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

[John Vandenberg]

On Wed, Sep 1, 2010 at 5:16 AM, Peter Damian
<peter.damian at btinternet.com> wrote:
>
> ----- 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 ...

I agree it was interesting, and does include some valuable
observations which highlight problems facing the CZ project.
Credentialism is one of them, but David's assertion that it is a
"pseudoscience haven" appears to be selective observation, or maybe
selective writing in light of the CZ article about WP, which makes no
mentions of the long history of pseudo-<x> problems on Wikipedia.

>>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.

An important distinction remains.  CZ requires real names, and as I
understand it, the credentials of the contributors are a known
quantity, which adds a dimension in 'patrolling' process.  This
obviously reduces the quantity of willing contributors, and
contributions.  I'm surprised you found the quietness of CZ (the
vacuum) to be a problem, as your content on MyWikiBiz is usually
written solely by yourself, and many of your WP pages have mostly been
written by yourself.

--
John Vandenberg