[WikiEN-l] Times article (London)

[Anthony]

On 8/18/07, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

Shouldn't that say writing *Wikipedia* articles is very different to
writing journal articles?  When I look at a traditional encyclopedia,
I see lots of unsourced statements from experts.

NOR is a rule for Wikipedia, which is needed because there is no one
in charge of content arbitration.  It's not a necessary rule for a
traditional encyclopedia, which has editors to decide what to include
and what not to include, and to decide what experts are really
experts.  IIRC the NOR policy was created largely to quell fringe
theories.  In a traditional encyclopedia this is the job of the
editors.

> 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.

I would venture a guess that most experts aren't interested in doing that.

> What experts
> should do as experts is review articles and put their stamp on them as
> being correct.

And/or put their comments as to what is wrong.  If we could convince
them to do that, and then keep a copy of those comments handy
somewhere (you might say the talk page, but a separate namespace would
be better), it might just help things.  I'm not sure if it would or
not, but it'd be interesting to try.

Now, how do you convince experts to come in and review Wikipedia
articles?  There's nothing stopping them from doing this right now.
But right now there's not much in the way of incentive, either.

> 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.

So long as all these experts are doing is writing critical reviews,
the need to strictly limit who can and can't write such reviews is
overrated.  If, on the other hand, you want to give these experts the
power to enforce their suggested changes, then you're fundamentally
changing the structure of Wikipedia and you might as well fork off a
new project to do so.

> 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).
>
Start anywhere with anyone.  If you can find an expert who'd be
willing to review one or more Wikipedia articles, a lot of people
would love to hear from them.