[Foundation-l] and what if...

[Thomas Dalton]

2008/12/14 Marc Riddell <michaeldavid86 at comcast.net>:
> on 12/13/08 6:52 PM, Florence Devouard at Anthere9 at yahoo.com wrote:
>
>> "Professionals could probably help us grow up in certain areas, but they
>> would have to cope with all the no-life standing on our mailing lists".
>
>
> Florence,
>
> "Professionals", or, as they are also referred to, "experts" don't get much
> of a welcome in the Project. I know, I'm one of them. My professional :-)
> guess is that it is fear by the larger Community that they will somehow take
> over. This is unfortunate thinking. And I believe it is having a negative
> effect on the overall depth and quality of the encyclopedia.

There may be some of that, but it is also true that a lot of experts
are actually unhelpful (perhaps we could do something to improve that,
though - a system for experts to review articles, rather than edit
them, might be good). When experts get involved in editing there are
often ownership and original research issues (or, to be more precise,
WP:OWN and WP:OR issues - following an earlier discussion, I deleted
the acronyms and wrote them out in full and then realised that
actually that makes my statement ambiguous since people don't know if
I'm using the terms in their general dictionary meanings or their very
precise Wikipedia policy meanings, and in fact, I meant the latter -
jargon serves a purpose and from now on I think I'm just going to use
it!).