[WikiEN-l] User Pages & Editing in Wikipedia

[David Gerard]

On 28/12/06, Marc Riddell <michaeldavid86 at comcast.net> wrote:

> OK - I'm learning. There is very much of the technical aspects of Wikipedia
> I know nothing about. It may seem like grasping, but it's really trying to
> wrestle with, what I see is a large problem.


When you started this thread, I assumed you were an old Wikipedia hand
who knew his stuff. That's probably a compliment ;-)


> But, I believe, with all of the
> human, intelligent resources within the Wikipedia community, a solution can
> be found. I'm just not willing at this point to leave it at "there's nothing
> that can be done".


Mmm. I think that you may be asking the wrong question: that is,
you're making the implicit assumption that a user page can be trusted
to ascertain whether a contributor to a page knows their stuff.

In practice, I don't think that's the case. On Wikipedia, the
contributors are listed in the history, and someone I don't know other
than a two-page detailed userpage is not necessarily a better writer
than an anonymous IP that puts in well-written statements of fact with
good checkable references.

When a reader views a Wikipedia page, they need to apply critical
thought to it, like they do to any web page. We can't take that
requirement away from the reader (and become a "trusted" source). But
with references, we can *enable* them to apply critical thought to
Wikipedia.

So it's all about the contributions themselves and the source material
that backs the contributions up. The contributors themselves are not a
focus at all. That's "no ownership of pages."


- d.