[Foundation-l] Has Wikipedia changed since 2005?

[emijrp]

2010/9/18 Peter Damian <peter.damian at btinternet.com>

> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "David Gerard" <dgerard at gmail.com>
> To: "Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List" <foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
> Sent: Saturday, September 18, 2010 5:46 PM
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Has Wikipedia changed since 2005?
>
>
> 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.  And in any case, the point you were replying to
> was that the main problem is recognising that there is a problem: your
> reply
> is symptomatic of that.
>
> > 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.
>
> The best suggestion is to take a list of what any humanities scholar would
> regard as the most significant or important humanities articles.  100 of
> these, for example (and NOT using the Wikipedia importance-assessment
> method
> which is grossly flawed).  We don't have to rely on subjective judgment.
> For philosophy, I could take the top 20 (by coverage) articles in a
> standard
> reference work (The Oxford Companion would be a start).
>
> For assessment of quality there are various benchmarks that could be used,
> relying on standard reference works, for example, or other objective
> criteria.  Andreas suggested one earlier: if standard reference works say
> that there are 3 components to a particular writer's work, does Wikipedia
> mention these?  Does it assign due weight to these?  And so on.
>
> > 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?  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.
>

The first (or the second) editor of Wikipedia was Larry Sanger, a
philosopher. ; )

I think that the matter is really simple. Wikipedia is a special
encyclopedia, it is written by volunteers. That volunteers are a subset of
the world population who have Internet. Most of the knowledge of that
population covers several topics with an high profile (general knowledge,
science, tech, popular culture) but anothers with a medium or low quality
(humanities, art, geoarticles of the third world, etc). The explanation is
easy, 'advanced' Internet users who can waste their time and are skilled to
'edit a website' are those called geeks, most the time.

Doris Lessing article is acceptable, in quality and size. Most of the people
only need a few pages of info about every topic. Those who need more pages
must go to a library.

WMF have wasted many time and resources in creating a new interface,
toolbar, usability improvements, etc. And not only in the Interwebs, also in
the 'real life': Wikimanias, chapters, meet ups, GLAM, an other volunteers
attracting events. Also, they are helping to the population in the south
hemisphere to join us.

Also, Wikipedia was founded in 2001. I think that Wikipedians have done a
great work in that years, this is a volunteer effort. Wikipedia is not
finished, and probably, it will be never finished. In the future, perhaps a
group of editors can create a wiki in Wikia about Doris Lessing. But that is
very time consuming now.

Systemic bias is old, very old, you haven't discovered it. In the next
decades, when computers and Internet will be almost 'ubiquous' that problem
will be solved.


>
> > 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.
>
> 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.
>
> Peter
>
>
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