Forgive me for spoiling the hopeful mood, but I'm not so sure the uneditable review idea would work.
The obvious reason is that in order to write a review about a wikipedia article, you'd have to be interested in wikipedia in the first place. So if I'm an academic interested in moving wikipedia along, why should I bother with a review? It would be less work to make the changes myself. My name would automatically be associated with the edit on the article's history page. And even if I write such a review, people would read it and fix the mistakes and missing issues I found (talking about duplicated effort here!). So, soon after my review is out, it won't fit the article anymore, because the article changed. So, all people would soon find is my outdated (=incorrect) review, with my name below it. No thanks!
As a to-be-academic, I'd rather have a stable article that says "...based on [[this article]] at wikipedia, edited by ..." (or "reviewed by" or "streamlined by";) where there's a backlink to the wikipedia article, maybe like "For a more current, but unreviewed version, see [[]]".
I might be wrong, and this is the "magic formula", but I don't see many academics interested in that review function, certainly less than in the original Nupedia (and even that didn't work...)
Magnus
On Wed, Sep 04, 2002 at 11:03:07AM +0200, Magnus Manske wrote:
Forgive me for spoiling the hopeful mood, but I'm not so sure the uneditable review idea would work.
Neither do I. In fact, I'm pretty sure that it won't work for the reasons that Magnus already gave. As the academic that I believe myself to be, my motivation to write such a review would be zero.
-- Jan Hidders
|From: Jan Hidders hidders@uia.ua.ac.be |Mail-Followup-To: wikipedia-l@nupedia.com |Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii |Content-Disposition: inline |User-Agent: Mutt/1.2.5.1i |X-Spam-Flag: NO |X-Spam-Status: Not checked, trusted sender |X-Scanned-By: MIMEDefang 2.9 |Sender: wikipedia-l-admin@nupedia.com |X-BeenThere: wikipedia-l@nupedia.com |X-Mailman-Version: 2.0.4 |Precedence: bulk |Reply-To: wikipedia-l@nupedia.com |List-Help: mailto:wikipedia-l-request@nupedia.com?subject=help |List-Post: mailto:wikipedia-l@nupedia.com |List-Subscribe: http://www.nupedia.com/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l, | mailto:wikipedia-l-request@nupedia.com?subject=subscribe |List-Id: An unmoderated discussion of all things Wikipedia <wikipedia-l.nupedia.com> |List-Unsubscribe: http://www.nupedia.com/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l, | mailto:wikipedia-l-request@nupedia.com?subject=unsubscribe |List-Archive: http://www.nupedia.com/pipermail/wikipedia-l/ |Date: Wed, 4 Sep 2002 11:57:52 +0200 | |On Wed, Sep 04, 2002 at 11:03:07AM +0200, Magnus Manske wrote: |> Forgive me for spoiling the hopeful mood, but I'm not so sure the |> uneditable review idea would work. | |Neither do I. In fact, I'm pretty sure that it won't work for the reasons |that Magnus already gave. As the academic that I believe myself to be, my |motivation to write such a review would be zero. | |-- Jan Hidders |
If we could get one of these lofty personages to write a review, why would we not be able to get them to write an article? Fear of the hurly-burly? If they fear the hurly-burly, why would we want the review anyway?
I think some folks have an artificially elevated notion of who it is exactly writing all those encyclopedia articles in those other encyclopedias. For the most part they are written by ordinary smart, well-educated folk who swot up on a subject, write it up, and then go on to the next subject. Just like the ideal Wikipedia article, except they get paid.
The most productive effort, it seems to me, would be recruiting people to write for Wikipedia, and the best process improvement would be some sort of probationary status, or cooling-off (warming-up?) period for contributions before they become fully party of the encyclopedia.
And, rather than clicking on Random Page to judge articles, why not click on Random Page to improve them?
Tom Parmenter Ortolan88
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