[WikiEN-l] Encyclopaedia standards

[Stan Shebs]

Christopher Mahan wrote:

>--- apw at ap-woolrich.co.uk wrote:
>
>
>>When more
>>editors with my kind of background can be persuaded to contribute
>>on a regular basis...
>>
>
>What do you mean, can be persuaded? Wikipedia is an all-volunteer
>organization. People here contribute because they want to, because
>they believe that this will benefit mankind.
>
I think he just means that there are a lot of experts who would be
valued contributors, but have been hanging back because of various
concerns, some valid, some less so. For instance, some might be
avoiding WP because they've heard about the "edit wars and vandalism"
that journalists like to write about because it's exciting, but in
truth, experts adding to [[Abyssocottidae]] will almost certainly
have a positive experience and not have their additions messed up
by the clueless.

It's an unfortunate irony that on many topics WP is already the
leading reference work, online or off, but aside from some being
featured articles, that part of WP gets almost no airplay compared
to the controversial topics.

It would be useful to collect and report statistics about vandalism
and edit wars. I have 16,000 articles on my watchlist (too many, I
know!) and vandals touch maybe five of those per day, with most of
the edits occurring on topics familiar to the general public (Julius
Caesar, Steve Jobs, RMS Titanic, etc). If you can tell ichthyologists
that the fish area of WP is 99.99% troublefree, that's a powerful
argument to move data from their own websites, which likely don't
even have 99% uptimes, and no army of copyeditors fixing typos.

Stan