[WikiEN-l] Wikipedia Leadership (was NY Times article on gender gap in Wikipedia contributors}

[Andreas Kolbe]

--- On Thu, 3/2/11, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> NPOV is IMO Wikipedia's greatest innovation, greater than just
> letting everyone edit the website.

Yes and no. We haven't exactly invented the neutral point of view. Scholarly 
encyclopedias strive for an even-handed presentation that is akin to what we 
are attempting (and they often succeed better at it than we do). But the way 
NPOV is defined in Wikipedia may be new, and relatively few academic and 
expert writers will have contributed to an encyclopedia before. Most have 
published their own books and papers, in which they are free to present 
their original research and opinions. 

Any outreach to scholars and universities needs to communicate that idea 
clearly. The reality gap between our NPOV aim and the actual state of our 
articles may otherwise give new contributors the wrong idea. They shouldn't 
do as we do, they should do better.

We should also recognise that our definition of NPOV is actually far from 
mature, and still beset with problems. First and foremost, we lack clarity 
on the topic of media vs. scholarly sources, and the weight to assign to 
each of them. We simply say, 

"Editing from a neutral point of view (NPOV) means representing fairly, 
proportionately, and as far as possible without bias, all significant views 
that have been published by reliable sources."

As the term "reliable sources" encompasses everything from gossip websites, 
The Sun and The Daily Mail to university press publications and academic 
journals, it is not easy to say what "fair, proportionate representation" 
actually ought to mean in practice.

The other day, I discussed Wikipedia with a religious scholar. I had asked 
why there were no scholars contributing. His comments were illuminating. 
Here is what he said:

---o0o---

"To take an example of a topic with which I'm familiar - Jehovah's Witnesses 
- I would really need to start all over again, and I don't know whether it's 
OK to delete an entire article and rewrite another one, even if I had the 
time. It's a bit like the joke about the motorist who asked for directions, 
only to be told, 'If I were you, I wouldn't be starting from here!'

The JW article begins with an assortment of unrelated bits of information, 
it fails to locate the Witnesses within their historical religious origins, 
it says it was updated in December 2010 yet ignores important recent 
academic material. The citations may look impressive, but they are patchy, 
and sometimes the sources state the exact opposite of what the text conveys. 
So what does one do?"

---o0o---

What we have going for us is that Wikipedia has become so big that it has 
become hard to ignore. And scholars have begun to notice that if their 
publications are cited in Wikipedia, this actually drives traffic to them.

If our success and our faults can induce those who know better than our 
average editor to come along and help, then we might actually get to the 
point where Wikipedia provides free access to the sum of human knowledge. It 
would be no mean achievement.

Andreas