[Foundation-l] Organization on Wikipedia that deals withcontent issues.

[Peter Damian]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "John Vandenberg" <jayvdb at gmail.com>
To: "Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List" <foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
Sent: Tuesday, August 31, 2010 12:21 AM
Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Organization on Wikipedia that deals withcontent 
issues.


>Irony.  David Gerard disparaging CZ using a rationalwiki page as evidence.

Actually David wrote the page.  I thought it was interesting ...

>Pseudo-science, pseudo-humanities, etc are no stranger to Wikipedia,
>and our processes have not always been victorious over it.  Simply
>put, the rubbish on Wikipedia outweights the rubbish on CZ, and I
>suspect that an academically sound study would indicate that,
>proportionally speaking, Wikipedia pollutes the interweb more than CZ.
>Compare the rationalwiki page for CZ and WP.  I wonder how large their
>WP page would be if a similar level of critical analysis was applied.

... but as you say, byte for byte, there may be a similar level of 
'pollution'.  I wonder if it was 'credentialism' that was the problem, or 
just the lack of editors.  I joined CZ when it was formed, with one other 
philosophy editor http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/User:Peter_J._King who had 
defected from Wikipedia.  He was a good philosopher but had some kind of 
stupid row with Larry and left. I found it difficult to edit in a vacuum so 
I left also.  And that was the end of "credentialled" philosophy on CZ. 
Larry is not a bad philosopher himself and has credentials but he was in a 
management role. He has this naive faith that academic philosophers would 
come flocking to CZ and fill the gap but they didn't. So in the end he 
lowered the entry barrier and the rest is history.

In summary, the evidence as far as my discipline is concerned is that Sanger 
wrongly expected the project to attract credentialled academics. It didn't. 
He allowed a number of uncredentialled or 'less credentialled' editors in, 
and the results are much as David Gerard describes them.

Peter