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

[Yann Forget]

Hello,

I generally agree with Peter here.
I think that there is a general problem of quality on Wikipedia articles,
especially on articles about humanities, social sciences, etc.

I also agree that letting the usual process to care about articles quality
is not sufficient. In nearly ten years, there was enough time to fix the issue,
if it the current policies would be appropriate for dealing with this problem.

This also does not affect the English Wikipedia alone.
For what I know, it also affects the French Wikipedia.
So this list is appropriate to discuss this issue.

Regards,

Yann

2010/9/1 Peter Damian <peter.damian at btinternet.com>:
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Michael Snow" <wikipedia at verizon.net>
>
>> The post I was responding to was nothing but an assessment of a
>> Citizendium article. It made no comparison, favorable or unfavorable, to
>> an equivalent article on Wikipedia. At most it engaged in some
>> speculation about what Wikipedia *might* have.
>
> It was explicitly contrasting how Wikipedia actually is, or tends to be
> like, as compared with the corresponding CZ article.  I think the
> observations were accurate and reflect pretty well what controversial
> Wikipedia articles are like, namely festooned with supposedly reliable
> citations, and bearing obvious battlescars from years of edit-warring.  The
> contrast was specifically prompted by a claim by Gerard that Wikipedia's
> relaxed attitude to 'expertise' leads to better articles.  I don't think it
> does.
>
>> If your intent is to
>> discuss content issues in Wikipedia, then you need to actually
>> explicitly discuss them.
>
> I don't want to discuss content as such.  I want to discuss generic and
> systematic problems with the way Wikipedia is organised that lead to poor
> quality articles.  There needs first to be some recognition there is a
> quality problem and that it is serious - I think there is an element of
> denial that is evident from some of the replies here, as well as elsewhere.
> Once the problem is recognised, there needs to be a careful examination of
> possible causes for this.  And then a further examination of how policy and
> governance could be changed to address some or all of these causes.  Does
> that sound reasonable?
>
>> I might suggest that you should
>> familiarize yourself with some of our other mailing lists and consider
>> whether another list, like wikien-l, is better suited to have this
>> conversation, since foundation-l exists for issues related to the
>> Wikimedia Foundation and the overall movement surrounding its projects,
>> not just Wikipedia.)
>
> I consider this is the best mailing list for the purpose.  What do people
> here think?
>
> Peter