On Wed, Sep 04, 2002 at 11:44:03AM -0700, lcrocker(a)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