[WikiEN-l] Times article (London)

[Thomas Dalton]

> Well over six months ago I personally persuaded several top-notch writers in
> their field to contribute to Wikipedia articles. In each and every case they
> finally gave up in frustration after their work was reverted or challenged
> on grounds that were pure bullshit.

Were the grounds really pure bullshit? In my experience, experts
struggle with NOR and citing sources, since original research is what
they do for a living. If an expert comes along and changes something
on a page and just cites their own expertise as the source, then it is
going to be challenged, and so it should be. Writing encyclopedia
articles is very different to writing journal articles. Being good at
one doesn't make you good at the other.

While encouraging experts to edit Wikipedia is great, they shouldn't
be doing it as experts, they should just be doing it as people
interested in the subject, the same as everyone else. What experts
should do as experts is review articles and put their stamp on them as
being correct. Such a system would greatly improve Wikipedia's
reliability and make people trust us far more. Of course, this system
has been proposed dozens of times, and it's very hard to implement due
to the difficulty is defining and verifying experts. Perhaps we should
start on a small scale with just a few fields where it is easier (eg.
academic fields where we can simply require being a lecturer at a
reputable university).