Hello everybody,

the German IT news service "Heise" (www.heise.de) has a short article on an interview with a German Professor of linguistics talking about the advantages of Wikipedia.

The German text can be found under: http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/59754

I try a short translation here (sorry for the bad English - but I hope its better than babelfish :-) :

"Following Wolf-Andreas Liebert, linguist at Koblenz, Germany, free internet encyclopedias like Wikipedia can complement the reporting on scientific subjects in the media. "Scientific journalism has to follow commercial restrictions. Wikipedia is still free of that", the professor said in an interview with the german press agency Deutsche Presse-Agentur (dpa). [unfortunately no link to the interview itself - Bernd] Wikipedia could cover subjects that in normal journalism cannot be sold or said anymore.

"In Wikipedia and other self-organizing systems support the discussional [?] character of science more strongly." Liebert declares. Science does not appear to be a uniform system producing truth, as it often appears in science journalism." In Wikipedia there are experts and normal people working on texts, that can be up-to- date and cover different positions. From this point of view it can be said that Wikipedia can fill up a special gap.

The big disadbantage would be that there is no coherent system of quality management. "We find articles of a very high level of quality besides bad articles." The reader has to decide, which articles he finds trustworthy and good. "In Wikipedia there are different strategies to deal with the problem", the professor said. He assumes that the operators of the database would have to take parts out of the self-organizing process and work with professional authors."

From my point of view, the last passage shows that the professor did not fully understand what is one of the most important strengths of Wikipedia. It's the old discussion: Who guaranties the higher quality of an article by a person named "dr." or "prof." in other encyclodias? Why should these persons be more trustable? In fact, the problem of the "inner circle filtering information" always comes up in these systems. And: If someone finds articles that do not fullfill scientific standards - why not correct them immediately? Still people (like prof. Liebert) think of Wikipedia as any other top-down information system: "You have to give me information; it has to be correct - and that is YOUR responsibility!" - "No, it's yours too!" I would like to answer.

Anyway - I wanted to bring this to your attention because it shows that Wikipedia is not only subject to scientific analyses already, but also that - even in the eyes of scientists - it reaches the levels of "real" scientific encyclopedias and ist not considered only a "hobby alternative" to "popular" encyclopedias like ... the ones we know :-) In fact, I believe, that Wikipedia can soon (2-5 years?) reach higher quality in the scientific in-depth treatment of subjects than any other encyclopedia - no one could hinter to publish articles of the quality of specialised encyclopedias in Wikipedia that may be interesting only for a small community of scientists dealing with any subject they like ... And that opens up the way to get more and more "experts" interested and convince them (hopefully) to co-operate in Wikipedia: Especially the young students from today will be able to see and rank the advantages of Wikipedia higher than the traditional system of "earning fame" in scientific publications. In fact, if someone does science because s/he is _interested_ in something and not because of the fame - s/he should see Wikipedia as _the_ tool of choice to contribute.

greetings

Bernd