On 1/3/07, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
Robth wrote:
Remember, people learn to write Wikipedia by reading Wikipedia. If we're going to relax our content standards substantially for one area, people are going to carry the lessons they learn from reading that area into the rest of Wikipedia.
Do you have any evidence for that theory? Those who are interested only in "serious" subjects are not likely to spend a lot of time with the flakier subjects in order to learn how to write for Wikipedia. We also have Study Groups (aka WikiProjects) which do a pretty good job setting standards for their area of interest.
Ec
It's a hard theory to provide specific evidence for, seeing as it does involve trying to get inside people's heads, which is all but impossible on the internet. What I do think we can reasonably state, though, is as follows:
1. People learn more about how to write Wikipedia from reading articles than they do from reading style guides. I know this has been the case with me, and I haven't met anyone with whom it isn't. We have an ungodly amount of guideline material relating to what articles should look like, and anyone who attempted to read it all before sitting down to begin writing for Wikipedia would get bored and give up before they ever started typing. Style guidelines are all well and good, but we have to acknowledge that, at the end of the day, the drive-by contributors who account for most of our material are, in the best case scenario, going to write something that looks like other articles they have read on Wikipedia. The better the average article is, the better the average passer-by contribution is likely to be. Think how great it would be if just 1 out of every 10 college kids who make a drive-by contribution to Wikipedia went and got a book from the library, checked their facts, and cited their sources when they wrote. That isn't impossible, but it would require that our across-the-board quality be high enough that getting the book would seem like the natural way to contribute to Wikipedia. Quality begets quality.
2. You can't quarantine topics from each other. Now I'm not arguing that people are going to read poorly sourced webcomic articles and then immediately go write articles on medieval Scandinavian literature sourced from the same blogs. You refer to people who are "only interested in serious topics", but people do read and write about more than one topic apiece on Wikipedia. And there is a startling amount of really shitty content about serious academic topics on the web, waiting for people who have learned to look to google for their sources to come snap it up. I don't use web sources when I'm writing, but every now and then I google the topic I'm working on and am blown away by the sheer quantity of incorrect information there is out there. If people observe that "Some Internet Guy said it" is accepted as a reasonable source for large portions of our site, they're going to go look and see what Some Internet Guy has to say about medieval Scandinavian literature when they decide to help out Wikipedia by writing an article about this cool book they just heard about. And the article they write will be, as a result, bad and inaccurate. (Really, google an academic topic you're familiar with, and imagine just how atrocious an article based on the sites that come up would be. I suspect that history is the worst, as some basic storytelling impulse inspires people to write breathless semi-informed narratives about stuff they took a class on one time, but it isn't alone.)
3. We don't have the manpower to contain the spillover. This is my problem with the argument that we can allow Some Internet Guy to serve as our source for articles about stuff that only Some Internet Guy cares enough about to write about, but then, through rigourous enforcement of our standards in other topics, ensure that only reliable sources are accepted for most subjects. Now this might work for subjects like Israel-Palestine, where both the IDF and Hamas have full-time personnel vetting every single edit (or have we not reached that point quite yet?), but it won't work for the vast majority of topics, in which most articles are monitored loosely or not at all, and any edit that isn't vandalism tends to stick. Remember, source quality and style guidelines are invoked only in those rare cases where two people find themselves working on the same article at the same time; editing in a fairly popular academic subject area, I have seen such simultaneous editing on only two or three occasions (outside of the FA or GA processes) in my year here. We don't have the resources to maintain the kind of line that seems to be envisioned in many people's comments on this topic.
I suppose that what you take away from this depends on your perspective. I'm sure there are people who would argue, given these three points, that we should do our best to contain this spillover and accept what we can't contain as a necessary byproduct of having these articles. I don't reach that conclusion. By including these difficult-to-source subjects we make available information, to our present internet audience, on topics of short-term interest (let's not kid ourselves about that) that are already covered in spades by the rest of the internet. This is a good thing. If, however, by doing so we impede the development of content that will be of use to a much larger potential long term and offline audience, then forget it. Including information on websites, fads, webcomics and the like is a nice thing to do, if it can be done without spilling over and worsening our coverage of stuff that people are still going to care about 10, 20, and 50 years from now. But if covering those subjects involves lowering our standards in a way that adversely effects the average quality of incoming contributions, and the standard or writing on other subjects--and I believe that it does--then forget it.
This was long. Sorry about that.