[Foundation-l] Has Wikipedia changed since 2005?

[David Gerard]

On 18 September 2010 17:19, Peter Damian <peter.damian at btinternet.com> wrote:

> Normally it is the first step that is the main difficulty.  As it is in the
> present case: I don't see any consensus here (apart from a handful of other
> posts, such as Andreas above) that there is any problem.


You haven't demonstrated there is enough of a problem even to induce
people here to jump into action, let alone the Foundation doing so.
You've had several examples of the sort of quality survey that would
demonstrate clearly not merely that there was a problem, but what its
nature was and to what degree.

There are lots of people who complain about our humanities content,
enough to say "perhaps there's a problem on the anecdotal evidence."
The usual way to fix such systemic bias is to get people actually
involved in writing in the areas in question. This is hard, but it's
also the method that will actually work.

There are various methods to bootstrap such a process. e.g. What's the
financial model for the SEP? It's under an all rights reserved
licence, but it doesn't generate an income in any way I can see. If it
were placed under a CC by-sa licence, that would not take away from
the prestige of the SEP and would help get its content somewhere it
was read.

e.g. A comparison would be the mathematics articles on en:wp. These
were brought to higher quality by the goal of making a free content
competitor to Wolfram Mathworld. They're not perfect, but they're
really pretty good (if written at rather a high level). This was done
by a group of mathematicians who bothered. So a start might be to get
a group of philosophy experts and target the SEP.


- d.