[WikiEN-l] Oour quality could rival Encyclopedia Britannica (was: Guardian article about Wikipedia)

[Poor, Edmund W]

I have only skimmed the Guardian article, but it seems fair and
balanced. I bet the "grades" rating the reviewed articles on a scale
from 1 to 10 are realistic indicators of quality.

I have the ear of the Editor in Chief of the IIFWP's Encyclopedia
Project (EP). He has praised my attention to quality (no one else seems
to care as much as me!) and urged me not to shut up about it.

I hope to be able to bring over some additional, pre-publication
articles from EP to Wikipedia. So far I've only exported [[abstinence]].
(It came early on in the alphabet, I'm not trying to be subversive or
anything :-)

We at Wikipedia like claiming that our quality rivals Encyclopedia
Britannica, but our readers don't think so. As a software engineer, I
think the "end users" are the ones I have to satisfy: THEY have to think
it's a good computer program; it doesn't matter much what my team
thinks.

As encyclopedia editors, I think our readers are the ones we have to
satisfy. Let's stop patting ourselves on the back and telling each other
what wonderful writers we are, merely because we have a daily "featured
article" (FA). EVERY article on a major topic should be up to FA
standards. 

I won't feel we will have "arrived" until our readers start telling us
that our quality level rivals Encyclopedia Britannica. And if our
[[Atom]] article is any indicator, we have a long way to go. 

I've mentioned "atom" repeatedly over the last few weeks, but no one did
a thing to it until recently. It then suddenly got a lot better.

This tells me two things:

(1) We don't pay enough attention to quality. Lousy articles can lie
around for months or years, collecting dust.

(2) When we put our minds to it, we can polish one of these decaying
relics and out-do Britannica!

What conclusion can we draw from this? I'd like to hear some discussion
on this, please.

Ed Poor
Wikipedia Liaison and Technical Consultant
Encyclopedia Project
IIFWP


-----Original Message-----
From: David Gerard [mailto:dgerard at gmail.com] 
Sent: Monday, October 24, 2005 11:32 AM
To: English Wikipedia
Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Guardian article about Wikipedia