would try to make Nupedia an ueber-elitist project, not unlike the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, accepting submissions from and making reviewers of only the leading researchers in any field. Another option in this direction, but less extreme, would be for us to revert to a traditional peer review system, completely redesigning (but radically simplifying) the system. At the other end of the continuum--and this is actually *not* seriously proposed by anyone--Nupedia would become another version of Wikipedia. Since Wikipedia already exists, this is silly; but in this direction, Nupedia could become *no more than* an approval process for Wikipedia. The latter would cause a mass exodus of people like Brad--most of our most qualified, distinguished participants on Nupedia. I know some of you on Nupedia-l just don't care about having the participation of academics and bona fide experts, but I think this is a huge mistake. If our open content encyclopedia projects are going to achieve their full potential, we *must* have the participation of these people. It would be a mistake not to let our *most qualified* potential participants stay in the project--on their own terms. So, I think Brad has an excellent point. It's one that Michael Witbrock emphasized to me very forcefully and persuasively when I visited him in Boston: to succeed, the project has to have even *more* credibility among its most qualified potential participants. I think Andreas' suggestion, that we feel free to replace reviewers and authors as necessary, is fine, but it's implausible that it would help much to adopt this policy explicitly, for the reason G. B. Lane gave. As I'd put it, for any given topic, on Nupedia, there is bound to be only a very few people who are *both* interested in writing on that topic *and* willing to revise someone else's work. Similarly with reviewers--it's hard enough finding just *one* qualified reviewer for an article. In other words, Nupedia's problem isn't that the project is closed to our finding replacement authors and reviewers when necessary--it's that we couldn't find enough *qualified* people even if it *were* generally open. I think you'd find most Nupedia editors would agree with this. IV. The proposal It's with these sorts of thoughts in mind that I have come around to the following proposal. This is something Jimbo suggested many months ago and that Claus Wilke has articulated recently. In fact, it was probably suggested by some wise person when we were designing a review system in the first place. I. Replace the current Nupedia system with a simple, traditional review process, to be designed by the members of advisory-l. This would at a minimum involve (1) writers either being assigned an article or simply submitting articles to the editor, (2) the editor deciding whether to assign the article to a reviewer or reviewers or reject it outright, (3) a reviewer or reviewers either saying yea, nay, or conditional pass (maybe) on articles (in one simple step), and (4) the article being passed by the editor. After that, I would strongly recommend having a public feedback system that would be something like the open review step we now have in place. In other words, I think we should basically eliminate steps four through six, open review and copyediting, and leave quality in the hands of editors and expert reviewers--then *supplemented* by public feedback. Copyediting would be the responsibility of authors, who would have to solicit help, if needed, on pain of having articles simply rejected. Copyediting comments would be solicited in the public feedback process. (By the way, I would like to say at this juncture that Ruth Ifcher has been probably the hardest-working member of Nupedia, and one of the most widely appreciated, and this latter proposal should by no means be construed as (absurdly) implying that her contributions as Nupedia's chief copyeditor have been without value.) If an editor were to approve very much substandard work, I would be willing to field complaints and, if necessary, take whatever action was appropriate. II. Create a link on Wikipedia article pages labelled: "Submit this article to Nupedia." This would link to a page that would solicit further information from the submitter and then place the Wikipedia article in the queue. Submission information would be reported on the Wikipedia [[Recent Changes]] page, as would final approvals of articles in the Nupedia system. III. Delete the Chalkboard (move its contents to Wikipedia, with the permission of authors--Magnus, mainly :-) ). IV. Put off a decision whether to make a separate article approval process for Wikipedia, on the hope that Nupedia might turn into a reasonably efficient approval process for Wikipedia articles. (This latter, after all, is how many of us have envisioned Wikipedia and Nupedia working together.) So, that's it. I'd like to solicit comments here and then, sometime soon, unless fatal flaws are discovered, take this proposal to advisory-l. Larry [Nupedia-l] -- a Nupedia.com mailing list Help build the largest and finest encyclopedia in the world! To manage your subscription to this list, please go here: http://www.nupedia.com/mailman/listinfo/nupedia-l