On 1/3/07, Ray Saintonge <saintonge(a)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.
--
Robth
(
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Robth)