I notice a couple of things: "While an old-style encyclopedia has a minimum standard of grammar, readability and fact-checking, Wikipedia has none"

We do expect all of those and there are written Wikipedia policies about them.

Another: "Assuming four hours per article and a three-hour work day, two thousand hardcore Wikipedians could paraphrase Britannica's entire content in eighty days"

I have an almost new set of Britannica, but I seldom refer to it or use facts from it. Paraphrasing a Britannica article would be a very dull thing. On articles I have a serious interest about I often buy read and then sell books on the subject (but then I sell used books for a living). I don't think very many other editors would bother to paraphrase an encyclopedia article. If they did it ought to be listed as one of the references. Many of my edits are derived from newspaper articles, especially the New York Times.

Fred

From: Lawrence Nyveen nyveen@videotron.ca Reply-To: wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org Date: Tue, 03 May 2005 11:55:05 -0400 To: wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org Subject: [Wikipedia-l] Inquiry

Hey, all -

Reader's Digest (Canada) plans to reprint a version of this article: http://legadoassociates.com/wikipedi.htm

My job is to fact-check the article before it goes into the magazine, and to do that, I would like to talk with some Wikipedia contributors. Anyone interested in helping me fact-check the article should contact me through e-mail. A lot of the article is not base so much on strict facts but is rather the author's opinion on WIkipedia's place in the encyclopedia ecosystem, yet I still have to check that. I need to report to my editors whether the author has defensible ideas.

To do his, I wouldn't mind speaking to both avid contributors and those with criticisms. Thanks in advance, all.

(Jimmy - I would like to get in touch with you about this, since you're mentioned by name. I left voicemail for Terry Foote on Friday, but I haven't heard back.)

--

Laurie Nyveen nyveen@videotron.ca __________________________________________________________________ Editor, Netsurfer Digest - http://www.netsurf.com/nsd/index.html "All we are, basically, are monkeys with car keys."

• Grandma Woody (Northern Exposure)

---

Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l

Lawrence Nyveen wrote:

Hey, all -

Reader's Digest (Canada) plans to reprint a version of this article: http://legadoassociates.com/wikipedi.htm

My job is to fact-check the article before it goes into the magazine, and to do that, I would like to talk with some Wikipedia contributors.

Lawrence,

I very much appreciate your openness and willingness to work with the Wikipedia community. Whilst the article gets a lot of things right, I think there are a few parts which could be improved:

Firstly, I believe that saying that Wikipedia lacks editorial standards is wrong: in fact, we even have an extensive Manual of Style: see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style for the top-level page of the manual. What you might find interesting about the Wikipedia Manual of Style is that it, like almost everything else in Wikipedia, was collaboratively written from the bottom up by editors concerned with improving Wikipedia's uniformity and quality of style, rather than being imposed top-down by authority.

Of course, not every article meets these standards, due to the open access policy, but we have a small army of copy editors who work hard at improving the grammar, spelling, style and layout of articles to meet those standards.

For example, we have many contributors whose skills in English are not ideal, but can still add useful encyclopedic information. Their inputs can then be copy edited by someone else (even if they are not expert in the topic) into an article that is both informative and well-written.

The same applies to fact-checking. Many editors periodically review articles in fields they know about, correcting details and removing misinformation. The software supports "recent changes" "new articles" and "watchlist" features to make this easier. The next version of the software (coming soon) will have a new article-version rating system which is intended to enable editors and readers to get feedback about where Wikipedia is weak and strong.

Secondly, "paraphrasing the Encyclopædia Britannica" is very much against the spirit (and letter) of Wikipedia's self-developed policies. Whilst authors are encouraged to draw on existing sources and references, plagiarism, direct or indirect, is severely frowned upon, and direct copying is completely forbidden. Wherever possible, we are trying to move towards citing primary sources, rather than other encyclopedias. There is no negative desire to "destroy" other encyclopedias; rather, there is a strong positive desire to create a new kind of free encyclopedia that is intended one day to surpass the achievements of previous works.

Finally, I think you might want to mention in more detail a key aspect of the Wikipedia process, which is how the process of progressive refinement works in practice. Here's how it works:

Although the original version of an article may be poor, it is likely to be copyedited within minutes of creation by an experienced editor watching the "recent changes" list. If it's drivel, it will rapidly be deleted. If it's dubious, it will be put on a list of articles to be either improved or voted to be deleted. Once it survives these early stages, it is sure to eventually be read by someone who knows slightly more than the original contributor, and will be just irritated enough to improve it, however slightly. In some cases, this may involve a complete rewrite, if the article is wrong enough. As time goes by, this improved content will be read and edited by more and more people, and the article will grow in size and quality. As the article becomes better, more people will link to it, drawing in yet more readers, with progressively greater expertise, who might previously have ignored it as being beneath their interest. In this way, Wikipedia has a tendency to "suck in" not only information into articles but also experts into the community, and these new editors often go on to expand Wikipedia in other ways.

I hope this helps.

-- Neil

Lawrence Nyveen wrote:

http://legadoassociates.com/wikipedi.htm

Near the beginning, the article says:

Its success has attracted harsh criticism from predictable quarters. In an article published recently on TechCentralStation.com, Robert McHenry, former Editor-in-Chief of Encyclopedia Britannica disdainfully said that using Wikipedia was like visiting a public restroom.

Yes, McHenry did write this. No, it did not come from "predictable quarters". What this article's author (and most people) seem to miss is that McHenry is a *former* Britannica editor-in-chief, who is *no longer* speaking for the old encyclopedias. Born in 1945, [[Robert McHenry]] left Britannica in 1997 at age 52, hardly an old age retiree. He has left that building, for whatever reason, and is not likely to return. He is now "out in the cold", free to write whatever he thinks.

The people currently working for established encyclopedias should probably feel a threat from Wikipedia, but they are the least likely to comment on its existence. If you have an enemy, you fight him, you don't smalltalk. But I think McHenry's article was an attempt to smalltalk the Wikipedia community. His critique of the [[Alexander Hamilton]] article was an all too obvious give-away that only proved Wikipedia's willingness to improve. Current Britannica employees would not help Wikipedia like that.

Larry Sanger is a similar but opposite out-in-the-cold case. If Sanger wrote a critique of paper encyclopedias, would you quote him as someone representing Wikipedia? Of course not.