George Herbert wrote:
On 9/16/06, Kim van der Linde kim@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