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 of the rigorous sort that Linux had when it set out to rewrite Unix from scratch (and later remain compliant with stringent technical standards like the POSIX standard). Linus Torvalds' task had well-defined parameters that absolutely required a lot of genuine expertise. Our task, by contrast, is to write a very large, unbiased encyclopedia. What this task entails is far more nebulous (though I and others have worked very hard to settle on and explain what it does involve), and 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. The fact that there is no organization like the IEEE staffed by world-class experts defining a standard that we must follow doesn't mean that our work doesn't require expertise to finish credibly. I think writing *and finishing* a credible draft of an encyclopedia requires more and a wider range of expertise than the free software movement has. If our encyclopedia project doesn't get an infusion of that expertise, the quality of the result will suffer accordingly, which is a lot.

So maybe I am living in a fantasy world, but my opinion is different. First, I think many of the contributors to Wikipedia already have genuine expertise. They have good knowledge about a number of topics (be it because it's their hobby, work, study or interest) and - very important - gain a lot of experience about how to write encyclopedia articles from reading a lot of them, correcting them, talking about them. And if there are more people needed for an article: they're there. Next, "normal" encyclopedias are not written by the most highly regarded experts either. There may be some, but in general these are not really better qualified than many Wikipedians, in some cases there are Wikipedians with better qualifications. In fact, the real experts will not even bother to write encyclopedias, they'll work on topics in their own field. Also, normal encyclopedias are usually written by a number of people, where each person has his expertise. While his articles are probably read by others, they're usually only written by one person.

So, while I think it would be great to draw some great minds to Wikipedia, I do not think we have a problem just because we don't have any (if that would be true). If these highly regarded experts think our encyclopedia is bogus because they've read a lot of articles that are bad, they are right and we can only hope these articles will be rewritten (hopefully by these experts themselves). But if they judge it to be a bad encyclopedia because there are no experts contributing (which there are), it is these experts that are wrong, and not the encyclopedia. Moreover, most people use an encyclopedia because they are NOT a highly regarded expert. I find it much more important if they think Wikipedia is useful. It is same as with the free software. If the program is crap, nobody will download/use it, not even if it were made by, say, Linus Torvalds or some other famous guy. However, if my completely programming-ignorant neighbour would create a great program, it will be used. Most people judge by quality of the product, not of the producer. True, Torvalds may draw more people to download his crappy program at first than my neighbour, but when word gets out of the quality, that changes.

So my opinion is that attracting expert contributors because they're experts is wrong; we should attract any contributor because he's contributions are of (high) quality, no matter if he's a high school drop-out or a guy with seven master titles and three Ph.D's.

Jeronimo