David Gerard wrote:
On 28/12/06, Marc Riddell michaeldavid86@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.
David raises a good point. Don't judge Wikipedia articles by the quality of their contributors, but by the quality of the article - and the sources in particular. Never trust an unreferenced article. An article that provides a good number reliable, verifiable sources and is well-written should be considered in the same light whether it's written by anonymous users or long-time contributors. (Virtually all our articles are a mixture of both).
-Gurch