[WikiEN-l] UIC Journal: Evaluating quality control of Wikipedia's feature[d] articles

[Carl (CBM)]

On Fri, Apr 16, 2010 at 11:58 AM, Steve Summit <scs at eskimo.com> wrote:
> All three of these criticisms, of course, are the almost
> inevitable result of some of our most strongly-held policies:
>
> * We have no requirement that articles be written by experts in
>  the field; indeed we tend to discourage experts.
>
> * Even if you deny the existence of an anti-expert bias, the fact
>  that we're "the encyclopedia that anyone can edit" virtually
>  guarantees a certain mediocrity -- an article's quality does
>  not increase monotonically until it is near-perfect, but rather,
>  oscillates around a mean quality which is determined by all the
>  editors who contribute to it over time (many of whom, yes, will
>  be high school students or university undergraduates).
>
> * Our vociferous insistence on sources guarantees that some
>  (if not many) of them will be "poorly selected".

These well worded, and perfectly accurate in my experience. As you
say, they are the result of other goals that we have, such as "anyone
can edit".   One thing I wish we emphasized more is: even though
everyone can edit every article, this doesn't mean that everyone
should edit every article.

The issue of selecting sources is particularly difficult because the
way that people often interpret WP:V leads to "cherry picking" dozens
of sources for individual facts in an article, instead of finding a
smaller collection of sources that cover the overall literature. The
issue is further complicated because people confuse articles on
current events, for which there is no established "broader
literature", with articles on subjects (e.g. music theory) in which
there is an abundance of reliable scholarly literature.  Our articles
on current events are essentially forced to use newspapers (in print
and online) as sources. Our articles on music theory should ideally be
referenced to the best textbooks and scholarly works on the subject.

- Carl