[Foundation-l] Has Wikipedia changed since 2005?

[David Gerard]

On 18 September 2010 18:05, Peter Damian <peter.damian at btinternet.com> wrote:
> You say

>> 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.

> and then you say

>> There are lots of people who complain about our humanities content,

> This seems contradictory.


Yes, that was unclear, sorry. You started trying to stir other people
to action. I'm saying there may actually be a problem, but you haven't
induced a convincing sense of urgency.


>> 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.

> How?  Are you going to do this?


Nope. It would take a subject area expert who was good with Wikipedia
to steer a project.


>  How are you going to attract philosophers
> to Wikipedia?  After 10 years, why hasn't the natural process of
> crowdsourcing already achieved this?   In any case, the first step is to
> establish that there is a serious problem.


You think so. Therefore you are stirred to action. I'm trying to post
suggestions that would 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

> The SEP, as I have already pointed out, is not a good model for a mass
> publication like Wikipedia.  The style and approach required are quite
> different.


Yeah, the stye is completely different. But it would be a useful list
of topics to make sure are covered. Same way the general encyclopedia
was filled out, 2001-2005.

The key point is: if you want it to happen, you're going to need to
make it happen yourself personally. Like most things worth doing. This
means getting (a) good enough with Wikipedia editing that your changes
tend to stick, which will lead to you being seen by the rest of the
community as fitting in as a productive editor (b) recruiting others
who would like decent quality articles in the topic area.

Note also that this is generic advice that applies to any topic area,
and that pretty much this process is how WikiProjects work in
practice. I'm not saying anything unusually difficult or weird here.


- d.