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.
You may be right; I have no plans to act on the idea yet, I just threw it out for comment. Magnus's alternative is more in line with what Larry was suggesting, and that may be what we have to do. But I see the problem there is this: if the expert is charged with writing the article itself, what incentive does he have to pay any attention whatsoever to the Wikipedia content? Wouldn't he just write a whole new article that he can claim authorship of, totally ignoring the /development/ process that went into the wiki content?
On Wed, Sep 04, 2002 at 11:44:03AM -0700, lcrocker@nupedia.com wrote:
[...] But I see the problem there is this: if the expert is charged with writing the article itself, what incentive does he have to pay any attention whatsoever to the Wikipedia content? Wouldn't he just write a whole new article that he can claim authorship of, totally ignoring the /development/ process that went into the wiki content?
Exactly! But, as Magnus already pointed out, if the expert is prepared to take that into account then he or she is probably going to write directly in Wikipedia anyway. We have to keep in mind that what we have here is a bootstrapping problem. Once we have enough good experts that are interested in writing in Wikipedia, we don't need voting systems, reviews, expert status, or whatever else has been suggested.
I may sound a bit negative here, but actually I think I'm a bit more optimistic than Larry. It's very rare that articles go back in quality, so Wikipedia is only getting bigger and better. One of Larry's complaints was that his initially imported writings on philosophy hadn't improved much. I'm still wondering if that is not simply what usually happens to large imported chuncks: they remain "undigested". There's probably also something about the style and structure of an article that was "home grown" on our own soil that makes it attract more new edits.
Finally, let's also not forget that Wikipedia has made a big jump since the new script. It might be interesting to look at the number of edits and the number of articles in the course of time. Even uncorrected for stubs et cetera they would tell us something about the trend of the growth.
So my suggestion: let's just wait a little more until we hit 50.000 (2 months?) and then start making some noise.
-- Jan Hidders
wikipedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org