Daniel Mayer (maveric149@yahoo.com) [041117 10:43]:
--- Mark Richards marich712000@yahoo.com wrote:
I very much hope this does not happen. Setting up 'expert reviews' would be the death of the project.
But the goal of the project is to create the largest free resource of knowledge that has ever existed. Wiki is a means to that end. So if some aspects of that process start to result in a drive toward mediocre content, then we *must* make some changes to put us back on track.
We went through this (you and I) on this very list just recently. You're still reasoning along the lines of:
1. We must do something. 2. This is something. 3. Therefore, we must do this.
Not only is this logically fallacious, you haven't really proven 1. as yet. Note that de: Wikipedia recently beat two commercial encyclopedias in blind testing without imposing review boards.
Adding some type of article review system that could scale to cover a large part of our content would be a massive improvement. Experts should have seats on those review boards, but so should non-experts. Neither the views of experts or non-experts would carry more weight - both would be equal (the consensus view of the board itself is what would count).
I suspect review boards will not scale. What is the processing rate of a review board likely to be? How many articles are there again? How many being created each day?
While reviewing content sounds like a good ide (to me too), there should be a way to do it wihtout seeming to repudiate the concept of the wiki. I'm not actually wedded to the idea myself, but repudiating it as you describe would be extremely jarring culturally and - and this is the important point - demotivating for the volunteers.
If it can at all be done within the wiki process, it should be. de: is solid evidence it can be achieved within the wiki process; neither your assertions nor those of the Britannica editor are solid evidence it can't.
(And I'm still seeking details of what de: did to get to that standard! Could someone on de: please tell us? cc'd to wikipedia-l for this purpose)
- d.
On Wed, 17 Nov 2004 20:21:42 +1100, David Gerard fun@thingy.apana.org.au wrote:
[snip]
While reviewing content sounds like a good ide (to me too), there should be a way to do it wihtout seeming to repudiate the concept of the wiki. I'm not actually wedded to the idea myself, but repudiating it as you describe would be extremely jarring culturally and - and this is the important point
- demotivating for the volunteers.
How about a system wherein a 'reviewer' (some kind of privileged user) or review board has the right to stamp an 'approved' label on a particular revision of a given Wikipedia article?
After being 'reviewed', the article itself could be freely revised and altered just like any other article, but the 'approved' label would only refer to the past revision which was approved, and the label would not carry forward to a new revision until it was 're-approved'.
Obviously the set of 'approved articles' will be much smaller and much more out-of-date than the rest of Wikipedia, but the idea is that a casual reader can place greater trust in their correctness and quality than he/she can in a typical Wikipedia article. We could even, if desired, create a fork consisting of only 'approved' articles which could be used for people very concerned with correctness and quality. (Maybe a 'fork' is the wrong word, since it would not be a one-time move; it would simply be a different view into the usual Wikipedia.)
For example, a teacher may not feel comfortable pointing a student to Wikipedia knowing there is a possibility, however remote, that when the student accesses the article 'Jew' she will find a random antisemitic rant or just wrong information. Even though we all know such a rant would be immediately removed (as they have been before) there is still some damage done here, and the potential for this probably deters people from endorsing Wikipedia's use. The approval-based Wikipedia 'fork' would suffer from limited and dated content, but would at least not have this problem, and could be 'safely' recommended.
The danger with a system is that we could create the impression that an article must be 'approved' to be believable; however, I think this could be overcome by using the same arguments we use now, about the collaborative process working most of the time.
Steve
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