[WikiEN-l] Eschatology and Wikipedia

[Charles Matthews]

On 19/01/2011 20:33, George Herbert wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 19, 2011 at 11:56 AM, David Gerard<dgerard at gmail.com>  wrote:
>> On 21 December 2010 19:58, Tony Sidaway<tonysidaway at gmail.com>  wrote:
>>
>>> http://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2006/12/wikipedia_will_1.htm
>>
>> Prof Goldman has followed up saying he was wrong, though we still of
>> course suck, though he still consults Wikipedia daily:
>>
>> http://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2011/01/my_2005_predict.htm
>>
>>
>> - d.
> I disagree with "though we still of course suck".  I think he makes
> reasonably on point useful criticisms.
>
> Several of them are things we've said internally, on this list and elsewhere...
>
There's still some spin in the punditry, though. Taking "celebrity" 
pages and "long tail" pages as two antipodal cases, as Goldman does, is 
OK, as long as you don't insist that the rate of updating should be 
comparable. The long tail pages are those that a print encyclopedia 
would think twice about revising for a new edition. They are there to 
say something intelligible about a topic; traditional encyclopedia 
compilers tended to copy them from an older encyclopedia. We have huge 
numbers of them - one of our strengths - and trying to turn them into 
one of our weaknesses by glib talk is a bit adversarial, really.

Charles