On 9/16/06, Kim van der Linde <kim(a)kimvdlinde.com> wrote:
George Herbert wrote:
On 9/16/06, Kim van der Linde
<kim(a)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.
--
-george william herbert
george.herbert(a)gmail.com