On 9/16/06, Kim van der Linde kim@kimvdlinde.com wrote:
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.
Exactly, though I also participate in some problem areas.
What I don't understand, and am still looking for, is a root cause for why some areas with equally popular and controversial topics have contentious article editing, and some don't.
The best I can figure is that some sets of people just play better together in online text-based interaction than other sets, and who shows up interested in a particular WP article is random luck of the draw. That's a terribly unsatisfying answer, though, because it offers no evident solution other than trying to convince people to behave better.
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.
Well, to some degree, there are legitimate reasons for using consensus: even within experts in the field, there often is not yet full agreement on the validity of newly developing science or technology. Science textbooks seem to either end up with a one-sided opinion, or have a consensus group rank and represent alternative theories which haven't yet proven themselves in a particular area.
Wikipedia suffers some from the consensus group including non-experts who really don't understand the topic (ranging from don't understand it at all but think they do, to don't understand aspects of the emerging research though they otherwise have a clue, with many shades between). But I don't feel laying blame on the concept of consensus is fair - even a paid, expert written and reviewed encyclopedia suffers from having to make this choice between consensus (sometimes wishy-washy) and sometimes one-sided viewpoint articles.
A really good writer can take a dynamic disagreement about the various contending ideas and both give all sides a fair treatment and bring the debate and issues to life in an accessable manner. The problem here is that the set of really good popular science/tech/etc writers is not the same as the set of topic experts, and that a lot of really good writers seem to despair at some of Wikipedia's process results.
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.
I've got slightly over a thousand en.WP pages on my watchlist, about 500 articles worth. Even accounting for overlap, there are plenty enough active wikipedians on en to watch the important pages.