[WikiEN-l] Expert editors

[Kim van der Linde]

George Herbert wrote:
> On 9/16/06, Kim van der Linde <kim at kimvdlinde.com> wrote:
>> What I do know is that experts have in
>> general a short life span at Wikipedia (if they join at all), and that
>> is not going to change.
> 
> There are areas of Wikipedia where that generality is not true at all,
> and experts are quite actively involved and not being rejected or
> driven away at all.
> 
> I keep wondering what's different about those, compared to the areas
> where they are being pushed out, and thinking if there's some way to
> change that.  I haven't figured it out yet.

Well, maybe you are active in area's were this is less of a problem. 
What causes it? In general, the impossibility to keep things at a high 
level quality due to edit wars, POV-pushers, drive-by-editing, good 
intended insertion of non-obvious nonsense, and the basic idea of 
consensus, which often leads to the most watered down version that is 
acceptable to all involved but does not necessarily reflect the current 
state of the knowledge in for example science. Finally, Wikipedia 
articles often reflect what is available at the internet (aka that what 
is easily verifiable), but fails to incorporate important work that is 
not directly available to editors, while experts would have access to 
those sources.

As long as Wikipedia has no way to protect the quality of the content in 
a better way, content will deteriorate asymptotically to the level of 
understanding of the the average vandalism fighter unless excperts 
themselves babysit those articles. The higher the quality, especially 
articles about complex subjects written by experts, the more problematic 
it will be to maintain the quality as most vandalism fighters don't have 
the insight to actually judge whether a this-is-obviously-not-vandalism 
change is actually an improvement or not, or worse, whether the 
insertion of nonsense or just plain incorrect information.

But this is inherently Wikipedia, and it will not change.

Kim

-- 
http://www.kimvdlinde.com